Template based websites always tend to look like templates and are often rough around the edges. For a small business just starting out, or when marketing budgets are extremely tight or nonexistent, one of these free or low cost websites is probably the best solution.

For the growing business looking to make a good impression on potential customers, a custom designed website is among the best, and certainly among the cheapest, marketing investments you can make.

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.

• 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.

I’ll let you in on a little secret of web design, search engine optimization does not necessarily produce a successful website, better expressed as SEO ≠ $. While it’s true that search engine optimization (SEO) is very important to a website’s success it is by no means the only element of it’s success.

The goals of individual websites may differ quite a bit, for one the goal may be to get a visitor to buy a product, while another may be to get a visitor to call, or fill out a form to request further information. Whatever the end goal is, reaching that objective is called a conversion, in web design we refer to the ratio of conversions to visitors as your conversion rate. The nice thing about web marketing is everything is measurable, we can know how many people viewed each specific page, how long they spent looking at it and where they clicked when they left so we can use these figures to analyze how a website is performing. We are interested in improving your conversion rate, here are the top 5 ways to do that.

1. An attractive, professional looking website. It has long been known that the look of your website effects peoples opinions of your company, but recent studies have shown that lasting impressions are made very quickly, a visitor to your website will form a first impression in just a 20th of a second.
2. Well written copy. The most under-appreciated ingredient of a great website is copy-writing. People read differently on the web than on paper, they scan more and read less. Copy-writing for the web is a topic for another article but suffice it to say that well written copy will significantly boost you conversion rate. If you are serious about it think of paying a professional copy-writer.
3. Keep content fresh. Nothing can turn off website visitors faster than stale content. Make sure you keep up with dated content like event calendars or company news pages, when these kinds of things become outdated it looks as though your website is not kept up and visitors will move on. You will find that changing around your home page or any other “landing pages” every few months will generate renewed interest as returning visitors notice the changes and take a closer look.
4. Eliminate hurdles. Whatever your goal is, make it real easy to do, with as few steps as possible. If you’re selling a product, put it on the home page, if you’re collecting leads put the contact form on the side of every page, if you want people to call you put your phone number at the top of every page, whatever it is make sure your visitors have to perform as few steps as possible. For contact forms you will get the best results by requiring the fewest fields possible.
5. Keep download times to a minimum. As of March 2006, 22% of Americans were still using dial-up internet access. The best way to lose a visitor is to make them wait too long for the page to load, and when I say “too long” I mean around 4 seconds!

What good is search engine optimization if you abuse your visitors once they get to your website? Give your web visitors a quality experience on your site, make things easy for them and they will repay you by trusting you with their business.

1. You will get what you pay for
   Your nephew said he can make your website for you, he can, but it winds up being like the Rolex that you buy from some guy on the street, it looks nice but later you find out it doesn’t work. The same goes for low budget web design firms, if they are offering to do it cheap chances are they are not giving it the necessary time and attention to create a quality product, which leads us to our next point.
2. Designing a good website takes time
   To make a website that works on all browsers and platforms, downloads quickly, performs well on search engines, meets current web standards and all the other things required for a website to be successful not to mention looking good and being easy to navigate takes many many hours. In addition a really good website won’t be done quickly partly because of the next point.
3. There’s a lot of code behind a website
   When you look at a website you are just seeing the end result of a whole lot of code, try viewing a website’s source code sometime. And that is just the HTML portion, there may also be many additional files for scripts and style sheets. The point is, don’t judge a book by its cover, a web page has much more to do than just look pretty.
4. Know what you want, plan ahead
   It’s helpful if you approach your web designer with some idea of what you would like in your website. Look at your competitors websites and make notes about what you like or don’t like. Your web designer will find it much easier to be creative with some initial ideas to work around.
5. Every browser will render your website differently
   There are more different web browsers available now then ever and each handles things a little bit differently. What your site looks like on your browser is not what it looks like on everybody’s browsers. There is no way to make one website render identically on every web browser, the goal is to allow it to degrade gracefully.
6. Every screen resolution and monitor will make your website look different
   This is like the previous point, depending on the monitor being used and the screen resolution along with various other settings like color depth, your website will look very different from one computer to another. It is often a game of compromises to make it look as good as possible on all and the best on the most monitors.
7. Fonts will look different on different computers
   Windows and Macintoshes handle fonts very differently, furthermore the individual fonts on a computer vary widely. So this is yet another example of what may look one way on your computer may look different on another, once again the web designer looks for a compromise that looks the best on most computers.
8. Honor Google, it holds the keys to online success
   Google has about 43% of the web search market to the nearest competitor, Yahoo’s 28%. Any website hoping to be at least mildly successful online needs to do well on Google which means playing by their rules for search engine optimization.
9. Visitors will not flock to your site when it’s done
   The road to internet success is littered with the remains of websites that have failed to make an impression in the market. The key thing to remember is that a successful website does not just happen. People need to be able to find your website on the search engines when searching for relevant keywords. You will need to promote your website to current and prospective clients. And one other thing is required to make it successful, our next point.
10. Your website will need to change… often
    People will return to a website that changes often, but not to a brochure website. The most successful websites are those that are more than just static information about your company, consider incorporating a business blog, community forum, RSS news feeds, photo gallery or at the very least have the ability to go in and change things around occasionally.

Web designers are like mechanics in this way, anyone can buy “Web Design for Dummies” and Microsoft Frontpage and start churning out websites, but that doesn’t make them knowledgeable or good at what they do. Web designers are not in demand as much as doctors or mechanics therefore you don’t hear as many stories circulating about the bad web designer, but believe me, they are out there in abundance. You might not have heard about them, but you have no doubt seen their work, and there are many unhappy customers around too. Because some people have been taken advantage of by disreputable web designers or know someone who has, they think the web is not an effective place to promote their business or that the internet has little to offer a business like theirs. The truth is that there are very few businesses that can not profit from the web, if done correctly. Therefore, in an attempt to keep my occupation from sliding into the morass of shady auto mechanics and used car dealers, I offer the following 6 considerations when choosing a web designer.

1. Design abilityThis goes without saying, but you would be surprised how many people choose a web designer without really looking at much of their previous work. When looking at previous work by this designer what is your impression of the design, is the information easy to read, does it have a professional feel to it, do the colors work well together?
2. Programming skillsMost designers are not programmers and most programmers are not designers, but any web design firm worth its salt will have programmers they work with and if your looking at a freelance designer, he should either be able to do programming or work with someone who does. Not all websites need programming, a static, brochure type site does not need any, but are you positive that’s what your business needs. The point is, a web designer who can get programming done is going to be able to give you an honest evaluation of your needs, while one who can’t is going to steer you away from anything requiring programming skills.
3. Satisfied customers A good indicator for obvious reasons. If you’re in the same city as the web designer in question, ask around, has anyone you know heard any good or bad stories about this designer? Look up some of the websites they have produced, can you email or call to ask about whether they were satisfied with their website? Remember that a satisfied customer does not necessarily indicate a good web designer as the following story illustrates.I was once approached by a man who was interested in getting me to make some minor changes to his website. The site was a circus of colors and movement, it had an annoying music loop that played and took forever to load, it was really terrible. The thing was, the man was very satisfied with his website. Now the case could be made that this was a successful website and the web designer had done his job as long as the customer was satisfied, but I would disagree. The web design must meet not only the needs of the business owner, but also the needs of his customers, if they are not happy with it they may not return, and in time the lack of response from his website may cause him to conclude that the web is not profitable for his business and in turn to shut it down. It was initially successful, that is the business owner was happy, but the long term goals of any internet website has to be satisfying the customers of the business owner, only in that way will a website be profitable and successful.
4. Reasonable load times One of the primary objectives of any web design project needs to be keeping file sizes as small as possible. Of course there are media rich sites that have very long load times, but is the load time reasonable given the amount of pictures, animations, music or whatever? There is a great deal to learn about image optimization for the web and an inexperienced web designer is likely to not know all of the tricks, so unreasonably long load times may be a good indication that a designer is not very knowledgeable.
5. Crisp graphics This is the other side of the previous point, image optimization for the web is a tricky subject and ones ability as a web designer shows in the quality of their graphics.An image that is not optimized enough may have an excessive file size and long load time, on the other hand, if it is overly optimized, it will be small but the images will be blurry or unclear. A good web designer will be able to create crisp graphics of relatively small file size.
6. Intuitive Navigation Who hasn’t been lost or confused in a badly designed website? Confusing, inadequate or nonexistent navigation is the hallmark of poor web design. Good design will feature intuitive navigation, like getting into a vehicle you’re not familiar with, you don’t have to think about where the gas peddle is, you just put your foot down where it’s supposed to be and it’s there.

When you take your car to the shop you no doubt make sure the garage is reputable, no less care should be exercised when picking a web designer. Even if you are satisfied with your website, if it does not do what it was meant to do, that is bring in business and leave satisfied, happy customers, then it’s not a successful website.

Set your skepticism aside for a moment as we lay out 10 reasons your company needs a website.

1. It will promote your business 24 hours a day.
2. It present a professional business image.
3. It allows you to quickly and inexpensively communicate with customers and business prospects.
4. It can provide 24/7 customer service and support.
5. It will allow your business to reach out to customers around the world.
6. It will help build your brand.
7. It can provide product information to interested ones anywhere, anytime.
8. It can sell product or services for you while you’re asleep, or playing golf or whatever.
9. It will save you time and money; no printing and mailing out information, instead direct them to your website, fewer phone calls for orders or trivial information when these things are available on your website.
10. It will give you and edge on your competition.

These are just the basics though, the possibilities are endless, what could your business do with online collaboration, event management or online data management applications? Think about showcasing your best work on your website, or having an email newsletter to keep customers and prospects informed on your latest sales and services offered. Does your business need a website? Well, does your business need more customers, does your business need happier customers, does your business need to save money on marketing materials and mailings?

To help you in planning your website, and the services it can provide, I offer the following 10 ideas for a smarter website.

1. Maps to your locations: A very simple yet useful feature sometimes forgotten. The visitor to your website often doesn’t know where you’re located and may need to call for directions before coming by, head off that question by providing a map, because you and your employees have better things to do than answer the phone. For multiple locations you may want to provide a different map for each, or have a dynamic map that pinpoints that location when the location is selected from a list.
2. Online order tracking: This is a common feature of e-commerce websites but even if you don’t sell products online your customers will appreciate this type of feature. Whether the product is ordered over the phone, through email or even by coming to your location, if there is any shipping, processing or manufacturing involved it is convenient to your customers to be able to look up their order status on your website.
3. Email newsletter: A powerful marketing and networking tool for you to keep in touch with your existing customers and make new ones. To mail out a traditional newsletter can cost quite a bit in printing, postage and handling, on the other hand an email newsletter’s cost is virtually nothing once the website is developed. Advise about upcoming sales, remind about services offered, provide tips and suggestions on how your products or services can be used, your email newsletter will be the cheapest, most cost-effective advertisement you can have.
4. Customer poll: Put your finger on the pulse of your customers by adding an online poll to your website. It’s easy and inexpensive to implement and provides direct feedback from people interested in your services, what’s more it comes with a simple administrative page where you can see the results tabulated and change the question.
5. Employee contact directory If you have a number of employees or departments that clients may want to contact, you can help direct those calls to the right place by implementing an employee contact directory. This can result in more satisfied clients when they are able to call or email the appropriate department instead of having to go through a receptionist or phone menu.
6. Online catalog You may not want to deal with the complexities of an e-commerce application or spend the money required to set one up, but, an online catalog could be the next best thing. With your products displayed online and a phone number to order by, you could be selling to people all over the country or even the world. This can be a good way to see if e-commerce would work for you since a catalog is much less expensive to implement.
7. Live news feed There are thousands of XML news feeds available online for inclusion in your website, from the New York Times to feeds about specific interests and industries. By including a news feed on your site you encourage visitors to check in often to read the news and give your website an aura of authority. Look here for a list of some of the most popular news feeds, many more are available.
8. Your company news New and interesting things happen at your business all the time, new products developed, new services offered or maybe a large project completed, brag about it to your customers by adding a company news feed. This could be a simple a list of blurbs and respective dates about goings on or they can be linked to more detailed news articles or press releases.
9. Online community One of the most effective ways of getting repeat visitors to your site, depending on your business, may be to build an online community by including a message board or forum on your website.
10. Business blog The blog or web log is a web page that serves as a publicly accessible journal and is typically updated daily. These are most commonly personal in nature, but more and more businesses are realizing the advantages of blogging. A blog can bring new visitors to your site, give visitors a reason to return to your site, establish you as an authority in your field and improve your page rank in Google. You can read more about business blogs here.

You need an edge to stand out from the crowd online and this doesn’t necessarily mean throwing more money at your website, it means working smarter, not harder, anticipating your client’s needs. If you spend some time planning your website and thinking about the above suggestions you should have no problem making a web site that customers return to again and again.