A web site is a cru­cial ingre­di­ent of your mar­ket­ing strat­egy because it can widen your tar­get mar­ket to include any­one who has access to a com­puter and the inter­net. Almost 85% of Americans had access to the inter­net at home in 2008, and around 13 mil­lion had reg­u­lar access to the inter­net from some­where, either at home, at work or at school.

And that’s just in the US.

Ecommerce sales from the US were $10 bil­lion, and we only cap­tured 30% of the global ecom­merce mar­ket! So, how can you reach this grow­ing num­ber of inter­net surfers, and how can you cap­ture some of that $10 bil­lion spent in ecommerce?

First, you build it

The first step is design­ing a web­site. (Or have one designed for you) If your com­pany already has busi­ness cards and let­ter­head, it’s best to have a web­site designed around them.  A match­ing cor­po­rate iden­tity and web­site helps cre­ate effec­tive brand­ing for your small business.

The best web­site you can have is an uncom­pli­cated one, with a sim­ple lay­out and easy nav­i­ga­tion. A nice, sim­ple lay­out, with good graph­ics, bal­anced look and good color com­bi­na­tions is the #1 goal when design­ing a small busi­ness web site. Remember to use graph­ics spar­ingly and to opti­mize them for your web­site because inter­net surfers are impa­tient.  If your page loads too slowly they’ll leave.

Navigation should be easy to find and to use, and it should be con­sis­tent from page to page.  I’m sure you’ve left more than one site frus­trated because you couldn’t eas­ily find your way around their site.

Small busi­ness web sites aren’t sta­tic.  They evolve.  You need to start some­where, and start­ing with an intro­duc­tory web site is prob­a­bly eas­i­est.  All you really need to start is five pages.  You can always add pages later. (If you hire some­one to employ your small busi­ness web design, you should have the site built with as much con­tent as pos­si­ble and make sure who­ever you hire, builds your site with SEO in mind.) The impor­tant thing is to just do it—take the plunge and get it out there.

Your five pages could include an index, or home page, about us, ser­vices, con­tact and a sitemap.  The index page is your land­ing page.  Typically its design is a lit­tle more detailed than the oth­ers, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

I like to use CSS (cas­cad­ing style sheets) for design­ing because it’s sim­ply eas­ier to build a web site and to edit its lay­out with CSS rather than just HTML (hyper­text markup lan­guage) alone.  A change on a CSS sheet changes all the pages on your site at once.

Content is king

Once your site is designed, you’ll want to start think­ing about con­tent.  Design is very impor­tant, but it does lit­tle good to have a beau­ti­ful site with­out high-quality content.

Your small busi­ness home page intro­duces you and your company—who you are and what you do.  The about us page is usu­ally used to give more detail than the home page about who you are, and your ser­vices page gives more detail about what you do.  You might won­der why you’d “waste” a page on a sitemap since you only have 5 pages, but sitemaps help search engines find all the pages in your site.

As far as con­tent goes, more is bet­ter, up to a point.  Your pages should be con­tent rich and infor­ma­tive, but they also need to be rel­e­vant to your small busi­ness.  If your vis­i­tor can’t fig­ure out what your web site is about in just a few sec­onds, they may leave.

The inter­net was at first strictly infor­ma­tional, and that’s how it remains today.  Several times peo­ple have tried exper­i­ments using copy­writ­ing sim­i­lar to direct mail sales let­ters, but they’ve all failed.  It seems as if peo­ple surf the inter­net more for infor­ma­tion than any­thing else.  Knowing this will help you write pages peo­ple will want to read.

Attracting vis­i­tors

You could fol­low your instinct and just start writ­ing, but wait.  There’s research you must do first, or your web site sim­ply won’t be high enough in searches to be found.  Search engine opti­miza­tion is far too big a sub­ject to cover in this short arti­cle, but among other things, search engines find your pages based on keywords.

So, pre­tend for a moment that you’re on the other side of the desk.  If you were a cus­tomer of your own busi­ness, what words or phrases would you use to search for your prod­uct or ser­vice?  Ask friends and neigh­bors how they’d search for your prod­uct or services.

Remember that peo­ple gen­er­ally don’t look beyond the first three pages for any search term, so if you’re not in the top three pages, your busi­ness is not likely to be found at all.  If there are mil­lions of results for your phrase, you might sim­ply need to make it more specific.

What you want to do is write your con­tent around those words and phrases.  You don’t want or need very many—three or four are plenty.

Getting vis­i­tors to come back to your site again and again is rel­a­tively sim­ple.  Keep your con­tent fresh and lively, make sure it’s infor­ma­tive, and add to it often.

I hope you decide your small busi­ness needs a web site.  It’s the best way I know how to reach a wider tar­get audi­ence with the low­est invest­ment and the high­est ROI.