It’s a fact that many small businesses either can’t afford to pay a web designer for the work they require, or don’t perceive the value in that work. If this describes you, then frankly you are between a rock and well, another rock.

You want your site to earn you money, so someone, either you, your web designer, an employee or that gullible technical friend of yours has got to spend many hundreds of hours working on varying aspects of your site over a long period of time. Anyone can create a web site in a weekend that no-one visits, but no-one can create a website in a weekend that makes money.

If you can’t afford to pay someone else to work the long continued hours required, or you don’t want to, you either have to settle for a worthless (possibly quite pretty) web site, or you can learn how to do the work yourself. You may as well get used to the idea.

If you’ve the capacity to learn, your web designer can get you started by creating a simple layout for you to work with. Thereafter you are free to take responsibility for your own site, only calling on your web designer/friend/relative to help when you’re stuck, or when you need something technical added.

It’s a hard road, but one that can pay off in the end. In my opinion, unless you aspire to a site that practically no-one visits, or you have enough money to pay a professional person to do the work for you, learning at least the rudiments of web design, graphic design and traffic generation are essential.

Further, any web site that is capable of generating meaningful income will need many, many hours of dedicated work on an on-going basis, to build, maintain and promote. If you have no budget to pay someone else, let’s face it, the person working late into the night for next to nothing (until the site starts to generate income), will have to be you.

Inevitably, because the single page of your new site will be created fairly quickly, it is unlikely to be loaded with animated graphics, flash animations and other visual trinkets. There is a time and place for those things, but rarely are they appropriate on a newly launched web site.

Pointless, purely decorative animations are usually just a manifestation of vanity publishing. The site owner or the web designer feels that the cooler his home page, the cooler he is.

There is nothing cool about having a home page so urban it looks suspiciously like a mobile phone ad. There is nothing cool about a home page so laid back no-one can work out what to click.

By taking the quick one page launch route, you neatly avoid the temptation to get involved with any of this. In turn this will help you concentrate on providing original and useful content for your visitors. Now that is cool.

If you launch with a big bang, you’ll be so excited about it, you’ll get all your friends and relatives to take a look. In between the positive feedback from your mother and your best friend you’ll get some negative feedback you didn’t expect from other people.

• “We couldn’t easily find your phone number”,
• “the colours clash a bit don’t they”,
• “it’s all right but I had to scroll to see the bottom”,
• did you test it in Firefox because I that page with all the photos on it was pretty mangled”.

If you have just spent a lot of money on the site, you’ll feel like you’re stuck with something you can’t change and adapt to feedback from your customers and from your stats package.

Of course, you’ll only get feedback in proportion to the amount of your site that exists at any one time. So if you iron out all design issues on a couple of pages by launching slowly, that’ll be a good place from which to start creating extra pages.

If you launch with a big bang, you’ll almost certainly be completely underwhelmed by the public reaction to your new web site. You will have gone to a lot of time, trouble and/or money and no-one will come. The single minded belief “Build It And They Will Come” worked for Kevin Kostner, but really does not apply to the internet.

The important and significance of your statistics will be more keenly appreciated if, after creating a single page, and adding to that slowly over time, you slowly and with deliberate awareness, build your visitor numbers. You will see as you make each change, the difference that change makes reflected clearly in the stats. Look at this in contrast to loading a site up all at once in its so called finished state. You’ll have so many ways you could change it, it’ll be hard to decide what to change first and what the likely impact of the change will be.

Building out more slowly, you’ll get time to become familiar with the necessary statistics package your site uses so that the detailed reports it provides about visitors, can usefully feedback into the design process. If you launch all at once, you’ll be guessing and worse still, if your design is a complicated, graphics intensive one, it’ll be a lot harder to change.

If you decide to launch your web site slowly, one page at a time over a period of weeks rather than in one Big Bang - there are certain advantages.

If you employ a web designer who applies this slow growth technique, they can either do the updates for you, or provide you with a content management system so you can add pages yourself.

If it’s the former method, it follows that the cost of your site is spread over several months which makes it easier for you to manage. Because you will be learning about the web as your web site grows, the relationship between you and your designer will be more fruitful. You’ll have time to become accustomed to the level of work and commitment required to keep a web site healthy and he’ll appreciate that.

But when you take the big bang approach to web site launch, where your web designer creates the whole site, it may result in an anti-climax with your expectations outweighing the site’s performance.

If you are fully involved in the development of the site at some level you’ll also be aware of the work involved in getting visitors to come to the site.

If you decide to launch your web site slowly, one page at a time over a period of weeks rather than in one Big Bang - there are certain advantages.

Adding a new page each week to your main site and a new page every day or so to the blog element of your web site, will help you to clarify your thoughts and should help you to create contain that is both relevant and useful to your visitors.

You’ll have time to look around the web to find examples of good ideas on other sites, and consider carefully how to apply them to your own. This step by step method, trains you, the site owner to get used to the idea that your web site is like your most loved and cherished pet.

You’ll feed it, you’ll walk it, you’ll even talk to it. You’ll nurse it when it is sick, and you’ll throw a  party when it does well.

It’s a good idea at this early stage to learn how to work with images properly. You will need to be able to competently manipulate an image, crop it, resize it and make it suitable for presentation on the web. Even thought many people have braodband connections nowadays, a site will still load slowly if the site author has not taken care to create as light-weight an image as possible, whilst still maximising the quality of that image.

This is a key skill, central to creating successful web pages. Use your slow approach to web launch to work on essential skills.

If you decide to launch your web site slowly, one page at a time over a period of weeks rather than in one Big Bang - there are certain advantages.

Even if you only load up a single page on day one, you are still free to start the process of getting your site indexed by the search engines - having only one page should not stop you taking this essential step. In fact it is the perfect time to start and because you have started in such a small way, you’ll have honed the page to perfection for human consumption. If you do that well, the search engines will follow.

There are several ways to get a new site listed very quickly (often achievable in a matter of minutes) - the Google sandbox does not always apply (or really exist), and even if it does, it is only because your site has grown too quickly or is too new and addresses a bunch of competitive terms too enthusiatically. These slow launch steps, natural growth steps will help your site avoid the threat of any perceived Google oblivion.

It won’t do you a lot of good at this early stage in terms of visitors to your site, but getting your first page noticed early on is a great foundation for your future web site popularity plans. Why? Well, search engines like to see constant change on a site.

Constant change is of course at odds with a site that launches with a big bang - the message being that that the site is somehow finished on the day it arrives. Adding a new page every week will engage the search engines who really appreciate new content. Use this slow launch time to learn about how to create title tags and description tags properly, and without endangering the site.

An easy way to add a page every day would be to add a blog to your site.

If your main site is at www.mywebsite.com then your blog will be at www.mywebsite.com/blog. If you organise it this way, you can start your main web site with a single page as suggested, but add to the domain every day via your blog. Use Wordpress and Wordpress plugins to enhance the search engine optimization suitability of each blog post.

As your main web site grows it does not interfere with the blog and the search engines just see the web site as a whole becoming richer, more relevant and more themed as time goes by.

Consider the blog to be the place where you put your thoughts and news about the business, and from where you link to each new page on the main site as it grows.

Just doing this will get your blog and your main web site indexed in Google within a few hours.

If you decide to launch your web site slowly, one page at a time over a period of weeks rather than in one Big Bang - there are certain advantages.  

Before you can start your online web presence, you need a hosting service and a domain name. Presumably you already have a logo for your business, but if you don’t the next thing to do is to get one designed or to create a simple one yourself.

Once you’ve done that, you can upload a single page web site that introduces you and your services, gives an email contact address and telephone number if applicable. No big bang, just a quiet, inconspicuous step onto the web for the lowest cost possible.

This makes sense because even if you spend a lot of money on your site you are unlikely to be noticed online until you have either completed some significant traffic building work or you’ve bought some qualified traffic.  So why spend the money at this stage?

As you only have one page to work on, you can build that page around a specific keyword phrase that is pertinent to your business. This will give you practice - at one the backbone principal of building a successful site.

Only having one page to think about means you will be free to concentrate on content, keywords, the all important title tag, and a proper internal page structure. If you start this way, you are on the path to creating web pages that will success.

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