Web Presence Cont.

When looking for a name I suggest finding a minimum of 30 that are available. I always do around 50, then narrow it down to 15 and get some opinions from friends or family before making the final decision.  When you are looking, it’s easy to think that you have the perfect name, buy it and then regret it 20 minutes later when you find that next perfect name!

How do I get started?
One thing to keep in mind is that websites can be very simple ( a few pages talking about your company with some pictures and contact info) or very complex with hundreds of pages, thousands of links and ads, a store, a blog and methods to interact with the customer.  If you can’t put it on paper, you won’t be able to organize your site.  The most important part of a website is prior proper planning.  You need to decide what you want the site to do, what features you want it to have and what your budget is.  Once you have the overall plan completed, lay out what pages you will need to convey your message or products.  This will help you decide on the navigation (how the customer gets to a particular page and then to other pages on the site).  When deciding on the type of navigation to use, also remember fancy, flash, drop-down menus are not seen by the web crawlers, hence they do not find those keywords relevant to the page.  Also, when you embed text into images the search engines will not see those words.  For the best search results your page title, the navigation menus and the text should all contain the most important key words.  Using them frequently throughout the page will allow more accurate results when users search on those words.

Next month we will talk about implementing your layout into the real thing!  Have a question you want answered?  Ask John