July 1, 2006

Five Steps to a Great Small Business Website

SmartBiz.com's Salim Lakhani writes 5 Steps to Building a small business web site. I've got my own 10 steps here. Whichever step you take make sure the end result is a GREAT looking web site, top notch functionality and that it achieves the results you want - be it increased sales or better communication.

There's several software packages, including Microsoft FrontPage or Coffee Cup HTML Editor, that you can use to build your web site yourself. You can also use an online web site building tool such as Office Live or HomeStead. Every web host (Yahoo, GoDaddy, Hypermart)

Of course hiring someone to do it for you, is another option.

Salim writes Eight out of ten failed projects fail because of lack of appropriate scoping and planning. So, the first part of any plan is to create a plan. Here is a five-step process for creating a development plan for your small business website.

Step 1: Document your requirements.
Step 2: Rank your requirements based on difficulty of implementation and value to organization.
Step 3: Visually map your requirements based on your rankings.
Step 4: Phase it out. Don't try to do everything at once. Go for the ?low hanging fruit.
Step 5: Setup a timeline for each requirement.

Step 1: Document your Requirements. The Site Map is a hierarchical list of all pages on your website. The top of the hierarchy is your home page. The rest of the pages and sub-pages go under that. Create an outline of your site map and your organizational and technical requirements.

Organization requirements are items such as "Our hiring manager needs to be able to manage the open positions section of the website".? Various positions or departments will have their own requirements and your outline should capture all these requirements. Technical requirements are items such as ?"The website needs to allow us to enter leads into our sales leads database."

Make a complete list of your requirements first without thinking about how much time and energy it will take or if it'?ll even be done in the first few phases.

0 comments