Web Site Design for Your Small Business - Part 1

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Starting A New Small Business Web Site

This is the first in a series of posts about starting a new small business web site. If you’ve already established a web site for your small business, this post will not apply to you - it is aimed at people who are planning to have a brand new web site built.

The small business person has two basic options, they can either have their web designer

1. create the web site in its entirety and only after the site has been checked, pored over, tested and double-checked, proceed to launch it on the Internet, or
2. launch the web site within a couple of days of deciding a new site is needed, even if the site has not yet been written or fully planned.

I have a preference for second of these two methods, based on my experience of being a web designer dealing in the small and micro business market sector. I will explain the advantages of the second approach to you in this post. More information will follow in future posts.

The Web Versus Ink on Paper and the Big Bang

Some small business owners, especially those who have never owned a web site before, will assume the characteristics of a web site are similar to say those of a printed brochure or business card. A client with this mindset will arrive with definite ideas can sometimes be unwilling to take new ideas on board. In his view of the internet world - everything has to be organised up front. Inevitably a huge amount of activity is generated, small (largely irrelevant) points are pondered over and worried about, and then finally the site launches with what I call, a Big Bang.

In the off-line world, for example in print, you have to get the wording, colours and layout exactly right before you commit the print company to produce 5000 copies of your latest brochure. Some small business owners, being used to this approach, may apply this thinking to the web. Many web designers will be happy to operate this way but I am not one of them.

For a number of reasons I believe the best approach for most small businesses (there are some exceptions), is to launch a new site with the minimum number of pages. And in the most extreme cases, this may mean a single page.

Advantages of Starting With A Single Page

Starting your web site by launching a single page is a good idea for the following reasons. (You can click on each bullet point to read more about that item.)

1. You can get your web site started very quickly
2. You can focus on getting your site indexed by Google
3. You can look forward to growing your site organically
4. A slow launch can spread the cost of web design
5. You will make fewer design mistakes
6. You can work effectively with web site performance tools from day 1
7. You can feedback criticisms into the design loop.
8. A slow launch encourages a simple web design
9. A slow launch makes it easier to write your own web site if money is tight

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 1:28 am and is filed under New Web Site Topics. Find similar posts by selecting any of the following tags: . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.