Don’t you just love the small business website designs that have so many things going on that you become confused as to what it is they are actually selling? Often times, this leads to loss of business.

Your home page is the window to your business. So, you need to think about it as though you were window shopping and wondering if you would like to enter this store. (I am referring to all small business websites here and not just e-commerce web desings.) So…What do you need to know to make the decision to walk in or not? Here are some points to consider:

1. Well, typically when I am shopping, I look to see if there is anything in that window that I am interested in at all.
Small Business web design translation: Your products/Services need to be prominently displayed and large enough to catch the eye.

2. I also want to know if I do like the stuff, can I afford it??
Small business web design Translation: Home page should offer some idea of the cost of your products/services even if it is a starting point.

3. Ok, so now I am interested in knowing more and now I am wondering if anyone else has used this product/service and what they thought of it.
Small business web design translation: Even a couple testimonials on the home page of a small business website with clear definition of the product/service that they used is helpful.

4. Now I am thinking that I like what I see but am not sure if it will fit my purposes. So I want to go in and take a look at the store and talk to someone.
Small business web design translation: There should be a clear and obvious tab for “About the Company” and a clear and obvious email address and phone number on the website home page. Because using a “Contact” tab can be just too much clicking around for some users.

This is the first in a series of design articles aimed at helping the small business owner understand the importance of first impressions on the internet. I hope that you find it useful.

Posting newsletters and creating blogs and putting announcements on your home page can take loads of time and effort especially if your are not versed in the platforms and now face a learning curve. Many Wordpress companies will have you thinking that managing your website is not time consuming.  However, it really is and can become a frustration for the business owner juggling more than enough as it is.

It may be more cost effective to hire a company to take care of the necessary changes and additions to your website while you run your business. Your changes and additions will have a professional appearance that you can be proud of as well.

Small Biz Express offers this service to our customers starting at just $49.00 a month. Our busy customers are very happy knowing that all they need to do is submit their request and within 48 to 72 hours, the changes and additions are completed.

Small Biz Express naturally optimizes every website that we development including the keywords in both the body of the site as well as the titles and build a site map for further drawing traffic to your website. That said, where you appear when a user performs a search for your products and/or services really depends on what your competition is doing to get ahead of you online.

Publishing a website on the internet can be like hanging a sign in front of your store that is located down a dark alley. Therefore, you really should be prepared to spend some of your marketing dollars on internet marketing to be sure that your website is getting the visibility you need to be sure your business is successful online. The dollars that would have formerly gone to direct mail and newspapers advertising can now be utilized to funnel  traffic to your website through such methods as paid search, large scale search engine optimization and email marketing.

Don’t rely completely on the internet for your marketing. Do get your business cards made with your website address and email clearly appearing on them. Tell everyone you can think of that you have a new website. Get involved in some organizations for networking where you can drive traffic to your website.

Your home page needs to speak volumes about your business in the most efficient way possible. The most important aspects of a home page are these three key components: 1. A professionally created page 2. All of your services in clear bullet points 3. Clearly located tabs to your other pages including a prominent “Contact” tab

No web education:  Business owners thought that website design was all “techy”

Expensive: Professional website design through a local agency can be expensive

As we launched, we expected most of our customers to be business owners without a web site.  Surprise! Almost half our customers had attempted some sort of website design. Many of these sites did not look professional. So they ended up coming to us.

Players in the industry have attempted to make website design easy through templates and other tools. But there are a number of skills that one needs:

-          Website Design skills: Even with templates, business owners try to change the color to meld with the logo or change the layout around. Website Design is “design”- there is art involved and web designers spend years learning it.

-          Copy writing skills: Most business owners we know hate writing copy. We started our website design business trying to get business owners give us copy and soon realized that we would not launch anything if we waited for them to write the copy. Our standard website design process now involves an interview  with owners for 20 minutes and have copywriters write the copy

-          Technical skills: To use the internet for business, you need some tools that will make it useful for the clients or even for yourself. For example, as a part of all the small business website design packages, Small Biz Express routinely offers an application called “Refer a friend” which will help  customers refer your business to their friends and let you know so that you can thank the referees (verbally or in form of a discount). Our photographer website design packages offer the ability for photographers to post pictures (with watermarks) and enable customers to order them online. To make website design business centric with applications requires some technical skills

As much as players are trying to push the “do it yourself” website design, most businesses are better off using professionals. At $25 per hour, Small Biz Express actually charges less for website design than what your local handyman does and we know there are others (free lancers mostly) who are as good and as cheap.

Her e is a website of a restaurant  in New York City we recently launched and I think it is apparent that having a professional design and develop a website makes a difference.

NFIB released their monthly survey this past Tuesday which showed some interesting results. Actual sales changes – which is net percent  of  small business owners with higher sales  minus small business owners  with lower sales the last three months compared to prior three months is at -34%. This is the worst ever score since NFIB started doing this monthly survey since 1986.

So if you are a small business owner seeing falling sales you have a lot of company. As an online marketing company we get asked by small business owners on how we can help. Unfortunately there is no magic wand. Here is what some of what we’ve done.

There are four options:

1. Lie low and tide it out: Don’t make dramatic changes. Keep up the good customer relationships you always and stick to the knitting. This shall pass. Look at low cost options that can help build the relationships further. Maybe this is the time to create that online newsletter that you always wanted to do. An e-mail newsletter to your customer is not expensive. We do some work with customers there and the costs are end to end including copywriting are less than $150.
2. Cut costs aggressively:  Survival is the key. People are predicting an imminent turnaround of the economy. But timing a recovery is difficult and you need to first remain in business to take advantage of the predicted eventual recovery. We’ve looked at this aggressively in our company. Internet has been very helpful in looking at deals for everything. In fact, we’ve done so much of it that we’ve decided to use our own research to create a new site called SmallBizExtras.com where we list all the savings we see- which brings us to the next point.
3. Growing through new products and services: There are services that you can add on to the business at very low cost. You may be 90% there and then just need to add a few bells and whistles to get extra revenue. SmallBizExtras  is a prime example. We are already scouring the internet very heavily looking for deals. Using internal resources and very little cost, we are creating a small business savings website –  SmallBizExtras.com which will help other business owners and generate some revenues.
4. Growing through new markets: While the market here in the US has been hit hard, elsewhere things are not as bad. There are markets like India and China that are growing, albeit more slowly. So if you can look at a low cost entry into these markets, this may be the time. Online marketing helps you offer your products across the globe. We’ve done the same launching SBXi.com as a site to offer services in India.

So this is what we’ve done. We will lay no claim to spectacular success except that we are not giving up and doing something about dealing with the economy.

Small Biz Express takes a different approach to web design for lawyers. To us, web design is always the last step in the process. Business needs come first. Here are three strong business reasons why we think lawyers need a website

Better conversion of referral business

Like most small businesses, lawyers get a bulk of their customers through referrals. These prospects will look up the referred lawyer up Google, look at the website and then decide on contacting the lawyer. The easier it is to access the information, the more likely the person will get to the lawyer. So having a site that is optimized so that your website comes up when someone searches your name on Google is really a must. Small Biz Express as a part of lawyer web design package with do submissions to Google and other search engines to ensure that this happens.

Managing Customer relationships

Instead of emailing large files back and forth, internet can be a great tool to manage documents. Small Biz Express as a part of the lawyer web design package offers a file share system that enables the lawyer and client to share documents. The client can access the folder and just deposit the documents. The lawyer gets an alert email. Different clients’ documents are in separate folders with secure access. Our lawyer clients love this aspect of our lawyer web design package.

Underlining your expertise

Your website gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your expertise by posting your views. You could also have prospects ask questions and answer some questions to build engagement with your audience.

In this era where everyone is online, lawyers can ill afford not to invest in a website for themselves. But rather than getting a website for the sake of it, get a web design that meets your core business needs as a lawyer.

Fact 2:  Small businesses are woefully underpenetrated in using the internet.

These are the two simple facts that drove us to launch Small Biz Express focusing on small business web design services.

Small Business website design has been a tough nut to crack. The approach that we saw most providers of small business web design take was “do it yourself” model and assume that small business owners would design their own websites based on templates. We spoke to many business owners, realized that this was far from reality and launched the “do it for you” small business web design model where Small Biz Express takes care of all aspects of website design.

Since then, we’ve realized that the tough part about small business web design is getting the price-service equation right. Small businesses do not want to spend a lot of money on web design. There are lots of players, the services get confusing and so price is one parameter that business owners use to decide on their web design provider.

On the other hand, you get what you pay for. So even among our competitors in the low cost “Do it for you” small business web design business, there are severe restrictions on how much you can change things. The problem with this approach has been that many business owners are dissatisfied with their website, never really own it in their minds and end up shutting it as soon as things become a little tough and they are looking for expenses to reduce.

SmallBiz Express take on small business web design was to use pre-existing designs as starting point and then make whatever changes business owners wanted. We would be lying if we said this process of small business website design is a profitable practice. It has afforded us a lot of learning but spending many weeks for a $399 small business web design project gets to be very unprofitable.

But we’ve learnt from this approach to website design. We think the industry of small business web design has focused on “web design” and less on “small business” and what the web can do for them. Folks in the website design industry understand websites and technology more  and the business itself less. Small Biz Express learning has been to focus on the business. We increasingly are coming to understand that focus on just small business web design is focusing on the skin. Web design for small businesses needs to focus on functionality- on what services and sales support the website can help small business owners deliver to their customers.

So we get into building functionality that really helps business owners as a core part of small business web design. But how do we then keep the costs low? We have been working hard at it. One answer is re-use of functionality. Small Biz Express builds one application and then rolls it out among many business owners to reduce costs. What about differing needs of differing business owners? Small Biz Express is trying to address this through functionality based on different vertical segments.

Small Businesses understand direct mail. They receive lots and lots of it. They also use it at some point of time or the other. So online marketing immediately translates to e-mail marketing.  And that is where small business owners start going wrong.

There are important differences between direct mail marketing and e-mail marketing. Here are the three most important differences:

Use of lists: It is a common practice in direct mail marketing to buy a list of names and start mailing these folks. With email, the practice is illegal. CAN SPAM laws dictate that you can only email to extend a relationship not spam people. What about all the spam you receive. Much of this junk is generated by folks with servers outside the US and therefore is difficult for the authorities to prosecute

So email marketing required a lot of preparation for setting up sources of emails. Collect emails through newsletters, So the next question that small business owners often ask is where can they get an email list?

The reality is different. Use of small business SEO Services is highly underutilized. Most small business owners getting a web presence spend a lot of time on website design.  But among thousands of sites that get launched, we see very few small business owners who start using search engine optimization services.

The reason is twofold-

Fatigue: Website design project is exhausting enough for most small business owners. Once they are done with it, most business owners want to see how the website helps them before starting off using SEO services.

Complexity: While website design can be difficult, SEO services are a lot more complex for small business owners to understand. So the idea is to get the site out there and see how the website performs without using any SEO services is even more appealing.

This approach to SEO services is self defeating. Without any search engine optimization, the only visitors to the site are those typing the domain name in. So the investment in website design is wasted for want of investment into SEO services.

At Small Biz Express, our website design packages come with some basic SEO services. We ensure that the pages have the right titles and tags to make the pages SEO friendly during the website design process.  The basic SEO services offered as a part of website design packages also include submission to the top search engines.

Our regular SEO services are a lot more robust and are focused on getting our client’s pages in the top ranks of Google.  And as a part of small business SEO services packages, we have now even launched a results based SEO package, where our compensation is tied to website showing up high on Google rankings.

Apart from Small Biz Express, there are many other providers of small business SEO services – business owners would do well to do a comparison and use the player that best meets their needs.