1. Nice and simple entry pages? No, thanks.

When we speak to clients, we often find that they have a very clear idea of what the homepage is supposed to look like. Usually, the request is to have a “nice and clean” homepage with only the company logo on it and a “please enter” link. Or – another alternative – to have some sort of flash movie playing before the client enters the website.

We will try to discuss on this page why this is not such a good idea.

It’s a waste of time

People might argue that the homepage should be similar to a front door with a company name and a logo on it. However, you are wasting your website visitors’ time. They did not ask for this extra click and any additional click which does not add any value is frowned upon. Some people take it to the extreme and simply ignore websites which have an entry page.

It does not contain any content

People search the web to find information about products, services etc. Your website should therefore contain relevant and good quality content. Some Search Engines rank websites depending on how relevant your website content is when a keyword or a key phrase is entered in a search engine. If your website contains relevant content, it is likely that the search engine will display a link to your website in the search engine results. If your content is very relevant, you will probably rank higher.

An entry page does not contain any content. It only contains your company logo or company name and a “please enter” link – usually without the “please”… Website visitors don’t have time. By arriving at your entry page, they have no chance to find out what you do, what your company offers, what your strengths are. You are missing the opportunity to leave a first good impression.

Search Engines don’t like it

Some people still believe that you need to hide keywords in your web pages in order to rank highly in Search Engines such as Google. This is not the case though. Hidden keywords in meta tags don’t play a big role anymore because the meta tags that contain the keywords were abused by many websites. Search Engines now concentrate on content – on good quality content. So if your homepage does not contain any content – because it either lacks content due to the display of the logo only or it conveys some graphic message in a flash movie – the search engines won’t like your website much. Search Engines cannot read content in flash movies. Search Engines also cannot read messages that are part of graphics – graphic files such as jpgs. All they see is the jpg file and maybe an ALT tag if it has been added.

2. Flash Movies on the homepage? No, thanks.

When companies have their website developed, they often think about themselves, it’s all about the company. Apart from – it’s not. It should be all about your clients. Why do they come to your website? To marvel at some design with flash motion that conveys no message at all other than nice colours and that you can afford to pay a flash designer? Websites with a Skip Intro button are very much frowned upon – especially by people who don’t have much time. If you sell small widgets, all your website visitors want to know is if you have a certain kind of widgets, of a certain size, if they are in stock and how long delivery might be. The website visitor is not interested in some movie that he has to overcome before he can get to where he really wants to be – on the widget information page.

What you shouldn’t forget is the visitors who have visited your website before. With a Flash Intro, you force them to view the movie again. Repeat visitors can get very irritated with this and may decide not to come back to your website again.

3. Company information on the homepage?

When it comes to writing copy for the homepage, the first thing some companies think about is themselves. They come up with some well-structured text about the company history, the number of employees, their health and safety procedures and so on. This kind of information belongs on the “About us” page, not on the homepage. If you add company information on the homepage, the message that comes across is that it’s all about the company rather than all about what you offer.

4. What to put on the homepage?

The homepage is similar to the first page on a CV – it should summarize the best thing you have on offer. If you specilize in widgets, but in particular, medium-sized blue widgets, that’s what goes on the homepage. The homepage should contain information about your most important services, your most important products. You can include news which change on a regular basis, but concentrate on what you do rather than who you are. Try to add quite some content to the homepage – not just one paragraph – “we specialise in blue widgets” – the end. Describe the blue widgets, what material they are made of, what makes them special, what they are used for and so on. Have at least 3-4 paragraphs of information on your homepage.

5. Who reads all the text anyway?

Search Engines. And your website visitors. If your website relies on being found in search engines, then you need to concentrate on website content. Good quality content. The content should be readable but it should also contain keyphrases that are important for your business. A key phrase is a string of words that a person would enter in Google, for example, in order to find a website like yours.

We will provide an example:

Marketing Matters is a Marketing and graphic design agency based in Bathgate, West Lothian who specialise in graphic design, advertising, PR, website design, website maintenance, search engine optimisation, and social networking.

This small sentence summarises what we do and where we do it. If you are a national company, you can re-phrase this:

Marketing Matters is a Scottish Marketing Agency who specialise in graphic and design, designing websites, website maintenance, search engine optimisation and social networking. The keyphrases used in the two examples are as follow:

• Marketing Agency
• West Lothian
• website design
• graphic design
• website maintenance
• website translation
• Scottish web design company

Having content about your employees, about your company history and such like will not give you any decent search engine phrases on your homepage and search engines are unlikely to give you a good ranking.

Read more about How to write text for your homepage…

First of all, you need to think hard about what you want to achieve with your website. Do you just want to have one because everybody seems to have one nowadays or have you thought about it for a while and how it can benefit your business?

Ask youself the following questions and try to find an answer for each of them. It really helps you and your web designer if you have defined goals that you want to achieve with your website:

• What you want to achieve with your website?
• What do you expect from your website visitors?
• Do you want them to buy products online?
• Do you want them to phone you and arrange a meeting?
• Do you want them to simply know about your business?
• Do you want them to fill in a contact form, or do you prefer them to phone you?
• Do you want to generate business with your website?
• What do you want to tell your website visitors?
• Do you want to tell them who you are?
• Do you want to tell them what you do?
• Do you want to tell them what you sell?
• Do you want to tell them what you specialise in?
• How do you want your business to come across? Progressive? Laid-back? Professional? Crazy?

Please find below a few examples of how you can answer the questions. This will give the web designer an excellent idea and a great starting point for the design and development of your website.

What do I want to achieve with my website?

I have started a new Marketing Consultancy business and I want to raise awareness about my business in the local area and the services it offers. I am hoping to build a client base and want to encourage website visitors to contact me online by using a contact form or to phone me. Potential clients should find useful information about Marketing Services and reasons why they should make use of my services.

What people will most likely visit my website?

Professional people from small to medium-size organisations who are looking for marketing services because they want to increase their exposure and prefer to work with a local contact they can meet on a face-to-face basis.

What look and feel of my website will these people expect?

My website visitors will expect a professional and progressive look to my website. They will expect a logical navigation and lots of information (and images / examples if possible) about the services I offer. They will not expect playful things like music, movies etc. They want information served quickly.

What colour scheme should I choose?

Have a look at websites that offer colour charts with complementary colours (example with colour charts). This will help you decide on colours you can use for your website. CreatWeb can provide colour charts that can help you finding a suitable colour scheme for your website.

What services does our business / organisation offer?

This is the time when you start thinking about the services your business offers. In our marketing example, you will probably offer things like copy writing, preparation of sales literature, product marketing, advertising and PR. Make a list of your core services. You should be able to fill an A4 page about each of these core services you offer.

Who is behind my business / organisation?

What additional company information would you like to display on your website? It’s always better to say something about your company rather than hiding behind a PO Box or a phone number. This makes your website more personal.

Header – Logo – Strap Line

Think up a strapline for your business, such as “Photography and Art Online”, or “Web Design for Small Businesses”. The strapline summarises your core business activities in a few words.

A website cannot and should not be designed by a web designer without a solid understanding of your business. The more you discuss your business with your web designer, the better idea they get for the design, layout and structure of your website.

For many people, this is one of the first questions they ask. When can we go live? And this question is usually asked by people who want their website to be live tomorrow, or next week at the latest. It’s not about the go live date, it’s about your business.

You can try to answer the following questions: How long did it take to build your business? How long did it take to get the customer base you have? How long did it take to get a decent bank account sorted? How long for your letterheads, business cards and so on?

Rome wasn’t built in a day: neither should your website.

Think twice about website designers who promise to have a website built within a matter of days and who have a go-live date within a week.

Depending on your products and services, for some – if not most – of your clients, your website is the first thing they see when they find out about your business. Having your website designed, developed, and taken live within a matter of days – it will probably show! And it will turn away your potential clients – FOREVER!

Cheap websites will look cheap. A £25 template website will look like a £25 template website. If that is what you want your customers to see, if that is what you want your first impression to be – fine. There are numerous website designers out there who will give you just that. A cheap and quick job. They don’t care if your website is listed in the major search engines, they don’t care if the template they have chosen is legal according to the Disability Discrimination Act. They are not interested if the information on your website can be accessed quickly and in a logical way. A cheap website will not do your business any good.

If you buy a cheap website just for the sake of it, the website designer will probably not have advised you on the search engine requirements. They will probably not have spent time with you and tried to find out about your products, services, and strengths and what would be the best way to show them off on your website.

If you approach a website designer a week before you need a live website, you have left it too late. If you realise that a website is very important for your type of business, chose a web designer who has experience, who can show a sizeable portfolio of websites and different industries for which they have developed websites. Ask them how the website will be optimised for search engines (if they only mention meta tags – they are not that important anymore), if the website will comply with current standards promoted by the W3C, and if it will be legal.

A good web designer allows you to be part of the web development process so you can monitor progress during the design and development of your website at all stages, and you can intervene if development does not meet with your standards / requirements. Building your website is like building your house. You don’t just go to an architect, sign off the drawings and then come back two months later and move in. You will normally monitor progress during the build of your house. You will want to confirm if sockets are in the right place, if the correct doors have been delivered and if the correct bathroom suite has been installed, for example. You will keep a very firm eye on what is being developed, and installed in your house to make sure it meets with your requirements. If you only arrive two months later, once the house is built and all doors are in place, it is difficult and very time-consuming to change essentials.

Give your website the time it deserves. If a web designer is “done” with you after a 15 minute consultation and seems to know what is important about your business in that short time frame, it’s not a good sign, and you should probably look elsewhere.

How long it takes to build your website – there is no formula you can apply. It depends on what needs to be put in place. Do you want a content management system? Do you want a shopping cart solution? Do you want static content pages? A small business website with only a few static pages can probably be designed, developed, and tested within 2-3 weeks. You should give yourself that time to think over what you want on your website and keep monitoring the development progress.

For some companies, the website is THE business. So don’t chose what seems to be the cheap option, but an experienced developer who can advise you on business matters as well as web design. This will be much better VALUE for your business.

If you have had your business for a number of years, think back to when you started: it probably took about six months to a year to get your business going, for calls to come in regularly, for enquiries to come in, for customers to come back wanting more, or for customers to recommend your services to someone else.

If your website has just gone live and if you have not paid for online advertising such as google adwords or any other form of advertising, it is unlikely for enquiries to flood in.

Your website needs time to establish itself on the web. This does not happen over night or in the space of a week or a month.

You need to imagine your website to be a brand-new island in the big ocean. You have just made the island accessible and added an airport as well. No-one knows, however, that there is a new island, therefore, no-one will fly there. The reason for this is because you have not implemented any flight routes from other islands to fly to you. You need to do a lot of work to speak to the other islands around you – especially the big ones – that there is a new island which is worth “flying to”. You need to establish new routes that go to your island. By “routes” I mean “links” – web links that is. You need to find islands / websites – which provide a similar kind of service or a complementary service to what you have on offer. If, for example, your business is wedding photography, you want to establish links with suppliers of wedding stationery, wedding supplies, wedding cakes and so on. You also want to establish links with photography related websites.

When you buy a photography magazine, usually at the back of the magazine you will find a number of pages full with advertising. These pages are targetted at people with an interest in photography – the very same person who just bought the magazine. The advertisers who sell photography-related equipment (such as backdrops, flash guns, photography training, software) will have a much bigger chance to being noticed by the person who bought the magazine than an advertiser who wants to sell garden hoses, for example. Therefore, the advertiser of garden hoses will not get much business from advertising in a photography magazine.

If you decide to advertise in a photography magazine, you will probably want to advertise in a magazine which is read by many photographers in the country. You will look for the biggest magazine there is in order to maximise impact of your advert.

You need to do the same thing with your website links. You need to find the big “islands” – the big websites – and ask them to place a link on their website which points to your website. You should also offer them a link in return – from your website to their website (this is called reciprocal linking). Sometimes, websites, in particular directories, charge money for a link to be placed on their pages. This fee can be a one-off fee or an annual fee. These fees can vary greatly between £10 and £150 or even more. You need to check out the PageRank and popularity of these websites and evaluate if it is worth paying a fee for your link to be included.

How do I know if a website is worth having a link exchange with?

If you have Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox on your PC, you should download the Google Toolbar and install it in your browser. The toolbar will be displayed at the top of the browser, and apart from having a search box, it will give you much information about how websites are rated in Google (please see image below).

If the toolbar is istalled, for any website you visit, the toolbar will tell you the PageRank of that website. PageRank is Google’s idea of determining the relevance and popularity of certain website. The higher the PageRank, the more relevant and popular a website is regarded by Google. This relevance is calculated with the quality of content on a website and with the number of quality links that point to a website. A quality link is a link from a website with a high PageRank (PR higher than 3 or 4 for example). You can read more about Google PageRank on the Google Website.

Back to our wedding photographer example: you want to have links pointing to your website that come from related websites, ie. websites which offer wedding-related products and/or services. Furthermore, the website that places a link to your website should be highly regarded by Google, it should therefore have a high PR.

How long does it take for my website’s PR to increase?

When your website goes live, it will have a PR of 0 because Google does not know anything about it. Over time, probably during the first 6 months of your website going live, your PR will increase because it has been indexed by Search Engines and the number of links that point to your website is slowly but steadily growing.

Bear in mind, that building link relationships with other websites takes a lot of time. Even though you might have sent away 50 e-mails to potential link exchangers, chances are that only 5-10 will reply and actually place a link which points to your website. Sometimes, you will receive a reply within a short number of days, sometimes you may receive a reply after 3 months.

How do I know how many links point to my website?

This is simple: Go to www.google.com and enter link:www.mydomain.co.uk
Google will then tell you the exact number of links that Google knows about that point to your website. The more links Google knows about the better. If you have 5 links pointing to your site, it’s a start. If you have 50 links pointing to your site, you are getting there. If you have 500 links out there – you can claim to be an expert.

Why do I need links on my own website? I don’t want my visitors to leave my website!

You need to have a links page on your website. If you ask other websites to link to yours, it is only fair to offer a reciprocal link in return. However, you don’t want to place a button in your main navigation that says “Links” or “Useful Links”. You can “hide” the link to your links page on your sitemap or in the footer, for example. The links page is only partly meant for your website visitors, but more for Search Engines. You website will get indexed by Google a lot faster if a link on a high-traffic website points to your website. If you fill in the Google Submit Website form, it can take months for your website to be indexed by Google. So don’t bother…!

If Google or other search engines crawl a high-traffic website and find a link pointing to your website, the search engine will follow this link and discover “there is a new website which is not in my database yet”. The search engine will then index your website’s homepage, which means it will add a small amount of information about your website to their database. This small amount is sufficient enough for your website to be found in the Search Engine. However, your website will only come up in the top results when you enter a very specific search term, such as “Bob Kowalski Wedding Photographer Edinburgh” for example. It is unlikely for your website to come up on page one of the Search Results if you only enter “wedding photographer” or “wedding photographe Edinburgh”.

Over time, the search engine will come back to your website and index your sub pages too. Bear in mind, that indexing has nothing to do with ranking! Indexing means that the search engine is aware of the existence of your website. Even though your website might not come up when you enter “wedding photographer”, it might be displayed when you enter a more specific term, for example “wedding photographer Robert Smith Edinburgh” (if that is your name and if this name and the word “Edinburgh” appear on your homepage on several occasions).

If you want to work on your Search Engine Ranking, you need to optimise your website for the keywords you want your website to be displayed in Search Engines and you need to establish link relationships. The more links that point to your website the more relevant Google and other Search Engines think your website is.

With all the information above you should get an idea of why you cannot have online enquiries or sales within a very short time of going live.

If you don’t want to spend money on online advertising and expect to make thousands within a matter of days, you will be disappointed.

Be first in Google from DAY 1 of going live

In order to be first in Google, you can check out Google Adwords. You can pay Google (and other search engines) to display your advert if someone enters a certain key phrase in the search engine. Your customised advert will then be displayed above the normal results or on the right-hand side of the browser. Some people will never click on sponsored links though. Sponsored links can help you to get noticed online, but they can cost a substantial amount of money. You should work on your normal “organic” listing and try to optimise your website for your most important key phrases (for example “wedding photographer Edinburgh”).

The development of a decent position in Google for your most important key phrases is not something a web developer can “sort out” for you in a matter of days. It’s a time-consuming task which has to be repeated over time. Link building, optimising content, updating your website can all help to improve your ranking, but it won’t happen over night.