In this image released by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, a design of Web buttons is shown.Jeff Baxter
You've decided to build a website for your business. It's a smart move: All companies, big and small, benefit from an Internet presence, but a significant number of small businesses across Canada either lack a website, or they have no strategy for their online properties. In this four-part, weekly series we'll take you through the initial planning and setup phase, to launch and maintenance.
Part Three: Design and construction
This is where all your thinking and planning, and your legwork on registration and hosting, finally starts to pay off. You're ready to choose your tools and start the website construction.
Designing your site
Design is the process of choosing the look and the layout. The focus is not just on appearance, it's also on function: you need to make choices on colours and images, and on how the site will work.
The look will likely be influenced by decisions you already made about marketing your small business. If you have a logo or other graphics that customers associate with your company, use them to maintain a consistent brand on your website. It may be necessary to make some variations on existing images - to make a detailed logo simple, for example, so it can be recognized on a cellphone - but your website should look familiar to existing customers.
Design is important. At least some visitors will judge your business by the appearance and functionality of your website. It's better to have no site at all than to have a site that, by its design, gives a bad impression.
Create a checklist
Pick a colour scheme and stick to it. This is easy if you already have a logo or other marketing material. Design for use on any computer, with any browser, or on any platform. Your site should look good whether it's being viewed on a BlackBerry handheld or a Nintendo Wii.
Go with simple, easy-to-use navigation. You should have a menu of page links that appears in the same place on every page of your site. The site menu should be consistent, and it should be very obvious which page you're on, no matter where you go.
Style using cascading style sheets (CSS) to make it easier to make changes later. Rather than custom-coding each page with colour and font choices, CSS uses variables that can be changed once in order to change all the pages together.
Remember the design considerations we discussed in the planning process. If your target audience is likely to view your website on an iPad or a cellphone, make sure your site is designed to work well on these devices. If you're not a designer and you don't have a designer on staff, you should either hire one or use website tools that come with attractive, pre-made layouts.
Freelance designers can be found on the web. Sites you like may even have a designer credits on the page. Follow the links and go to their sites for contact information. If you need to search for a designer, there are public sites for that, too. Try Sortfolio.com or Elance.com. Sortfolio.com can search by city and by budget, to help you find the right professional for the job. You might even find some talented Canadian web designers with a simple Google search (try: web designer, Canada).
If their own sites aren't well designed, run away.
The layout
Regardless of what design you choose and what tool you use to build your site, several basic elements should be included.
Header: Usually contains your logo, business name, and motto or tag line.
Navigation: The horizontal or vertical 'menu' of pages that visitors will use to get around your site.
Contact: Provide a way for potential customers to contact you, including a phone number and e-mail address. If your business has one or more physical locations you may wish to include the street address, maps, and driving directions as well.
About: Provides basic information about the business and its products. If desired, you can provide a brief history of the company here as well.
Usability
Entire books have been written on the subject of usability, and we won't cover it in depth here. Focus on easy-to-use site navigation and on creating pages that load quickly. Make sure your text is readable (not too small) and test using different browsers on different computers to ensure that everything works and looks okay.
Constructing your site
There are many different tools available to help you construct your website. There are three basic categories of web publishing tools: software you install on your computer, "hosted services" that provide their own web hosting, and content management systems (CMS) you install on a web host.
1. Software installed on your computer. If you're building a small, basic site, you may be able to do it yourself using web publishing software. Adobe Dreamweaver is probably the best-known product in this category, but there are others including Amaya, Bluefish, iWeb and Rapidweaver.
These programs create websites just like Microsoft Word creates documents. The end results rely on your creativity, but the basic process is simple: choose a template, paste or type in your content, then save the pages and upload them to your web host. That's all you have to do to make and publish a very basic site.
If you're considering this route, download a trial version of one of these programs and give it a try.
2. Hosted services. The current trend in website publishing tools is away from the local computer and toward "hosted services" that live on the web. The trend began with blogging services that made it easy to publish online diaries without much technical knowledge. As the demand grew for blogging tools, the tools added more features and became much more capable, and now it's possible to build a modest website online with little or no technical knowledge.
When you use a hosted service as your site, you don't need to buy web hosting services elsewhere. Instead, you adjust the settings at your domain name registrar so your domain name directs its traffic to the hosted service address. Visitors see the hosted service site as your site.
WordPress is the most popular of the current crop of hosted services. It began as a blogging tool but it has recently added new features that make it attractive as a general purpose web publishing tool. WordPress.com offers a hosted service where you can build and publish a simple website for a small monthly fee.
There are many hosted services to choose from. Some of the best known are Yola.com, Orbs.com, Webs.com, and Weebly.com. Each of these tools offers many of the same features, but offers some slight variations in tone and focus. Depending on your business, you might choose a more business oriented tool like Yola, or a more personal tool such as Weebly.
If you hire a web designer or a developer, they might help you set up a hosted service such as PageLime.com. If the focus of your site is business collaboration, project management or customer extranet, consider a site like PBworks.com. If your small business is primarily social, you can build a very basic site for free using Twitter.com and then point your domain name at your Twitter account.
Some people are even choosing to build small business pages on Facebook.
The hosted service you choose will depend on the character of your business, the features you need, and your budget. The obvious disadvantage of all hosted services is the ultimate lack of control. If Twitter goes down or a hosted service goes out of business, your site will appear to be broken.
3. Content management systems. For some businesses, it will be enough to register a domain and point it at a web-based service. For others, bigger and better tools are needed. Most web hosts now provide their customers with a variety of web publishing tools known as content management systems (CMS). Many hosts even provide free technical help to install and manage these tools.
Here's how it typically works: You contact your host and ask it to have a specific CMS installed. The host sets up the CMS and gives you a username and password. After that, it's up to you.
Each CMS has an administrative view and a public view. To make changes or add pages you log in to the administrative view. The public site changes based on the edits you make. There are literally dozens of free CMSes available in many different categories. Some systems, such as GetSimple and WebsiteBaker are designed to make simple, basic websites similar to those you can build with a hosted service such as Orbs or Webs. Other CMSes focus on blogging, community discussion or team collaboration. You can find a directory of free CMS tools at OpenSourceCMS.com. A few hosted services, such as WordPress, are also available free. When your hosting company installs the free version, you get more power, more features, and more flexibility. The down side? You (or your web host) are responsible for keeping the software up to date and keeping your site secure.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these approaches. Software packages are updated less frequently than web-based tools. Hosted services tend to cost more and offer less control. CMS tools are powerful and inexpensive but require more care and feeding. You have to decide which approach suits your business best.
Now what?
Spend some time exploring the tools and services. Design your site, and make your pages. Once you've done that, you're ready to think about the next phase: launch and maintenance.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Earlier stories from this series can be found on the Web Strategy section of Your Business.