Small Business Web Pages

Choosing the Right Small Business Web Pages for You

Luckily, the whole concept of site architecture can be answered by asking the simple question: What is your site intended to do?

Deciding What to Offer

Depending on your business, this may range from a showcase of pictures to a database of parts for cars. It may only be the equivalent of hanging a digital sign out over the information superhighway, letting people know that you and your services exist. Taking the time to write down what you hope to provide with your website will help you figure out what kinds of pages you need.

Here are some of the factors to take into consideration:

• How will the site reflect your business' brand identity?
• What kind of content will make people want to visit your site, and also come back?
• What do your clients need to know about your business, at a minimum?
• Are there any services or information that your website could provide for your customers, and is it worth the effort?
• What kinds of resources do you have to maintain and create content, and also to respond to various client inquiries?

Avoid "Feature Creep"

Answering these questions will help determine the pages needed for your site. It will also help you avoid unnecessary pages and work on the site, which is a common element of "feature creep" that can occur during the process of creating a website. All it takes is one person on the team who saw a "great picture gallery – we should have one too." Then the web designer is asked to create one, even though the business may have no need for one – such as a law consultancy, for example. Most web designers are going to be more than happy to create one in order to meet your requirements, and they will also charge you the accompanying fee. It's much cheaper to simply get a flickr page for the company, and maybe include a widget on your site to show them off.

Typical Small Business Web Pages

Here are some pages that are almost certainly necessary on any small business site:

• Branding Page – This used to be considered a "splash page" until people realized that making viewers click an extra time just to get to content was a bad idea. However, the front page of your site should both visually and verbally give a good feeling of your company's brand and feeling.
• Mission Statement – aside from being a useful way to let customers know what your company is really about, this is also a chance to load up your page with key words that will optimize your site for search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
• About Us – Different than the mission statement, this page is not about what you do but about who you are. This may include staff pictures and bios, or a history of the company.
• Contact – Absolutely the most important part of any website is enabling customers to easily get in touch with you via email, phone, or by visiting your office. While it is standard practice to include an email link and phone number in the postscript to every page on the site, having a page with specific departments and who to contact is an excellent way to increase the visibility of your firm on the web. Often this page will also have a google map widget or other means of locating the office for a visit.

Other pages that may or may not be necessary on a site include things such as rates for services, site maps, or blogs and other forms of social media. Clarity of purpose is essential, though, and with that solved, putting your site on the web can be as efficient and cost effective as your company hopes to be.