Before you do any shopping, consider learning a little about web technology. At a minimum, you should have some general knowledge about hosting accounts, domain names, shopping carts, image formats, databases, Flash graphics, HTML, PHP and XML. You don’t need to know exactly how they all work but you should understand the purpose of each component. You’ll need to purchase a hosting account if you don’t have your own server for storage of web pages. You will also need to choose a domain name if you don’t already have one. Do you need to store dynamic information in a database? Do you really want your website in what they call Flash graphics? It will perform slower and might not be suitable for those with mobile devices if it does. Anything you can quickly learn about web technology will help you in the long run.

Next, know what you need in a website. Ask yourself if you need only a brochure-style site or if you need one with interactivity. Web designers sometimes make reference to static and dynamic websites. Static is where the content does not change. But no matter what type of website it will be, there will come a time to do maintenance like fixing broken links or updating product and contact information. So, at this stage, determine if you will need a web designer over a long period of time or if you have the skills in-house to make changes after site implementation. If the latter is true, you will only need to choose a web designer for the initial site roll out which could be easy on your budget.

Once you determine what you want, begin looking for a designer. This task can appear overwhelming because there are many web designers offering different services and pricing schemes. Many small businesses don’t know what to look for in a web design firm so they look at something they understand: price. Unfortunately, they look for the lowest priced design firm without understanding the real cost of their decision in the future. Prices that are set too low can indicate many things. It could be that the web design firm is just starting out therefore it may not have the experience you are looking for. It might also be that the web design firm set its prices low because it picked up a bad reputation from previous clients. Prices set to low for an extended period of time oftentimes results in the design firm going out of business which could leave you hanging if support is needed in the future.

1. Don’t rush things. Search engines like to see websites to grow naturally so if you buy traffic and go from getting 1 to 100,000 visitors a day they will know something is not right and will more than likely bump your rankings downwards rather upwards. It can take ages to recover from this penalty so it stands to reason that this is best avoided.
2. Start blogging. This approach is best for the short term as well as long term. It is wise to have a blog of some kind that you can regularly add content to. The search engines see this as an active site as long as the content is relevant to the site then you should see improvements in the number of visitors.
3. Back links are a massive part of getting rank well in search engines such as Google. Just like other approaches this should be done slowly so that it will appear more natural. Don’t limit yourself to a single method of getting back links, you can get links from directories, social networking sites, forums, blogs, community sites and many more.
4. Web 2.0 content. This is a great way of getting quality backlinks to your site above and beyond those from article directories. Creating something like a Squidoo Lens or HubPage will really boost your rankings. These would take less than an hour to create and will be there forever. It is well worth investing some time into creating at least one per week.
5. The content of your website is vital. Everything needs to be relevant to the keywords that you are trying target. It is important that you include these in the copy and have keyword-rich links within the site. Never force the keywords in or use them excessively because the search engines are now clever enough to spot tricks like this, and they will put a mark on your website to drop its ranking or worst, take it off the database completely.
6. If you haven’t done anything like this before then no one is going to say that you should be an expert. There are lots of websites, forums, e-books and tutorials online that will give you hints, tips and advice on what you should and shouldn’t do to help your website grow and be profitable. You should spend a few hours going through these to pick up some worthy tips.
7. Check for broken links. If there’s any broken links on your website the search engine bots will have problem with indexing some of the pages. You can use this tool to quickly check for broken links.

A successful website require more than just the skills of designing and using the software; it require a combination of graphic design, web programming, copywriting, search engine optimization, and marketing knowledge. If you believe you have these skills then by means do it yourself, otherwise don’t force yourself to do something that you’re not comfortable with.

There are many advantages of hiring a professional to design your website. A professional web designer is likely to be able to design a more professional looking website and in less time than you, so you will be able to focus more on your business. Depending on the value of your hourly rate, you’d most likely be spending less if you hire a professional web designer, and you can get more other things done. A good web designer can put together a professional website, with search engine optimisation, in less than a week. You will be able to get the marketing campaign started sooner, which means the sales will appear sooner also. If you are lucky you will find someone who can do more than what you asked for.

Many freelance designers have skills other than web design, and are happy to do extras for you. The advantage of building a good relationship with freelancers is that you can go back to them for updates, new features on the website and small design jobs and they will most likely give you good rates because you are loyal customer to them. Not only that, they’re more likely to work outside office hours and able to deliver work quicker than big companies.

If you can, do make sure your website is built by someone who understands SEO, otherwise you will need to hire another person for this. If you are tight on budget, you can leave this out in the beginning or try to learn and doing it yourself. The good news is search engine optimisation is easier to learn than web design. You can read books to pick the fundamentals and try to do what you learnt on your own website. So if you have more time than money then I would suggest you do this part yourself. The other advantage of doing SEO yourself is that you will save money in the long run, even if you’re not planning to do all the work yourself! So if you are serious about your business you should let a professional web design agency handle the building of your business website.

Here are the steps for creating your own business website:

1. Domain Name – The very first thing you need is to register a domain name. You can use Godaddy or 123Reg. Never buy a domain and hosting service with the same company, because doing so could cause problems when you want to move to a different hosting company.
2. Hosting – It’ important that you find a hosting company that offers unlimited addon domains. What this means is that you can host multiple websites with a single account. We use Hostgator for some of our sites and it never let us down. It’s perfect for people who are just starting out.
3. Installing CMS System – Don’t let the term scare you because it really isn’t that difficult to do. Think of this as the control centre and structure of your new website. You need to download the files from the WordPress website and unpack it. Next, you’ll need to upload this folder to your hosting server. The folder is called public_html or home. If you not sure, just ask your hosting company.
4. Setup SQL Database – This is probably the most difficult step so far, but after you’ve done it once you will be able to do this in 5 minutes. Basically, you need to login to the Cpanel, which is provided by your hosting company that allows you to create email addresses, databases, upload files, backup files and many more. Once you have logged in you will some icons and the one you want to click on is called “MySQL Database”. Create a new database and user in there; don’t forget to assign the user to the database before leave the site. If you do have problems in this or 3rd step, you can find more information on how to install WordPress here.
5. Content – I assume that you have already prepared the copy and images that you want to display on your website. If not, you will need to do that and come back to this step when you are done. In the WordPress control panel, you can use the “add pages” section to add your content to the system. If you have used Microsoft Word or something similar then you should have no problem doing this. Because WordPress is a blogging system, so you will need to change the “display mode” from posts to static pages, and you can find this option in the settings > reading section.
6. Design – You are almost done! There are thousands of WordPress themes on the net, and most of them can be customised easily without any web design knowledge. The best place to start would be the official WordPress theme site. If you really want to give your business a unique appearance, you will need to learn a few things about CSS.

In my opinion, WordPress is the best CMS for creating your business website. It’s simple enough to allow people with no web design knowledge to use it, yet it’s powerful enough to allow professional website designers to build all types of business websites. One of many advantages of using WordPress to create your business website is that it can be customised to fit in with almost any business models!

Make it Simple And Recogniseable
Depending on what your business is about, there are some common factors that are linked to having a good web site. One thing to keep in mind when designing your website is to make it simple and user friendly. The visitors should know what your business offers within 10 seconds after landing on your website. This is why you need to make sure the most important elements are above the fold (the screen they see before scrolling).

The Quality of Your Content
Your goal should be to put as much useful content on your website as possible. Having quality and regularly updated content on your web site will result more return visitors and natural incoming links(links from other websites). Useful content would give the visitors(prospects) more confident to do business with you. Ensure the contents on your website are search engine friendly so that people can find you more easily on the net. This isn’t hard to do. Just remember these three things and your website will be more optimised than 90% of the other websites on the net. 1. Make sure all the main headings are using the H1 or H2 tag. 2. Repeat the keyword phrase at least once or twice on the page. 3. Bold the keyword phrases at least once.

Create The Right Brand Image
You need to think about what your visitor wants before designing the website. Think about what you look for in a website and what you would like to see if you were looking for your own service or product. If you want your service or product to be perceived as the best quality, or the most competitive in your area, then your web site needs to reflect that image. Using colours like pink and green on a business consulting website will certainly not attract many customers. Or, if the layout of your website looks ok on all Internet browsers but not on Google Chrome, it would leave a bad impression to those who do use that browser.

So yes, bad design can seriously hurt your business. If your business is doing pretty well at moment and you put up a badly designed website tomorrow, that could actually do more harm than good to your business. A portion of small businesses are doing just that! What’s more shocking is that they don’t even realise it. To prevent this from happening to you, you must seek help from the professionals. If you can’t afford to pay someone to build a whole website, you should at least get it checked up by a professional before putting on the Web.

The truth is that if you do some research on the Internet you will find that there are many tools available to simplify the website building process. To save you time, I will cover three of them in this article and you can decide which one is the best for you.

WordPress – WordPress is free to use blogging content management system. It’s very easy to install and it can be used to build a small 5 pages brochure website or a 500 pages magazine style website. The main benefit is that it allows you to get your business online without spending anything but your time, and you can expand it as your business gets bigger and more profitable. Because WordPress has been on the market for nearly 10 years, most web designers or companies can advice you on many technical aspects, such as how to optimise it for the search engines.

Squidoo – This is a free to use online service that allows you to create your own page on their website. Everything is done on their website. They have all the tools that you can use to add text, images, videos, links, RSS feed and more to your page. If you don’t have much time and you just want something on the net so that people can see your products or services, then this would be a good option to consider. The only downside is that they insert a few advertisements around your contents, which could drive your potential customers away. If you are going to use this option I would highly recommend that you choose a generic name of your products or services instead of your company name for the domain name. For example, if your business sells dog toys, you would register something like www.dogtoyslondon.squidoo.com or www.cheapdogtoys.squidoo.com. Why? Because you cannot use this service as your main business website, and you will need to get a unique domain, hosting and website design when your business is more profitable. When you do, you can get use this “Squidoo Content Site” as tool to drive traffic and search engine values to your main website.

Hosting Companies – You will find that some hosting companies like Goaddy give you website building tools to build your own website when you sign up to their hosting service. Many people are using this method because they don’t the time to find the others, in other words, it’s more convenient. There’s nothing wrong with this if you know for sure the hosting company is reliable and you are happy to use them for a few years or so. If that’s not the case, you might want to spend a little more time in building the website now, and save yourself a lot more time down the road. Why? Because most of these companies don’t allow you to move the website to another hosting company, which you will be stuck with their hosting service! This is the reason why you need to think carefully before using this option.

The best thing to do, if you have the time, it’s to spend a weekend trying out these three options and get feel of which one is most suitable for your business. If you have done experimenting you can pick one method to build your main website and use the other two to build related content sites to boost the main site’s search engine ranking position.

You’ll need to ask yourself how much time and efforts YOU are willing to spend on the website. Do not rely on your web design company to do all the work for, because they can’t, especially the ones that offer you websites at below market value! So if you are going to use their services, make sure you are aware of the followings:

1. Research – They will spend very little to zero hours on researching your business or your competitors. This is extremely vital, because if the designer doesn’t have any knowledge about your business, he/she is giving a piece of art, and not a solution to your problem.
2. Design – They use templates that have been shared and used by thousands of people around the world. They may change them slightly, but the overall look and feel are usually the same.
3. Structure – Your website will most likely not be hand coded from scratch, which means the structure would be meaning less to vision impaired users and search engines. Unless you don’t care about getting found on the major search engines, then this won’t be much of an issue for you, but say no to free traffic?
4. Layout – This is just as important as the other above. Most cheap web designers have little to none marketing knowledge, and they make design decisions by using their right brain(that’s the creative side in case you didn’t know), what that means is that you will get something that most visitors would say “that’s interesting” and then leave. Why? Because the design was not focused on getting the visitors to do a specific task.
5. Search Engine Optimisation – Many claim that they can optimise your website with no extra charge if you use their web design service. I would suggest to avoid these companies unless they have a good reputation or are recommended by a friend. The truth is that a good seo job require more time than most people think. To fully optimise a 10 pages website would take about 5 hours at least, provided the keyword research is already done. Also, some businesses will be benefited with certain methods than the others.

All in all, not all cheap web design companies are bad. Now that you are aware of what some of these cheap web design companies do, you will be a lot more prepared than 90% of the people when approaching them!

Choosing a good website design company is something that should be taken seriously. There are so many web design companies that offer similar services. Finding the right one can be a real challenge; but when you are able to do so, you will see the benefits of their web design service.

Here are some tips on how to find a good web design company:

Identify Your Needs
Before you set your eyes on finding the right company to do your website design, you have to identify the needs and requirements of your business. You must be clear on what role your website will play in enhancing your online presence as well as contributing to the growth of your business.

These are some of the questions that many web design companies would ask you:

• How do you plan to use your website?
• Who is the target audience of your website?
• What is your budgetary allocation for the website?

Your website will depend on your expectations as well as the information that you want your website to contain. It will help to determine these things in advance to make it easy for you and your web designer to conceptualise and implement a good design for your website.

Gather a List of Web Design Companies
When you have already identified your needs as well as how your website will cater to the requirements of your business, you can start creating your list of your potential web design companies. You can do this at the comforts of your own home just by going online and patiently search from the internet.

You may also want to ask for referrals from family or friends, or if you come across a website that catches your attention, you may inquire or search the web design company that have created that website.

Choose the Best Company
You can now narrow down the list of your potential web design companies based on the following criteria:

1. How they meet the four Cs – Capability, Credibility, Consistency, and Cost.
2. Have a look at their website portfolio and see if their style is suitable for your business.
3. Length of experience in the web design industry.
4. Turn-around time.
5. How they respond to their customer needs and queries.

Evaluate Their Proposal
A good website design company will send you a proposal for evaluation. To be able to get the best deal, compare the proposals you have received with the following considerations:

1. Over-all soundness and feasibility of the proposal.
2. Strength and limitation.
3. Package including value-added features.

When you have done the above, you will be able to pick the best from your list. If there are still gray areas or some questions in mind about their service, then by all means phone them up and clear all your queries about their website design service.

1. Update your website often. If you have nothing new to add, try to improve the copy. This will let the search engines know that your website is still “active”.
2. Start blogging for your business. Write something that could be useful to your customers.
3. Join some affiliate networks, add their products to your website. Make sure they are not in direct competition with you.
4. Invite people to opt-in for your newsletter or free gift.
5. Join social bookmarking sites like Digg.com, stumbleupon and wiki, then add the icons to the bottom the homepage.
6. Add a bookmark link to your website so people can easily save it to their favorites.
7. Make sure your branding, colours and navigation are consistent on every page. It should be clear that which page the user is on.
8. Create a policy page if you don’t have one yet. Let your customers know the principle and philosophy of your business, so that they will feel more comfortable in dealing with you.
9. Make sure each page has a unique page title and description. Doing so will give you not only the search engine benefits, but also the benefits for humans.
10. Create a user friendly 404 error page. By default, if somebody goes to a page that has been moved or doesn’t exists, he/she will be shown a page with the message “404 Error – page not found”. To make this page more user friendly you can create your own error message with a link that takes the user to the homepage.