Websites for Service Professionals/Consultants - Part 5

Websites for Service Professionals/Consultants - Part 5

Building The Site

Websites can be 1 page or thousands of pages, but they all start with the first page.

It is important to remember that your website will never quite be finished but it shouldn't look unfinished either.

What that means is that you should have under construction notices everywhere.

If you don't have any content to put on page then leave the page out don't put it on the site with a big under construction sign.

 

So I would recommend that you start of with a mini site consisting of 5-6 pages.

1. Home page- Most important page
   
2. Contact- Contact form, phone, fax details etc
   
3. About Us- Your Company details
   
4. Services- List of services you provide
   
5. Articles- Series of related articles
   
6. Resources- Links to useful sites
   

The site may grow and the navigation may change as it does but that will take care of itself later.

Tools Required (If you are doing it Yourself)

The only thing you require besides your PC for starting your website is a web page editor. The one I will use is the Open Source client NVu which is available free for windows, Linux and Mac. You can download it here.

This client is suitable for creating a small website (<20 pages). When or if you site grows beyond that you may want to consider investing in a commercial product like FrontPage (will soon become Expression web) or Dreamweaver.

Dreamweaver is the choice of professional web developers but is not the easiest program to get started with. For users of Microsoft products FrontPage is the best choice.

Having It Built

There is nothing wrong in having someone build it for you. However just because someone else is doing it for you doesn't mean you don't need to pay attention.

Most web designers (not all) just do design. Not quite sure what I mean by that then take a look at web designer common tasks.

In short you get your pages they look good but they don't perform. They haven't done any keyword research and page optimisation. They haven't promoted your site.

Most sites done this way site there looking pretty but not getting found. Now imagine you have an ugly site but it is well optimised and gets 15 visits per day and your competitor has a nice site but not well optimised and gets 1 visit per day.

Who will get the most clients? I would go for the 15 visitors over the 1 any time. But its not my intention to get you to build ugly sites. But to press upon you the fact that sites need to get found, be clean, functional and answer the visitors questions more than they need to be pretty and win design awards.

 
 

Building It Yourself

My advice is to always start basic and use a simple layout, black text on white background, simple header logo ( your company Name), plain text navigation. Maybe boring but it does the job.

You can also use a professionally designed template which is what I will take you through in the How to Make a Website Using Templates Video Tutorial Series.

We will be using a free one but there are many available for purchase but.. unless you are suitably skilled and have the right tools you may have a hard time using them. See Are Ready Made Website Templates for You?.

 
 

Feedback- To help improve this article series for others I would be grateful for any feedback that you may have. Just use the feedback form- tks.

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