The Wild, Wild Web

How to build a Web site for your small business

Charles Molineaux

March 20, 2008

For Darrell and Janie Clark, the idea of putting their business on the Internet was as basic as dirt. About as far from high tech as it's possible to get, their company, Darrell's Dirt, matches contractors or homeowners who have an excess of clean fill, shot rock, mulch or whatever with those who need some.

"We talked to a lot of people in the industry; contractors," says Janie Clark, Darrell's Dirt vice president of finance. "Dirt is basically a word of mouth kind of thing. You see a sign that says ‘free fill dirt' and that's how they do it."

"When you see a company like that online," marvels consultant Peter Rassel with Georgia State University's Small Business Development Center, "then what business shouldn't be [online]?"

"A Web site becomes part of your sales force," says Richard Warner, founder and CEO of Web design firm What's Up Interactive. "It has replaced collateral (sales kits and brochures)."

Where to begin?

"In the 21st century, every business needs a Web presence," says Drew Tonsmeire, a consultant with Kennesaw State SBDC. "There's not an occasion to say, ‘When do I need it?' It's ‘How do I build it now?'"

If you're in the tiny minority of startups flying first class, hiring a professional Web firm to design a Web site can run between $3,000 and $6,000. "You need to get serious about your Web site," Warner says. "You won't be credible if you don't look pretty."

Still, he acknowledges, "There are ways you can look credible without breaking the bank," and for the majority of small business decision-makers, counting coupons and pennies, a lower-cost approach may be just as effective and a better idea anyway. "Start with the simplest cheapest," says Tonsmeire. "Even if it's not more than a Web brochure, that's where you start."

Staking out your position in cyberspace requires setting up an address, your domain name and a landlord, i.e., a Web host. 1&1 Internet provides both and for less than $25, you'll have your home on the information superhighway and your rent paid for three months.

1&1 will even provide rudimentary Web site building, although to get more specialized you may need to go elsewhere. Nvu provides more advanced tools for the budget minded.

For those with a little more in the IT wallet, Microsoft's Front Page and Adobe's Dreamweaver allow the highly motivated and technically adept entrepreneur to put together an impressive web presence. Likewise, TemplateMonster sells a variety of, yes, templates. For Mac users, Apple's .Mac platform offers a polished look and even tutorials for assembling a site.

If you do have the time, aptitude and desire for that level of control, the W3 Schools offers no cost online tutorials in site building skills like HTML. Or you could simply take a web development class. Keep in mind, though, that time spent learning and wrestling with the technical challenges of your Web site is time you're not spending on the business of your business.

For the starry-eyed, staunchly technically illiterate entrepreneur, it doesn't get much simpler than the one-stop-shopping available at Go Daddy.com or Homestead which offer domain name registration as well as hosting and simple Web site templates. They even offer the infrastructure to turn your site into a rudimentary e-commerce site. For around $100, you can get online in an afternoon.

Tonsmeire says speed and economy should be priorities. "First, most small businesses don't have a lot of money, and secondly, that first Web site is usually not going to last too long. After about three to six months, they'll figure out what they like and don't like and they'll end up redesigning everything anyway."

These simplest Web site systems do have a shortcoming. When you outgrow them, you may have no choice but to dump them wholesale. If GoDaddy or Homestead owns your template and the licensed photos they've provided for your site, you can't transfer the material very easily to another site so you'll end up starting over.

Another option is to check in with your local tech school or even high school, where students learning Web design may be eager to cut their teeth. "They'll love to have the chance to build a Web site for fun," Tonsmeire says with a laugh. "Usually two hamburgers and a Coke is all it will take for them to build a Web site."

Up and running? The easy part is over.

"Getting yourself online is only half of it," cautions Patrick Carlson, a principal at Bullseye Creative Communications. "People think if they have a site and put it out there, customers will just find it. That may have worked years ago, but in this competitive field you have to do a lot more than just put a site out there."

Warner says to make the site touch visitors as soon as they arrive. "You have five seconds from the time they get to your Web site," he warns. "We've noticed it on all the sites we do. We can time it. It has to be customer focused, not ‘me, me, me.' It has to be ‘you, you, you, how you'll benefit, what you'll experience with us.' After the five seconds, you have 30 seconds to make your pitch. There's tremendous competition for eyeballs."

To help customers find you in the first place, make sure your site is "search engine optimized," meaning the page is set up in such a way that search engines can find it and index it to generate attention from people looking for your product or service.

Search engine optimization [SEO] has become a science unto itself with expensive consultancies built around it, but for the struggling small business, a few principles can make a big difference. For around $50 a month, services like Keyworddiscovery.com and Wordtracker show what Web users are searching for, and specifically what words they're using.

Meta tags, the keywords that bring search engine attention to Web sites, have changed since the 1990s when piling the right titillating words on your page could bring search engines blindly rushing to you. Still search engines, Yahoo notably, continue to use them, so including them is important for bringing visitors to your site.

Likewise your site's URL, its web address, matters a lot and should have your keywords in it. If you're not already at AutorepairDecatur.net or Monroeplumber.com, you might want to consider buying a new URL. That helps with your ranking on both Yahoo and Google. Your address and phone number and zip code should be displayed early and frequently.

And precise language matters in the complicated SEO game. Rather than "best pastries in the world," Nancy's Bakery could try "Nancy's Bakery bakes and ships fresh cakes, cookies and pastries in Jonesboro, Ga. for fast delivery worldwide."

Found Links

Standing out in the search engine world also means getting linked, linking to other sites and especially getting other sites to link to you. More than just a way to attract surfers who click on your link, the number of incoming links to your site affects the rank assigned your site by that most important search engine Google. Google even offers its own tips at its Webmaster Central site.

Putting posts on other Web sites and blogs, and including your link in the post, can help. In your own field, watch for news and connect to professional organizations. "Let's say if you are a dry cleaner," asks Tonsmeire, "maybe you have a link back in to the Fabric Care Institute. Maybe someone's written an article about how to get stains out of shirts. You can link to the article from your site, then ask the author or whoever's carrying the article to have a link back to you. They will do that."

Better still; generate your own material, an article, column or white paper with your link in it, and post it on news sites. Ezine @rticles offers the chance to get your link out there, associated with your specific area of expertise. Sites like the business section of Topix.net actively ask users to submit material they've written or, as on the user driven site Newsvine, even material they've reworked after someone else wrote it.

The Web search professionals of SEO Company refer, and link, users to a list of optimization tools for use with Google, Yahoo and MSN, as well as social sites.
"If you're going to market on the Internet, you have to advertise on the Internet," says Tonsmeire, "which may mean you're paying for Internet advertising, banner advertising, pay-per-click advertising."

Tonsmeire says online ads do offer a plus for startup and small businesses in their flexibility. "You can set an advertising budget that says, ‘Oh, I want to pay 50 dollars a month for my Google advertising.' If you're paying, say, 15 cents per click, 50 dollars will give you 333 clicks. These advertising programs offer a way to control your budget."

He also says social networking sites like MySpace.com offer venues for getting a message out ... carefully. "It's a fine line. Every Internet world has its own culture," he warns. "Myspace carries a lot of that Generation Y culture. If you put a commercial message on Myspace, you'll probably be bombarded from outside, but there are ways of using a presence in that social network to stimulate interest and generate traffic to your site."

Better you than them. Really

Warner says his firm does Web design for companies as big as Coca-Cola and as small as tiny Columbus accessories shop Pursona, due online in a few weeks, but says small businesses may be the best candidates for establishing a Web presence simply because they're small.

"A smaller company has the advantage in that it can react very quickly. A big company has to go through layers of management. It's not like that if you're a little company. You can knock yourself out, do whatever you want."

More than what you are, your Web site," Warner adds, "can show what you want to be, what you are in the process of becoming. It's like that classic cartoon from the New Yorker where the dog says, ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.'"

How did you get your small biz site running online? Find out how other entrepreneurs and small business owners did it in our Catalyst Community Forums.

Photo Credit: © Helder Almeida | Dreamstime.com

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The Wild, Wild Web

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How to build a Web site for your small business

Charles Molineaux

March 20, 2008