Professional Website Design & Blog Design
With A Marketing Focus Delivers Results
What is a Website?
A website is basically a collection of web pages, documents, images, audio files, and video files, that are accessible from the same URL and typically residing on the same server and maintained by a person, group, or organization. A server is just the “place” online where your website files reside.
The main page of a website is called a home page and the other pages inside the website are sub pages. Each page is hyperlinked (linked) together so the visitor can travel from page to page.
Websites are created using a combination of programming languages. The top three are Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). These languages and style sheets tell the web browsers what information to display on your website and how it should look.
Learn why most business websites stink in my blog post
10 Reasons Why Your Business Website Stinks.
Learn how you can improve your business website in my blog post
Lead Generating Websites: 20 Tips to Improve Your Business Website.
Do I Need a Website or Do I Need a Blog?
If you have a business, you should have a website. Having a website or blog for your business is no longer optional, it is a necessity.
People are searching for you, your business, and your products and services online. With web-enabled mobile devices, netbooks, regular computers and wi-fi pretty much everywhere, the Internet is quickly becoming the number one place people are turning to for quick access to the information they need.
Need a plumber? Google it. Looking for a restaurant? Google it. Looking for a local drop in child care provider? Google it. Looking for a dog groomer who specializes in toy-size dogs? Google it.
If you don’t have a website, you will never come up in the results of someone’s Google search or Internet search. That means they may never find you. And, if they don’t know you exist, they can’t hire you or buy your product.
Remember, people buy when they are ready to buy, not when you are ready. So, as a business owner, your business needs to be visible when your prospects and potential customers need your product or service. One of the easiest ways to do that is with an optimized website that acts like a 24 hour beacon, attracting and educating your prospects and customers.
Now, I know not every business is a a good fit for the online business model, because there are certain overall businesses that just don’t translate that well. Not every business is going to integrate a shopping cart in their site and set goals to grow a huge online empire.
I also know that every business, big or small, needs to invest in their online store front just as much as their in personal, bricks and mortar store front. Every business must have a professional, branded, easy to use website that provides added credibility, presence, dependability, and interest.
BE CAREFUL! I am going to give you one warning. A bad website, that looks like a high school student did it for a class project, can do more harm to your brand and your business than having no website at all. It screams, “I am too cheap to hire a professional and I don’t value my products and services enough to invest in a good website to showcase them.”
I guarantee, if you don’t invest in your brand and your professional appearance, no one else will either. I also guarantee that without a website, no one will be able to find you online. But, I can tell you who they will find… your competitors.
How Can a Website or Blog Help My Business?
Your website, or even better your blog site (a website and blog combination) is the absolute best marketing tool you have for your business. It is the perfect platform to reach your prospects, customers, and partners/vendors and provide them:
- More information about you, your business, your products and services, and special programs
- Education about why your services and products are needed
- Samples of how your products and services have helped other people
- Opportunities to interact with you and your business
- News about your industry, business, products, services, etc. that affect them
- Increased customer services and added benefits
A website or blog site can help local businesses connect with people in their community, and world-wide businesses reach a global audience. While each business may have slightly different website needs and requirements, a website can help and enhance your business by:
- Creating More Business
A well-done, optimized website or blog can land your website in the search engine rankings, putting your site in front of more people, more often – and that results in more sales. - Enhancing Your Reputation
When someone wants to learn more about you or your business, the fastest way for them to learn more is to jump online, type in your name or business name and see what comes up. By investing in your online presence through your website, blog, and social media profiles, etc. you can actively manage your reputation and increase your online presence. - Adding Streams of Income
Your website or blog can act as an online store front, selling your products and services to a wider market. It also is a great opportunity to re-purpose information and sell it in the form of audio recordings, ebooks, and infoproducts. - Positioning Your as a Go-To Resource
Your website can be a great resource for your customers to get more information, answers to their questions, customer support. It can be the perfect place to post your contact information, events calendar, sales and special offers, and more. Some of the most popular ways to do this is to provide a newsroom and an Frequently Asked Questions page. - Saving Your Money
Your website can save you money! While the initial investment in a custom, branded, professional website or blog may be larger than other forms of marketing materials, over time, your website will save you money. Instead of incurring printing and postage costs, your documents, handouts, newsletters, and reports can be posted to your website for people to download. - Building Credibility and Trust
A consistently updated website, with good, fresh content that is helpful to the site visitors shows that you value your customers. It tells them that you are committed to providing them the information they need on a timely basis. Allowing comments and other forms of interaction also shows them that you care what tey ahve to say and want to hear from them. - Automating Redundant Tasks
With all of the Internet tools and blog plug-ins available online, you can find a way to automate pretty much anything you want. Automating the redundant tasks in your business through your website doesn’t just save you time. It actually makes you money. Automating non-billable tasks frees you up to focus on billable work and serving your clients.
What different types of websites are available for me to choose from?
This is a great question! With so many different companies offering website design and development services, and each one calling their product something different or using different services and tools, the entire idea of creating your company website can seem a little daunting at times.
Don’t worry!
There is no need to waste any time worrying about what type of site you need because there are really only two different types of sites:
Standard Website
A standard website is built using plain HTML or XHTML and CSS and maybe some additional coding types such as JavaScript or PHP. It is the typical style website you think of when you think of a business site.
To make changes HTML editing software such as Dreamweaver is needed. Usually a webmaster or website designer is in charge of making all of the updates for the business. This style website is typically a more static site, not changing very often.
Blog Site
A blog site is the combination of a website and a blog. This site is a sample of a blog site. The blog feature can be on the home page of the site, or like this site, on an interior or sub page. There are platforms online that allow you to create a free blog site like Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad. Some blog platforms can be integrated into custom, self hosted websites as well.
Blogs are becoming increasingly popular due to their low cost, strong search engine optimization features, and content management systems that allow uses to update their own websites themselves at anytime.
NOTE: Free blog sites are hosted with the provider and usually include their name in the domain. An example of a free hosted blog site is: www.yourdomain.wordpress.com. Self-hosted blog sites are hosted in your own account with a web host just a standard website. An example of a self hosted blog domain is: www.yourdomain.com.
Some people refer to the type of content management system used in a website as the type of website. When in reality, it is instead a feature of a website. Two popular options for content management systems are Drupal and Joomla. Bourn Creative offers the integration of the Wordpress CMS Wordpress into our Websites. With Wordpress, you can update your website anytime you want without knowing any HTML!
What is a Blog Site?
A blog site, or simply a blog, is a shortened version of the word weblog. A weblog is a site that is usually focused on one specific topic and consistently posts fresh, new content. It is frequently updated, used sort of like an online diary, and usually contains more personal commentary than a regular website.
Blogs, with features like trackbacks, pingbacks, and leave a comment, offer a whole new level of interaction with site visitors, allowing your content to start and participate in online conversations. The archiving options (by date or category) that blogs offer are also a great way to organize articles on websites.
Another popular blog feature is the options for feed syndication. The most common forms of feed syndiation are RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom. Blogs publish feeds of their content, usually in XML, so that users can subscribe or sign up to have the content sent right to them by email or in a feed reader. Visitors can add the RSS feed links for their favorite blogs to their feed reader, and it will inform them whenever there are new posts.
What is Wordpress?
Here is the definition from the www.wordpress.org website: WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.
WordPress is an Open Source project. That means hundreds of people all over the world are working on it and creating applications and plug-ins that work with it. It also means you can use Wordpress for any website you want without being required to pay anyone a license fee. It was originally designed just for blogging. But because it is so powerful, many developers have created functional and helpful plug-ins that work with Wordpress, making it a great tool for the development of business websites as well.
In a standard HTML/CSS website, each page and all of its content is a separate file and in most cases, the page files contain the code for the design and layout as well as the content. Anytime you want to make a change, you have to make it to each page it affects and re-upload the updated files to your server through an FTP account.
With Wordpress, all of the content for each page is stored in a single database. The design and aesthetics of the site are stored in separate files that define the theme (template/skin) of the blog site. This makes updating the design and layout of the site much easier, because you only have to make revisions to the theme files, not the content. Likewise, it means all of your content changes can be made in one place.
You can learn more about Wordpress in my blog post: 6 Reasons Wordpress Is Perfect For Your Business Website.
What is a Website Content Management System (CMS)?
A content management system (CMS) is a system that simplifies the publication of content to websites, allowing website owners to update content, change content, and add new content without requiring HTML programming or file upload knowledge. In many cases, integrating a CMS into your website, like the Wordpress CMS, allows the user to edit their website in an environment similar to Microsoft Word. These type of CMS uses a WSYISYG (What you see is what you get) editor.
Content Management Systems are becoming more and more popular as business owners and entrepreneurs are turning to the Internet to do business. Website owners are tired of paying insane prices for even the smallest of website updates. They want to be able to do it themselves they want to be able to do it whenever it is convenient for them – even if it at 2:00 am!
Smart web designers and web developers are offering the integration of content management systems like Wordpress (a blog site CMS) to provide more flexibility in the sites they produce and to help entrepreneurs and business owners stay in total control of their websites.
Here is a quick breakdown of just some of the basic ways a content management system can improve your website:
- Update, delete, change, add content
- Format content and add bulleted and numbered lists
- Add links to other websites, blogs, documents, videos, shopping carts and more
- Add, delete, and organize pages
- Upload and link to documents such as PDF, DOC, PPT, XLS, etc.
- Upload and insert images, photos, and graphics
- Manage a blog
- Integrate your social media posts and profiles
- Customize page names, add page titles, and add meta tags information
- Add video and audio
- Create electronic forms
- Add and manage a calendar
- Integrate your email marketing list opt-in boxes
- Define user roles and access
- Access old versions of your web pages
- Track stats and traffic history for your website
- Access information and make updates easier and faster