Building A Blog Or Website For Your Small Business

Building A Blog Or Website For Your Small Business

If you are running a small business and have decided to build a new site or redesign your own, the decision about how one goes about it these days is not any easy one.

• Get a designer in or DIY.
• What software to use if you go the DIY route.
• What program is the best for a shopping site?
• CSS or straight html.
• Would a blog platform be a better choice?
• How do you best chose for SEO purposes.
• How do you set the site up for best SEO practices and the list goes on.

Therefore before asking many of these questions the two factors of time and money will come into play.

If you decide to outsource to a web designer, $100 per page is a good figure to start with. Many designers start with a higher price for the first page and some features on individual pages and then charge less for each page after that.

If you are going the DIY route with CSS or html, you will need some good software. Below I have chosen a few of my favorites that can be used no matter your budget. And always remember that the DIY route will save cash however it does take up a lot of your time especially if you are new to web design.

That being said, once you have the gist of it, large savings can be made in editing or adding new pages of which your web designer would normally charge for.

Dreamweaver – Dreamweaver is probably one of the best known CSS/html software programs about. Definitely worth a look if you are going to be doing a lot of design work on one or multiple websites.

Xsite Pro – Xsite pro is great for those not wishing to take on a too large a learning curve in getting a website up and running. Very easy to learn with and get a website up and running quickly.

Html Kit – Html kit is a free general editor. Comes with an excellent instruction manual and is appropriate for anyone starting out or putting up a small site.

Mozilla Editor – Another free editor however one which holds less instruction and one I mainly use for quick edits.

Oscommerce – If you are setting up a shopping site, Oscommerce would be my favorite pick especially if you are considering SEO as one of your main strategies.

Now that I have supplied a few ideas with regards to software, here are a few very good tutorial sites that will also came in handy as you learn.

• Htmlcodetutorial.com
• W3schools.com

Why Not Use A Blogging Platform?

This will not suit every business due to varying needs, products or services being offered and sold however using a blog platform for your website is definitely worth consideration.

Over the last few years I have moved most of my sites to wordpress mainly as the sites are:

• Very easy to set up.
• Hundreds of templates are freely available or can be cheaply designed.
• Once set up, adding pages is as simple as adding the text, pictures if required and pushing a button.
• Additional plugins are freely available so that your site can be adapted for any purpose.
• Every page can be easily optimized for rankings as they are placed online.
• Every page is automatically distributed and promoted via rss when a page is placed online.
• Pages work well with social media sites and marketing due to the nature of blog platforms.

Above I have listed many benefits however the overriding benefits of using a blog platform are its easy of use, cost and marketing benefits.

Wordpress is by a long mile my favorite choice due to the sheer number of free themes (templates) and plugins available.

Wordpress.org

Whether you decide to use html or blog software, the main thing is weigh up your business needs and those of your customers to ensure a proper solution is decided upon. Changing your mind half way though or after the site is finished is not only time consuming but also costly.