Previously, we have seen some of the technical aspects of building a website for your small business, namely planning the site building and determining whether you will want to use a Content Management System (CMS) to operate your website. While these are all important considerations, once you get them squared away, it is now time to move ahead and start building your site. Here are the main elements that you would be including in your site:

• Product information

Obviously, you will want people to know more about your company’s products and services. After all, this is why they came to your website in the first place, no? Add some details about your products, pricing, etc.

• Relevant details about your industry/niche

Here, you will be giving your site visitors some information that is not directly related to promoting your products. Like what, for example? Let’s say that you sell laptop parts. You could include some tutorials about how to take apart various models of laptops, how to remove the screen, replace the keyboard, etc. Basically, things that are relevant to what you are selling, without promoting your products too much. You can also include multimedia content here, such as videos as well.

• Background information about your business

This section will simply contain some basic information about your business, such as the types of products that you sell, the amount of time that you have been in business for, who the company leaders are, etc. This will help the visitor find out more about you and will give them the reassurance that they are dealing with a legitimate company.

• Contact information and ways to get in touch with you

Your contact information, such as your phone number and address, should be featured prominently on your site, as well as in the header and footer of every one of your pages. After all, you want your visitors to contact you, right? Don’t make them dig through 10 pages before they are able to find your phone number. You can also include a contact form that will allow a visitor to send you a request for information or an inquiry, and then you can respond to them via e-mail or by phone. Including live chat support on your site is also a great idea, if you will be able to have someone on staff ready to provide support by live chat to your visitors, at least during regular business hours.

• Links to your social media pages

Social media is an excellent business tool, and this has been stated numerous times by industry experts. Because of this, it will always be a wise idea to include links to your Facebook and Twitter pages. Also, on your content posts and product, include a “Like” button for Facebook, which wil let the user share that page with their friends. If your business has a YouTube channel, just link to it from your website. This will allow them to quickly check out all of your videos that you have uploaded to YouTube.

Now that you have seen more information about building a static HTML website, what about using a Content Management System, such as Joomla, WordPress, or Drupal? This is something that many small business website owners are now preferring to do, even though it may seem a bit more difficult to accomplish at the beginning. However, using a CMS has many more advantages as opposed to disadvantages as you will see presented here.

Advantages

• Ease of updating your website. If you plan to update your website on a regular basis, such as adding or removing products, adding new content, adding and removing seasonal promotions and special offers, etc. than a content management system will make this a whole lot easier for you. All you would need to do would be to log into your back end, make the necessary changes and it’s done. No need to use an HTML editor software, or re-upload files constantly to your web host.
• No coding or web design knowledge required. Here, you will not need to have any web design knowledge, or know how to use HTML. All you would do is install the CMS, then install the necessary themes or templates that will be the backbone of your site.
• Good for e-commerce. When you are planning to run an e-commerce website, using a CMS is mandatory if you are serious about it. WordPress, Joomla and Drupal all have e-commerce themes, both free and paid, that you can use to manage your website with ease. You can perform operations such as adding products, setting up different prices, coupons, promotions, integrating with different payment processors and gateways, etc. There are also dedicated e-commerce CMS available out there, such as Magento and OS Commerce.

Disadvantages

• A bit of a learning curve. For those who are used to working with simple HTML pages, using a CMS for the first time may seem like it has a learning curve associated with it. You will need to figure out which theme is best for your website, then install it and figure out how to use it to make the necessary changes and customizations. However, there are plenty of free tutorials, resources and help files available online for all themes and content management systems. Therefore, even though you may need to spend a few hours learning how to figure it out, in the end it will all be very easy for you.

As we can see here, using a CMS for your business website is definitely a good choice. No matter what kind of website you want to run, there will always be themes and templates available for you. Also, your site management will be streamlined significantly, as you can simply update your website with a few clicks of the mouse, rather than having to fire up Dreamweaver, make changes to your site, save the new file, then upload it to your webhost and replace the old one. Therefore, there is less work involved when using a CMS.

Previously, we have seen that there are certain things that you need to decide when you are building a website for your business. One of the things would have been selecting a system to manage the content of your site. Of course, the goal of any business website would be to share information with your visitors about what your business has to offer and make them want to buy your products. But you should also have a good back end system that will enable you to easily manage your website, plus add or remove information to it as necessary. Your main options are either: simply put up a static website, or use a content management system, or CMS. Both options have their pluses and minuses, as such, it would only be logical for us to explore them in the context of building a website for your small business.

Using a Static Website

This is by far the simplest way to put up a site. You create the pages, either from scratch, or by using a template or web builder and then you upload them to your web host. Then, you are done. Let’s examine some of the advantages and disadvantages of this option:

Advantages

• Ease of use. You will simply have to create the web pages and upload them onto your server. There are no new systems that you would need to learn how to use, etc. This makes creating a static website quite easy and an attractive option for beginner webmasters.
• Availability of many templates and tools. There are plenty of free and paid website templates and web building tools that you can use to create your site. Many of these are quite straightforward to use as well.
• Highly customizable. You can add any type of content that you want on your site, usually with a WYSIWYG web editor, without worrying about compatibility issues too much.

Drawbacks

• Hard to add or remove information. If you have a static website, adding or removing information, especially if you need to do so on a regular basis, will be quite difficult. You will need to open up the page in an HTML editor, make the changes and then re-upload the page to your web host. While this is certainly achievable, it is not too convenient.
• Limited e-commerce features. If you plan on selling things on your website directly, then managing an e-commerce site that is simply composed of static HTML pages is quite hard. You will have no back end system, so you will have to rely on your payment processor’s system to manage sales, get reports, etc. Also, adding and removing products, adding new promotions, etc. is going to be quite difficult due to the point above; you will need to manually edit and re-upload the page every time.

Conclusion

Using static HTML pages for your business website may be an acceptable option, if you own a business where your offerings do not change very frequently and if you are not selling anything directly on your website.

WordPress is great. It really is, you have seen me write about it numerous times on this website, namely because it is the most popular, most accessible, easy to use CMS out there, in my opinion of course (but numbers do not lie). But there are some things that WordPress could do better. It could better integrate different code, or sometimes be easier to code for, but for the most part it is alright.

Sometimes however, there are other things you want your website to do, or you want more customization to your site. Or just maybe, you want to be a bit different and learn a new language and build a site out of something completely new to you. For whatever your reason, there are some great alternatives to WordPress, so check them out below.

Drupal

Drupal is one of the main competitors to WordPress in straight CMS terms. It is much more customizable and hacky, because of the open source nature of itself. Since Drupal is open source (much like WordPress, but in a much more geeky way [in a good way]), it begs a bit more putting together. A Drupal install and WordPress install are much different and Drupal’s takes just a bit more work.

Drupal is a great CMS, but the design and layout of it isn’t as pretty as WordPress. The designs are a bit more boxy out of the gate, and take some real work to get them to look like a typical blog.

With that being said, Drupal is a great CMS, especally for the web tinkerer. If you like putting code together and making something unique and cool, Drupal is definitely for you. With less plugins and themes available, Drupal drives creativity and some very cool projects to create their own way around a problem, or to write some code and fix it.

Drupal is free, so check it out today at http://www.drupal.org

Typepad

Typepad and WordPress have always been a pretty big rivalry, not quite like Apple vs Microsoft, but pretty close.

Typepad is owned by Six Apart, a company that has had some major ups and some major downs. But Typepad has remained and still remains a huge competitor for WordPress.

The difference is the opensource vs proprietary debate. Typepad is only available as a hosted service from Typepad.com.

For true customizers, this may be a huge deterant, but for average users that want an all in one package that isn’t http://www.wordpress.com then Typepad is a great alternative.

One of the most discussed areas things people talk about (after social media nowadays probably) is search engine optimization or SEO. The most popular CMS in the world is WordPress and so it is important for us to discuss SEO in regards to WordPress.

WordPress does a great job with SEO from a standalone perspective, but there are a lot of other things, such as plugins that can make it better. Using just WordPress you can add meta tags, insert keywords, optimize images for SEO via titles and captions, and change the permalinks structure of the website to use full titles as the URL.

But there are some limitations, which could be for simplicity sake and to not confuse new users, or it is because for most people it simply isn’t necessary.

Luckily for power users and fanatics about SEO WordPress has a huge set of available plugins, both free and for pay that can enhance your websites search engine ranking.

Check out these 4 plugins to start on your search engine ranking journey!

All-in-One SEO
This is considered THE SEO plugin for most people. The plugin sits on the post and page editor and provides users with options for title, description, keywords, and more allowing you to customize what shows up in the Title (rather than just using the default title). An extremely handy plugin and best of all it is free, so there is no reason to not have this installed and working for your blog.

WP Google Analytics
Site metrics aren’t normally talked about when talking directly about SEO plugins, but having a Google Analytics plugin that allows you to track where your traffic is coming from and from which keywords is a great way to refine your strategy and thinking about SEO. Seeing the real results will help motivate you to continue your SEO campaign. There are a few plugins to help with Google Analytics setup so make sure you search the plugins on WordPress.org to help you out.

Google Sitemap XML
This plugin allows you to generate a .xml sitemap to submit to Google Webmaster Tools to help Google crawl your site when it visits. An easy one time thing the plugin serves the purpose great and is a must have for a new or established site.

WP Auto Tagger

It’s no secret that you need to figure out what keywords apply to your content in order to create an SEO friendly website. The challenge comes in figuring out exactly what to do with your keywords. We’re going to show you a few uses for keywords that will help you create a SEO friendly website.

The first (and one of the most important) place you should be using keywords is in your title. If you’re using a CMS like WordPress, you should try to use as many keywords as you can in the title of the post you’re creating. If you’re building a website using an editor like Dreamweaver, or just hand coding it, then try and use your keywords as part of the title of the page, in between the title tags. It’s important not to make your title awkward by overusing keywords. You have to remember, your visitors see your title too, it’s not just there for search engines.

Descriptive meta tags, and keyword meta tags aren’t as big a part of how search engines rank sites as they used to be, but that doesn’t mean they should be overlooked. Description meta tags should contain as many keywords as you can manage, while remaining coherent. It’s important not to make your description awkward or overly bulky just to squeeze in a few more keywords because search engines often use those descriptions as a snippet about the site when it shows up in search results. As for the meta keyword tags, don’t exceed 20 keywords when using them. Search engines view excessive keyword use in the meta tags negatively, so you could actually wind up doing more harm than good if you overdo it.

A visitor that comes to your site through an image search is no less valuable than a visitor that comes through a regular search, so make sure to handle your images correctly. Be sure to take the time to name your images carefully. Be as descriptive as you can, and don’t be afraid to give the image a somewhat lengthy name. Be sure to use the alt tags to describe the image in detail as well.

All of the uses for keywords covered above are important when building an SEO friendly website, but they’re all supplemental to keyword-rich content. Search engines are putting a greater focus on the actual content on a site, and h ow it relates to the keywords in your niche. So be sure to use keywords effectively in your code, images, and content, and you’ll see your search rank rise before you know it.