In the free category I would recommend Tumblr which offers a very nice free blog. They have some nice looking design templates to choose from and you can attach your account to your Facebook and Twitter account which is nice.

In the low cost paid category I would recommend Page.ly which for $14.98 per month offers a quick 2 minute setup, your choice of some nice looking templates and a free domain name. Also because Page.ly is powered by Wordpress you have the ability to install any Wordpress plugin so you have an almost unlimited ability to customize and add functionality.

To break the process down a little bit. First we create a nice looking design that represents your business well, then we have to code all the pages into HTML, the language that your web browser reads, make all the graphics and images and optimize them to download quickly. Then we need to make sure that all of our work will look good no matter what browser or operating system someone is using by testing and making revisions. We also have to make sure our work will perform well on search engines. It all adds up to a lot of hours in front of the computer. The average website we develop takes between 40 and 80 hours of work.

There are some low-cost, template based alternatives available to the budget conscious business that I will discuss in a future installment here.

All too often businesses get their new websites designed and then forget about them and expect them to do the rest. Business people sometimes assume that if a website doesn’t take off, that the web designer hasn’t done his job correctly, that may be true in some cases, but for a website to really excel it needs to be treated like a high maintenance girlfriend. Here is my list of the top 5 things you can do to set your website on fire and make it really take off.

• Blog – This brings us back to the old cliche about content being the ruling monarch or some other such drivel, the point is that your content is everything. Good wordy content drives search engine ranking up, it also encourages people to spend time on your site and it motivates visitors to return to your site again and again. Blogging is the best way for a website owner to add content to a website regularly and tools like RSS help disseminate that information and drive traffic too. Set a schedule and stick to it, one new entry a week, or a day or whatever works with your schedule.
• Inbound links - Probably as important to website ranking as good text content is inbound links, that is links on other sites that point to your website. There are a myriad places online where one can get linked. Online directories related to your local area or your particular industry, reciprocal links, blog comments and discussion forums. It takes more time and patience than anything else to find these places and get linked, but your efforts will be rewarded as your search engine ranking rises. Search engines aside, inbound links are good for the traffic they generate too.
• Social networking - Another great way to drive traffic is to get your business on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking websites. Be aware though that simply creating a presence on these sites is not enough, you need to contribute to these communities by connecting to others and posting relevant information. There are tools available now that will connect many blog systems to your social networking account, so for example, when I post this article to my blog it will also appear automatically on my Facebook and LinkedIn account. This saves time posting to a lot of different sources and makes short work of keeping all your online marketing efforts up to date. Other tools of use in this area are sites like http://ping.fm/ that can post to various social networking sites at once.
• Email newsletter - A great way to market to your web contacts is by implementing an email newsletter. This is fairly inexpensive to set up on your website and can bring great returns because once you are set up it costs you nothing to send out as many of these as you have names in your database. If you are going to set an email newsletter up on your website take the time to schedule a time each month (or whatever schedule you want to keep) to write and send out your newsletter, a newsletter system that doesn’t get used is money wasted.
• Mix things up - A static site does not encourage repeat visitors, update your website frequently. This is especially true of your home page, at least once a year you should change the look of your home page. This gives the impression that your company is active and will encourage people who have been to your site before to spend some time digging deeper to see what else has changed often times reading information that has been there for a long time.

A well designed, well thought out website can do a great deal on its own, but to really excel it needs care and nurturing. This doesn’t need to be expensive, in fact all of the above suggestions you can do yourself, you just have to make the time.

Any other ideas? What have you done to make your website take off? Leave comments below.

Early this morning the newest incarnation of iLab New Media went online. This latest design improves on the last in many way (in my opinion). The last design was new in August but never really lived up to my original vision, maybe because I just never took the time to polish it up, I spent some time recently thinking about what I could do to make it better and ended up by just scrapping it and starting over.

Check out these features in the new design:

• Handy quote form – never more than a menu slide away on any page.
• Sweet portfolio, just as convenient as the quote form and with BIG screenshots available.
• Nice big splash screen on the home page.
• Changeable backgrounds.

This site does not support Internet Explorer 6, it is literally chuck full of alpha-transparent pngs and I am making no effort to swap them out. According to Google Analytics IE6 makes up for less than 1% of my web visitors.

1. Easy to use admin interface: this is critical, for a web publishing platform to be successful it has to empower the website administrator, making it easy to add and maintain content quickly and easily.
2. Extensibility: the system should be able to add new functionality and features as needed, relatively inexpensively and quickly.
3. Easy to use templates: the look and feel of the site needs to be easily customized, so the tempting engine should be easy to work with.

I recommended Drupal for awhile and used it on a number of websites and it works pretty good. But I found that adding functionality to Drupal beyond what it was designed to do out of the box, was quite difficult. Also, the Drupal admin interface was difficult for some people to come to grips with.

For the past year or so I have been using WordPress with fantastic success. WordPress makes it so easy to keep a website up to date that people are more likely to add new content. The admin interface is very simple and easy, I have no reservations about introducing the most computer illiterate users to the WordPress admin interface, it’s that easy. Additional functionality can be easily added to a WordPress site and I have been able to quickly and easily customize a website’s look and feel because the templating system is very easy to work with.

The number one thing you can do to make a website more successful is to add more content. More content means more things for people to look at and read, more reasons for people to link to your site, more pages for search engines to index and link to, more reasons people to return to your site. So an easy to use web publishing platform encourages more and better content by making it very easy to add and edit content.

Call and talk with me about making your web site more successful by adding WordPress.

• Capture visitor’s attention: Your home page is like the cover of a book, it has to grab attention and encourage people to explore deeper. Your usual “Welcome to our site” copy is not enough, you have a very brief period of time to make this impression, it must be made graphically or lots of people will leave before they have time to read anything. Balance is required in the area of home page graphics, balance between eye-catching images and download time since a fast loading home page is also important. This does not mean that your home page should be all images and no text, it needs to have both, images to catch people’s eyes, text to explain what you’re all about and for the search engines to index since they can’t read images.
• Direct visitors to the content they want: The home page is not just the cover of the book, it also needs to be the table of content. The best way I know of to get web visitors to leave your site is to make it difficult for them to find what they are looking for. The days of the Flash intro page are long gone, visitors expect to see the global site navigation on the first page of your site. The site navigation should be obvious, simple and intuitive, give them that and they may stay around long enough for you to tell your story.
• Establish the credentials of your business or organization: While grabbing visitor’s attention and helping them find what they are looking for is important, it all means very little if your website leaves the impression that your 12 made it during summer vacation. The professional image of your website is as important as that of your office and your dress. Visitors form opinions about your company based on the image portrayed by your website, make sure that is as polished and professional an image as you can offer.

Creating a successful home page requires a delicate balance of all three of the above items. If your website’s home page is able to grab peoples attention, make the content of your website easily accessible while portraying a professional image you are sure to reap the benefits.

If you have any doubts about your current website’s home page, we would be glad to talk with you about it to offer our professional advice or a bid on what it would cost to improve.

• Look good – This goes without saying and is the part you probably already knew. A good looking website portrays a positive image for the business it represents.
• Work on a wide variety of the most popular browsers and operating systems – Every web browser will render a page slightly different, there are also mobile phones, video game consoles and other odd platforms to think about.
• Be easy to navigate – the end user must find the site easy to get around in and not confusing or they will go to the competition.
• Achieve it’s goals – Whatever the site was intended to do, be that getting potential clients to call or producing online sales, the site needs to be designed to naturally interest visitors and funnel them towards that goal.
• Play nice with search engines – Almost any site will benefit by better search engine ranking. So another thing the website must do is make it easy for the search engine spiders to index the content of that site.
• Be easily maintainable – At some point every site will need updates, a well put together site will be created with updates in mind using includes, comments in the code and clean, easily readable HTML.
• Load quickly – Obviously, yet it is often not made a priority in web design.

There are many other things a website needs to do, but these are the big ones in my opinion. These are the items that separate the men from the boys in web development, the lowest bidder is most likely not going to nail these points. Likewise a person trained in traditional graphic design will not have all the skills necessary to create a great website, it takes someone who understands the intricacy of website design, someone who understands things like:

• graphic design
• cross-browser and cross-platform website compatibility
• information architecture and web usability principles
• search engine optimization techniques
• W3C HTML standards
• server side scripting languages
• image optimization

A really great website has to look good, work across all browsers and platforms, be easy to navigate, achieve it’s goals, be fully indexable by search engines, be easy to maintain and load quickly, among other things. Creating a website that can do all these things requires a wide variety of skills that you won’t find at every business offering web design services.

Because We Care A Lot deals with individuals with disabilities it was very important that this new web site be accessible to everyone and meet the criteria of Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Section 508 was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities, and to encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these goals. We Care A Lot contracted Redding based Liquid Design to develop the site and ensure it meets Section 508 and current HTML standards.

The website can be viewed at www.wecarealot.org.