How Can A Website Help My Business

This webpage was created as a companion piece to the short seminar given to Park Slope small businesses at Lion In The Sun on November 11th.

Identity

All small businesses have an identity. If you’re a box supplier and you have a simple sign that says ‘BOXES’ in black letters on a white sign, that’s an identity, maybe not a very sophisticated one but it communicates a lot about what the company does and also their style.

Your identity is not just your logo and signage, it’s everything that goes into the look, feel and personality of your business. Everything from the clothes your staff wears, the color of your walls and carpeting, your attitude towards your clients; it all adds up to equal your identity.

When we talk about ‘identity’ in relation to a website it’s pretty much the same thing, all aspects of the site add up to give an overall ‘identity’; the typography used, your logo, colors, photos, even what’s said in the text…

When we make a website our main goal is to strengthen the identity you’ve already started developing. If you’re just getting started we work with you to develop an identity that is both strong and unique.

Design & Layout

A clean well organized design is key to any good website. People come to your site to get information and they don’t want to work too hard to find it. the quicker you can get them to what they are looking for the better, having to figure out the interface of your website will frusterate most users. If a user doesn’t quickly find what they are lookign for they will most likely keep moving down their google search results to the next site (your competition).

A consistant navigation is something that will help your users always know where they are. Two rules we try to follow are:

• You don’t want to give your user too many choices
• You don’t want to have your user click more than three time to get to the page they’re looking for.

Content Management

A content management system makes it possible for you to edit your own site content.

Find out if you need a CMS

E-commerce

There are tons of ways to buy on the web, here’s the methods we recommend using:

Zencart

An open source shopping cart (no monthly fees attached) which is very customizable. You would use ZenCart if you want a full featured store with an admin area that keeps track of orders and customer information for you. An advantage of ZenCart

Magento

Another open source cart, which has a nicer admin interface than ZenCart but has speed issues when working with a large number of products.

At the moment we can’t recommend this cart because although it’s awesome, it’s just too slow… Hopefully it’ll be fixed in the future

PayPal

Paypal is an online payment processor, if you’re just selling a few items, you may not need to use a cart, a more cost effective way to accept payments may be to just add paypal buy now buttons to items on your site.

Google Checkout.

Google checkout is very similar to paypal, they both provide you with code to put into your web pages to make buying a few products very easy for your users. The difference is that with google checkout the user will need to create an account and before buying whereas with paypal the user can bypass this step and just pay directly with credit card

Search Engine Optimization

What good is your perfectly built website if nobody visits it? Google is the #1 way most people will make it to your site, so we concentrate on getting your page rank as high as possible. This is a process that takes time and you need to work at. We’ve created this page with more info on the things that we do and you can do to improve your Google page rank.

Related Articles

• How to get better rankings with Google
• How much will my website cost?
• What is the best server to use for my site?
• Do I need a content management system?