Making Your Website Work

Whether you are contemplating putting your business on the world wide web and thinking about having your own website, or updating an existing one that you want to make more productive, there are many articles, e-books and software products available that tell you what you should be doing.  It can be very difficult to decide which ones will actually work.  Did you buy the book that gives you all the information you need?  Some are so full of technical advice that they’re difficult to understand and others only give you a specific area that they cover.

To begin with, small business owners get very excite and start with searches of website templates and looking at existing websites to choose a design.  Then they spend money on the self-help books, or purchase programs and then find out they didn’t get the full story or the program gathers dust because they couldn’t figure out how to work it.   While having your business on-line is a very exciting time, doing that search to see what style or design you want, then buying software and design books to create it are not the first steps you need to take.

The first step actually needs to be done either at your desk or dining room table.  You need to organize your website before you do anything on-line.  For those who already have a website, this is a great way to assess whether or not you need some modifications or adjustments in your existing website design.   Always remember through the entire process of designing, creating and modifying your website that it’s not actually for YOU, it’s for YOUR CUSTOMERS.  Your website may be appealing or look cute to you, but how will it look at the kind of customer you are trying to attract?  Your website is your store.  Think about that as you go through the rest of this article and follow the suggestions it contains.  Then, please call in to Wrap’n Radio Sunday afternoon at 4 pm Eastern Time, for Website Workings, where I discuss these concepts and will answer any of your questions.

But first, take the time to sit down with different colors of paper.  On white paper, write down every product you want to sell through your website.  Each product should be on a different piece of paper.  Now think about how you want to organize your page to display these products.  Whether it be by product type, season, occasion, price range, whatever it is you think you want to do.  Keep in mind as you go through this exercise of how your prospective customers will find these products.  Are they all going to be listed on your homepage?  Do you want links leading from say a candle page to matching candle holders?  As you work with the pieces of paper, organizing them as outlined below, don’t forget that you have to make headings for your homepage, maybe price list page, ordering page (although most people make it easy on a customer to order directly on the same page as the product they wish to order).  As the number of pages grow, the different connotations can become endless.  So, let’s take a look at the process.

Write each of these headings on a different colored piece of paper (i.e. if by product type blue would be hats, green would be gloves, red would be shoes, etc.).  Then lay your headings out and place the products that match each of those headings underneath them.   This where you can do some planning.  If there are too many under one heading, how can you reorganize that?  Does the list look overly-long if you have a lot of one type of product in many different colors or styles?  Try re-organizing using different headings.  Use different colors for seasons maybe and see how that works.  This may take some time, shuffling of papers around in different set-ups for different categories and lot of reorganizing again and again until you are satisfied with what you see.

Once you have completed this task, you have conquered a major step in your website designing stage.  Now you have in front of you exactly how your website should come together and what is left of the designing stage is the fun part – colors, theme, style – have fun!