Is Your Site Ready For Prime Time?

As a principle in a website promotion company for over ten years I have looked at thousands of web pages with an eye to marketing the sites. Many of these websites have been designed well and were ready for mainstream advertising right from the start. However, a surprisingly large number of these sites had errors that, if not corrected, would actually prevent potential customers from ever buying anything or contacting anyone.

As a rule, people love the design phase. It's creative. It's often the beginning of a new venture or a new angle on an existing one. It is an enjoyable process and can result in a great representation of your company. However, three factors are often forgotten in the heat of creative passion: Your website is foremost a promotion and marketing tool and must communicate much in the same way as a brochure or advertisement; to keep the interest of visitors and search engines website design and development must be a continuing process; you must not spend all your money on the design and leave nothing left for promoting your site.

Beauty of design will never counteract errors in basic site development. There is no excuse in going live with a site that has hyperlinks that don't link, unreadable text, unclear navigation or missing contact information. Paying to promote such a site is obviously a huge waste of money. But worse than that it makes it appear Internet marketing does not work when, in fact, with a clear and functioning website it could boom that business.

With regards to the second factor, website design as a continuing process, you must make sure you have a designer you can work with. If you don't have an in-house webmaster (or webmistress) ensure the one you pick to design your site is easy to get in contact with, gives you a quick turn-around time, respects what you have to say and does not charge so much you are afraid of making changes or additions to your site. Do things to your site to keep it interesting, add new products, change descriptions, write articles or newsletters and put them up on the site, create a blog. The more your site changes the more likely people will be to revisit and the more frequently the search engines will crawl your pages.

One more point regarding the actual design of your site? All sites need not be created equal. A website designed for an insurance company, law firm or department store will need to be larger and 'official? looking than a site for a local landscaper, restaurant or tutoring service. And, of course, there are sizes and styles of sites that fall in between.

For instance, a few months ago we started advertising the site of a local chimney sweeping company. The company owner created the website by using one of the free templates available on the net. The site looked homespun. In fact, it looked a whole lot like it had been designed by a chimney sweep. It did, however, contain all the information a visitor would need to decide to use the service and contact the company. It had the company's location, the business owners name, phone number, email address, when he could be reached, the price of the service, and his qualifications. The site was friendly, completely un-ostentatious, and had all the needed contact info. With a very inexpensive local advertising campaign in Google and one in Yahoo his business boomed. His conversion rate was huge and he has had to hire help based solely on his Internet promotion. I am certain that with an overly designed, less homey site he would not have gotten the results that he has. The point is, let your site properly reflect your business and its native personality. This alone can help with the results you get with your online advertising efforts.

Keeping the above factors in mind any enterprise from a small local shop to a multimillion dollar international business can benefit from Internet marketing and promotion.

Meridith Berk has been working in and writing about search engine optimization and Internet advertising since 1999.? You can read more of her articles at her website http://UltimateSitePromotion.com or keep updated by reading TheWebsiteMarketingBlog.com