Managing Your Business Website

A common mistake many business owners make is to have a website designed and then abandon it for several months and wonder why they aren't seeing any results. 

But... think of it like you would a billboard.  When that billboard is fresh and new, you receive lots of new leads.  However, once that billboad gets old and the corners start to peel and the color fade, nobody calls.  

A website needs to stay fresh.   You need to post new content to your website on a regular basis, and you need to interact with the visitors. 

Knowing this, many website designers use Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and others to build their sites.  These are software packages that are relatively easy to install, and the three I mentioned are even FREE. Plus, there are thousands of free or cheap (under $100) templates, or skins,  that can be added to the site to make the site look more appealing, and modules that can be added to make it do almost anything, including e-commerce.  You can search for these on Google or Bing and see hundreds of listings.  So, for around $100, you can have a full website in about 10 minutes!!

While using one of these DOES acheive the goal of making it easy for the site owner to add new content, it creates a new problem:  Search Engine Optimization.  These systems do not have the required elements of SEO built in.  While it is possible for the web designer to go in and manually add them, they frequently are in a rush to get it done and fail to do this.  Additionally, the WAY these systems are designed is counterproductive to good SEO because of the table-based structure and page download times.

If you have a CMS, then you should make SURE that your web designer has gone through and added the right ALT tags and TITLE tags to the design.  This is very easy to do.... just hover your mouse over a link or a picture and see if a box pops up with a keyword phrase.  If it doesn't pop up, then they have not done any search engine optimization and your site will not do well.  If it does pop up, it should be more than one word, and it should be something a person might search for on Google or Yahoo or Bing, not just "Contact" or "Home", but something like "Contact XYZ Business" or "Vinyl Siding from XYZ Business".

BUT the best alternative is a custom designed site.  Why?

1. They are NOT code heavy, so they load quickly.  Did you know Google actually times this and stores it in their database and calculates this into their Page Rank algorithm they use to rank sites?
2. They can be designed using CSS instead of tables.
3. Every image and link and header and title can be created to boost your search engine rankings
4. The entire website can be designed with the copy placed in the most profitable locations in the files
5. They CONSISTENTLY do better in search engines.
6. They are unique and can reflect your Corporate Branding

And the very best part is, you can STILL have a custom designed application to allow the site owner to add content WITHOUT having to have the full-blown, code-heavy content management systems on the web today!