Not Just Pretty | Building An Effective Small Business Brand

Getting Your Website Posted

Once you’ve figured out where you want to host your website, and you’ve signed up for the service, then you’ll need to actually post your website.

The way that you do that is that you copy your website files from your computer onto your web host. There are a couple of ways to do that:

• Some web hosts offer built-in programs that allow you to transfer the files from your computer to their server through their website. This is usually extremely easy to use. But, not all hosts offer this option. And, it takes a bit of time – you have to select each file individually – all the web pages, all the images – and that can be a slow process.

• With an FTP program. “FTP” stands for File Transfer Protocol. This is a small program that will allow you to open up a direct connection from your computer to your web host.

  You’ll need:
  

  • An FTP program: For Windows, I recommend WS-FTP. For Macs, I recommend Transmit. To learn to use the program, go ahead and read the user guide – it’s not very difficult, but the specifics of each program will be different from the next.
    
  • A few pieces of information from your web host: Your domain name or IP address, your user name and password. You should have this information in the email that you got from your web host when you signed up. If you don’t have that email any longer, then hop on the phone with your host’s tech support department and get it.
    

  Once you have that all set up, all you do is use your program to connect to the host, and then drag and drop your files into the folder that’s designated for your web files. This process is called uploading. If you’re not sure which folder to put them in, ask your web host.
  

Getting Your Site Up For All To See: Part 2: Website Host

A Website Host is like an apartment – basically, you’re renting a place for your website files to “live”. You’ll purchase a specific amount of space on a computer, called a server. This computer is connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, and when someone wants to view your website they type in your address – your domain name – and then that address connects to your web host. Then the web host sends your website files over to the person who wants to see it.

What you need to consider when looking for a website host:

Available Backend Functionality: Running contact forms, forums, galleries, and other “whistles and bells” on a website require that the website host either have various scripts and programs available, or, at the least, have the capability to run those scripts and programs. It can be convenient to host your site with a company that has the scripts and programs that you need already installed on their servers, because then they’ll maintain the programs, upgrade them and take care of things for you.
Ask your designer or programmer if you need to host your site on a Windows or UNIX platform. As the business owner, you don’t really have to know what the answer means, just that your site is hosted on the correct type of machine for your needs.

Access to Customer Service: Imagine: it’s Friday afternoon, and you go to check up on your lovely website. And, when you type in your URL, you discover that the site’s down! Oh, no! So, now you dig around to contact support, and you discover that your only way to contact your support staff is by a website form on their site, and that they only answer questions from 8am to 6pm Eastern Standard Time, Monday through Friday! Aaah! Wouldn’t you be happier if you could actually talk to a person and get your site back up right now, instead of waiting, worrying and steaming about it all weekend long?

So, when you sign up for a host, check out what their customer service availability is, and what methods they let you use to get in touch with people. I strongly recommend not going with a host that only offers a support email or web form – calling a phone number is often the best way to get things resolved. If possible, try calling their support line – see if you get a person or a machine, if there are long hold times, if the people you get in touch with are courteous, and helpful. Also, make sure that you can understand the support staff – that they’re not too technical, and that they don’t have unintelligible accents.

Maintenance: Does the company update the software on the servers frequently enough to keep up with the latest advances? Do they perform maintenance at convenient times, or do they take down the servers during your prime business hours? Do the scripts and programs that they offer actually work? Make sure that the answer to all of these is “yes” before committing to a host.

Email Needs: Having a branded email address is really important for your online brand. So, that means that your website host will actually wind up managing your email for you as well. Ask your computer guru whether you need an IMAP or Pop3 email account, and then make sure that your website host offers that type of account for you. And, have them set up your email so that it also looks like it’s coming from your branded email address. It’s often easiest – and tempting - to just set up an email forward to your existing account, but then any mail that you send out won’t have your domain name on it. Taking the time to set things up correctly will make your small business look bigger.

Also, consider how many email addresses you’ll want to set up – many hosts will allow a set number of email addresses to be set up with an account. You’ll want one for each person in your company, of course, but then also having separate emails for different autoresponders, separate emails for your forms, and for different “departments” in your business, like administration, sales, and contacts, can really make your business look more like it’s not just you (even if it is).

Storage Space: For the average website, any host will give you plenty of hosting space – my host offers up to 20 gigabites of file storage with every account they host. The average graphical site won’t go over 5 or 10 megabytes, so you’d never even approach the full capacity. But, if you’re planning to have PDF files available for downloads, integrate a lot of scripts, tools and software, or make audio downloads available on your site, those can really add to your site’s size quickly. Make sure you have the space you need available.

Credibility: Make sure that the host you choose is established, and will be around for a while. You want your site to be up and available, and if your host shuts down, your site will too. You’ll also probably do some customization of your site to work with the host that you choose. If your host then shuts down, or makes major changes to its’ software systems, you’ll have to re-invest and re-code your site! Pick a host that will stay in business.

And, host credibility becoming more and more important for email purposes – if your host gets blacklisted on spam sites, then you won’t be able to send out your emails! Make sure your host works with credible companies and has anti-spam practices in place.

And, of course, price: Working with the cheapest web host, or a free hosting company, is usually not the best choice for a small business. But, for a simple website, you don’t need to be paying all that much for a good-quality web host. For example, I pay $8 per month for my host, which is a pretty reasonable price. And, many hosts will offer a discount if you pay for a year all at once – which is more convenient anyways!

How do I come up with a domain name?

Finding a domain name that hasn’t already been registered by someone else can be a difficult task – there are a lot of websites already out there, and a lot of companies focus on thinking up good domain names and then selling them at really high prices. But, here’s a few suggestions on how to find a good domain name for your company:

• The first thing I recommend that you look for is your business name – yourbusinessname.com . If that’s available, buy it right away!

• If you’re incorporated or an LLC, then you can try yourbusinessnameinc.com or yourbusinessnamellc.com.

• Try adding dashes: your-business-name.com. This makes telling people your domain name a bit harder, but if the version without the dashes isn’t available, then it works.

• Try adding what you do to your business name: yourbusinessnameservice.com. This won’t always work, but might result in a great name.

• If none of those are available, try your tagline: yourtagline.com.

• Try your product names: productname.com

• Try the name of your newsletter: yournewslettername.com
  

If you’re struggling, then you can try going to a domain name suggestion site like nameboy.com. You type in your business name, or some words about your business, and hit “go”. It will suggest a bunch of variations on your name that are available.

Consider buying extra names, too: if you can get yourbusinessname.com and yourtagline.com, along with productname.com, then do it! You can then forward those secondary domain names to your main domain name, or to specific pages within your site (like your product page).

Domain Name Extensions

I often get asked which extension a small business should buy - the .com, the .net, the .org, or even some other domain name extension like .info or .tv. These extensions actually mean different things, to specify which kind of website you have. The main extensions are:
.com: Commercial
.net:
.org: Nonprofit organization
.gov: Government organization

There are many more extensions, but these are secondary extensions that are a bit less popular. Some examples are (but, this isn’t a full list; there are dozens of these):
.biz: Business
.pro: Professional
.info: Informational
.name: Personal information
.tv: Television
.ws: Website
.us: This is a “country” code that means United States.

It’s a good rule of thumb that your primary website address should be a .com. This is because most people assume that web addresses end in .com – even if you tell them differently on your business card, they might type in .com out of habit. So, you want to have a .com as your main domain name.

You might also buy some of the other extensions of your main domain name to use as alternate domain names for extra “insurance”, if they’re available. But, you don’t have to!

If you do that, then there will be an option in your domain registrar’s website that lets you forward your alternate domain names to your main domain. That way, when someone types in yourbusinessname.org instead of yourbusinessname.com, they’ll still wind up in the right place.

Getting Your Site Up For All To See

Once you’ve developed your website, you’ll need to put it up online. There are two major components to this: Domain Name Registration/Set-up and Website Hosting.

A Domain Name is like your website’s address . It usually looks something like www.yourbusinessname.com.

You need to purchase a domain name (I know, one more thing to buy!) – but, it’s not incredibly expensive. You can buy a domain name for about $9 per year.

I recommend that you go to a domain registrar like GoDaddy.com to buy your domain name. Each domain registrar will have a form on their home page where you can do some domain name research – you have to find a domain name to purchase that’s still available, which means that no one has bought it already!

And, a few miscellaneous last thoughts on websites

There are a few more questions that often come up in the website design process with my clients. These don’t really have a solid “home” anywhere else in this piece, but I feel like they need to be addressed.

Some last considerations are:

• Getting Your Site Up For All To See:
  
  1. Domain name registration
     
  2. Hosting options
     
  3. Getting it posted/FTP
     
  4. Testing the site
     
  
  
• How do you know when it’s time to do some maintenance on your website?
  
• How do you do more complicated maintenance (beyond just the text)
  
• Redesigning your site (How do you know when it’s time to do so?)
  

Blogging For Your Website

Blogs are a great partner for your website for a couple of reasons:

• Bringing you Search Engine attention: The search engines love to see blogs – especially when you update your blog often. If you put a new post in your blog even once a week, you’ll give the Search Engines some great content to read and look at.

  And, your blog will offer you places to link back to your site – you can put a standard link back to your site in the sidebar, on the “About” page of your blog, and then you can always link back to your site in the text of your blog as well where it’s appropriate. If you’re talking about a topic that you’ve written an article about, you can link back to that article on your website.

  This combination is really great because the Search Engines will want to come back to your blog often to see what you’ve written there. Then, they’ll see the links back to your website and follow those over to re-index your website. If you’ve made any changes to your site, the Search Engine will take notice of that, and improve your ranking accordingly.

• Blogs are really user-friendly, and that can help you to post more information about your expertise online. If you don’t have a website editing program that you like to use, or you don’t have the time to learn a new program, then you can still get new articles, tips, and comments up online easily and inexpensively with a blog.

  Blogs are built in such a way that they give you a very easy interface where you can cut and paste your content into your blog. I recommend that you write your blog posts in a Word document and then cut-and-paste things into your blog for a couple of reasons. First, you don’t have to be logged in to your blog software online while you’re writing your posts. Second, you don’t have the danger of your web browser crashing in the middle of writing your post. Third, you can write half and then come back to it later easily. And last, you’ll have a full archive of everything you write.

  So, once you write your text, you can just log in to your blog software and cut and paste everything into the blog. You can even write several posts in advance, and schedule them to “go live” throughout the week or month.

  And, instead of paying your web designer or coder to post all of your articles or thoughts on your website – which can add up quickly, especially if you’re a prolific writer – you can just post your own thoughts on your blog easily. And, blogs are really affordable – mine costs me $5 per month.
  

Putting Audio on Your Website

Audio can be a fabulous way to add another of the senses to your website. You can use audio in a couple of main ways:

• Add music to your website to add atmosphere and further communicate your brand. If you’re building a lifestyle brand or a brand where it’s personality is especially important – like a fashion company, a spa, a restaurant, a vacation company – then adding music can help to tell your brand’s story in a deeper and more meaningful way.

• Add recorded tips, lectures, teleclasses – basically, record yourself talking about your area of expertise. This can be a great way for you to showcase your expertise without spending a lot of time writing. And, if you want to get more complicated about it, you can turn your audios into a podcast to get the word out further.
  

If you do put audio on your site, though, be considerate to your visitors – let them choose whether they’d like to listen to the audio or not. Not everyone wants music blasting out of their computer, or to immediately hear your Imagine if your website visitor is watching TV or talking to someone else when they arrive at your website. Suddenly, there’s too much going on!

If you put a button on your site that offers them the option of whether they’d like to listen, then they’ll feel respected and like they have a choice of whether they’d like to listen to the audio. And, everyone likes to have a choice.

You can increase the likelihood that someone will click on the audio and listen to it by:

• Using a call to action near your play button: “Click here to listen”
  
• Making the benefits of your audio clear: “You’ll learn this, this and that” makes the reasons that someone would want to listen to the audio clear.
  
• Making the play button stand out: Use a graphical play button, and consider putting the audio in a graphical call-out box with a colored background, or making a special button about the featured audio.
  
• Make your play button easy to use: There are a lot of technologies that you can use to put audio on your website, and some of them are easier for your visitors to use than others. You don’t want your visitors to be asked to download a new piece of software, or to slow down their computer while they’re trying to listen to your audio.
  

One of the easiest ways to incorporate audio into your site is to associate the audio with a Flash button. And, if you don’t know Flash, that’s OK! There’s a little program that you can buy for just $20 that will give you a Flash button to hook your audio up to. It’s called Wimpy Button (http://www.wimpyplayer.com/), and it even comes with an easy-to-fill out form that helps you do all the “technical” stuff – so that you’ll have a customized bit of code to paste into your website to make the whole process easy for both you and your visitors.

Printing a web site

Have you ever tried to print a website, and gotten an unexpected result? That parts of the design “went away”, or the page got cut off at the edge?

This is because websites are designed in such a way that they’re incompatible with most printer set-ups.

Web pages are designed at a minimum of 800 pixels wide, and the average browser window is about 600 pixels high. Printers are designed to print about 600 pixels wide, and 800 pixels high. There’s the problem.

How do you deal with this if you’re designing a website?

• Put the most important information on the left side of the page – in the first 600 pixels of the design. A good way to use the remaining 200 pixels is for a column of calls to action, testimonials, feature boxes, etc. But, don't go so far as to try to move your navigation over to the right - that's not user-friendly.
  
• For articles or other information that you want to encourage people to print, include a “Print Version” button that links to a 600 pixel wide HTML page or even a PDF.
  
• Don’t include important components of your site in the graphics or in an animation – they won’t print well. Graphics will print pixilated, and animations will only allow the visitor to print one frame of the animation.
  
• Don’t design your site using light text on a dark background – it won’t print.
  

A few tips to help you print as a website visitor:
If you want to print a website full page (as a website visitor):

• Change the scale of your printed page to less than 100% so that it will all be scaled down to fit
  
• Print in landscape orientation – this is much closer to the actual size of a printed page.
  

If you want to print the full design:

• First take a screenshot of the web design and then print that.
  

Search and Replace Is Magical

This one’s a bit more advanced tactic. It requires that you know a bit about HTML coding. But, it can make doing site-wide changes, like adding to your navigation or changing the copyright notice at the bottom of your site much easier.

Search and Replace allows you to change pieces of your website code throughout your entire site quickly – no matter how big your site is. For example, it takes me about 5 minutes to re-arrange the items in my website’s navigation. 15 minutes to create a new button and add it into my entire site’s navigation. And, my website has over 400 pages.

How to do it:

• First, you need to know what piece of HTML code you’re trying to edit, and what you’re trying to change it to. I suggest copying and pasting the piece that you want to change to a new file, and then creating the new piece of code there as well.
  
• Then, select the “Search” or “Find” option in your HTML program. This will usually pull up options for you to either find instances of certain things in your code, or to find them and then replace them with other pieces of code. If you can’t find this option easily in your menus, check your program’s help file.
  
• Make sure that your program is set up to automatically save your changes to the files – this will save you a lot of time.
  
• Select a Multi-File replace, and select the folder on your computer where you keep your website’s files.
  
• Then, just paste your old code and your new code into the appropriate boxes and hit replace. The program will cycle through all of your files and make the change for you.
  
• I suggest then testing a few pages throughout your site to make sure the change has taken effect everywhere. You should be able to do this by previewing the file in your browser window.
  
• Once everything’s edited, upload the new files to your web server.
  

One caution: your site does have to be coded well – and consistently – to work well in Search and Replace. If your code varies from page to page, then you’ll have to do a bit of work to make sure that you’ve caught all the variations and cleaned them up with the search and replace tool.

This should save you many hours of tedious work on your website! Which makes editing your site often much easier.