Is Your Small Business Website Profitable?

How effective is your small business website or electronic business card? The fourth annual small business Internet survey by Verizon Superpages.com conducted by the GallUp Organization found that 55% of small business websites covered web costs or were profitable in 2002, and that number will only keep rising. Over 41% of small businesses saw an increase in sales revenue with a website. If your small business website is not as productive as you would like consider these pointers.

Having a website is as vital as a business card, it is often a first impression or introduction of your business. So it is immensly important to put your best foot forward. 

What does your website say about you and your business?

You should be able to answer yes to all of the above questions. Nowadays, most people have Internet access, and are using the web more as a research tool to obtain information from everything about travel to local restaurants and major purchases.

Having an effective website is a cost-effective and easy way to advertise your business. Once it is built, the maintenance should be relatively easy and inexpensive.

Active or Passive Audience

The difference between using a website as opposed to other methods of advertising is the difference between having an active or passive audience. People hitting your website are an active audience, and are curious as to what you have to offer. Print ads, telemarketers, or mass mailings are geared towards a passive audience. An active audience is seeking information, which your site can provide and win them over. The beauty of the web is that you can advertise your website by using the other passive methods of advertising.

On the flip side, how often have you visited a website that took too long to load, had a lot of flash and fluff but no substance, was out of date, or looked like the boy next door created it after his homework? Your business and your image are too important to place in jeopardy. If a person is trying to learn more about what you have to offer, and sees a website that is less than desirable, chances are you lost that business and they will not return. The web can be the easiest way to pick up new business and you should use it to your advantage.

Some establishments practiced business the same way for many years and are having difficulty becoming web savvy. They are realizing that the economy has impacted their business. The best advice is to look at your competition, most successful companies and businesses, and your neighbor.

It is not a coincidence that more and more people are doing business on the web. Maybe it is time to reach out to a web developer and educate yourself on how the web can work for you.

Content for this feature article was provided by Donna M. McGuire

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How to Create a Small Business Website That Works 

We here at AI hope that you pick us for your webdesign needs, but if you MUST have your cousins' uncles' friend do it, please make sure they follow these guidelines. And don't forget- we're here to meet any budget and schedule so give us a call at 814-515-2295, or email us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

 Tips for Small Business Website Design an article By Susan Ward

Often people tell me,

"My small business website isn't working. I'm not getting anything out of it."

The trick to getting what you want out of your small business website, such as leads and sales, is to have a small business website design that attracts the visitors you want and encourages them to do what you want them to do. Look at your small business website (or your plans for one) and ask yourself these eight questions to create a small business website that works. Our web survey addresses these 8 points, we ask that our customers fill out our custom survey before we begin any steps of your website design project.

1) Does your small business website have a professional appearance?

More important than anything is how your business' website appears. Your small business website design needs to look professional. Cookie-cutter website templates and/or home-made websites stand out like sore thumbs, and do nothing to encourage anyone to do business with you. Unless you are an experienced website designer, you should hire one to design a small business website for your company.

2) Does your small business website provide 'real' content?

The endless sales pitch approach is vastly overdone and an instant turn-off for visitors. People come to your small business website to see information about your business, and your products and/or services and what makes it unique. By visiting your site they have shown they are already interested. So provide more relevant, additional content for them. For instance, if you offer bookkeeping services, additional information on keeping records or tax tips are great value-added content. If you sell tiles, provide not only detailed information on your product lines, but how-to information on installation.

3) Does your small business website make it easy for people to do business with you?

Somewhere on your small business website, you need to have a page that has your full contact information, including your mailing address and your phone number(s). It's not good enough to just have an e-mail address, especially one that starts "webmaster@". Carrying contact information on every page is even better. People prefer someone to address, since email is impersonal enough, something like This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it is even better.

4) If you have an ecommerce site, do you provide adequate online payment options for your customers?

If you want people to buy your product, you have to make it easy for them. Invest in a good shopping cart, and make sure that you offer payment options such as credit cards and other online payment options, such as PayPal. People don't want to have to bother to print off and mail in a form and a check.

5) If you're selling a product or service online, does your small business website address your visitor's security concerns?

Customers are concerned about transmitting personal information, such as credit card numbers, over the Web. You need to not only have the appropriate technology (such as SSL) in place, but let your potential customers know about it, by putting your Secure Site certificates in prominent locations, and having a page that addresses your visitor's concerns, such as a FAQ.

Now your site showcases your business, and the products or services you offer in a way that makes doing business with your company attractive. Keep reading to make it even better!

How do you show prospective customers the path to your small business website's online door? Primarily through good search engine placement, which means spending time on search engine optimization and search engine submission. Look at your small business website and ask yourself:

6) Have you built search engine optimization into your small business website's pages?

You need to give every page of your small business website the best chance of ranking well in the search engines. Search engine optimization means that every page of your site has title tags and meta tags that are appropriate in terms of the keywords you have chosen for that page.

7) Have you put any effort into search engine placement?

The Web is full of spiders that constantly search for new and updated pages for the search engines. However, as there are millions of pages online, just putting up your small business website and waiting for the spiders to find it is not wise.

While I'm sure you've seen those ads that offer search engine submission to "hundreds" of search engines, this kind of automatic search engine submission is not effective. What works is taking the time (or paying someone else to take the time) to manually submit your small business website pages to a selection of the top search engines and directories.

Some businesses also find that pay-for-search-engine-placement search advertising is an effective way to attract the customers they want.

8) Does your small business website have adequate web hosting?

While there are some free web hosts out there, many visitors will turn up their nose at your site when they see that your business is using one. The assumption is that a quality business will have quality website hosting.

Using a free or 'inexpensive' web hosting service can also cause you problems because of excessive downtime - periods of time when no one can access your small business website at all.

AI ensures you have the kind of quality web hosting that you need to draw and keep site visitors, and strives for continuous improvement.

Making Sure You Create a Business Website That Works

The purpose of a small business website is to provide your potential clients or customers who use the Internet access to your business, and make doing business with you, rather than someone else, an attractive proposition. If you can answer "yes" to the eight questions in this article, you have a small business website that will be well on its way to bringing in those leads and sales you want. 

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What is CMS??
Web content management system
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• A Web content management system (WCM, WCMS or Web CMS) is content management system (CMS) software, implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A WCMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and essential Web maintenance functions.
• The software provides authoring (and other) tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content with relative ease.
• Most systems use a database to store content, metadata, or artifacts that might be needed by the system. Content is frequently, but not universally, stored as XML, to facilitate reuse and enable flexible presentation options.[1][2]
• A presentation layer displays the content to Web-site visitors based on a set of templates. The templates are sometimes XSLT files.[3]
• Most systems use server side caching boosting performance. This works best when the WCMS is not changed often but visits happen on a regular basis.[4]
• Administration is typically done through browser-based interfaces, but some systems require the use of a fat client.
• Unlike Web-site builders, a WCMS allows non-technical users to make changes to a website with little training. A WCMS typically requires an experienced coder to set up and add features, but is primarily a Web-site maintenance tool for non-technical administrators.
• Once CMS is set up on your website it is easy to use and flexible. Take control of your own content, ask us to install CMS for you today!

Capabilities
A WCMS is a software system used to manage and control a dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents, images and other forms of media).[5] A CMS facilitates document control, auditing, editing, and timeline management. A WCMS typically has:

• Automated templates
  Create standard output templates (usually HTML and XML) that can be automatically applied to new and existing content, allowing the appearance of all content to be changed from one central place.
  Easily editable content
  Once content is separated from the visual presentation of a site, it usually becomes much easier and quicker to edit and manipulate. Most WCMS software includes WYSIWYG editing tools allowing non-technical individuals to create and edit content.

• 
  Scalable feature sets
  Most WCMS software includes plug-ins or modules that can be easily installed to extend an existing site's functionality.
  Web standards upgrades
  Active WCMS software usually receives regular updates that include new feature sets and keep the system up to current web standards.

• Workflow management
  Workflow is the process of creating cycles of sequential and parallel tasks that must be accomplished in the CMS. For example, a content creator can submit a story, but it is not published until the copy editor cleans it up and the editor-in-chief approves it.

• 
  Delegation
  Some CMS software allows for various user groups to have limited privileges over specific content on the website, spreading out the responsibility of content management.[6]

• 
  Document management
  CMS software may provide a means of managing the life cycle of a document from initial creation time, through revisions, publication, archive, and document destruction.

• 
  Content virtualization
  CMS software may provide a means of allowing each user to work within a virtual copy of the entire Web site, document set, and/or code base. This enables changes to multiple interdependent resources to be viewed and/or executed in-context prior to submission.