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Building Your Online Business Basic Small Business Identity Site Infrastructure During your first three to six months online, most of your efforts will be spent alerting your prospects and customers to the presence of your Web site. Following is the minimal information you should provide for your first site publication to enable search engines to categorize your site properly and make it easier for people to find specific content. Home Page (Index.htm) It is the first page seen by your web visitors. Here is where to include a 20-40 word welcome and introduction to your site. We can't say enough about the importance of those first 40 words. Please take due care in compiling those words as they are what the search engines will most likely use in indexing your site. If you do nothing else within your first month under your new domain name, publish the appropriate content on this page. Search engines send robots out automatically and you may lose an opportunity to make it easy for prospects to find you otherwise. The home page should contain links to the other pages within your site or at least a link to the table of contents or a site map, either of which should contain links to the pages accessible by the public. This page should NOT contain links external to your Web site. Your goal is to provide an easy route for search engine robots to drill down into your site to retrieve pertinent information for their databases. Because robots tend to follow links listed on a page, you could risk routing them to another site before they have completed indexing yours.
Contents (contents.htm) or Site Map (sitemap.htm) Here is where you create a hypertext listing to contents you want the public to be able to easily access from your web. This page is also often labeled as the "Site Map". You might want to include a brief statement describing what your visitors will find on each of those pages. The following table of contents serves as an example.
Contents
What to Include in Your Publication We have discussed what to include on your home page and your contents or site map pages. In case you need some help in determining what to include on the others, following are some hints we hope you find helpful: What's New (whatsnew.htm) Highlight on this page the content you expect will draw return visitors to your site. Your What's New page should be updated each month at a minimum. If you want to stir up some regular interest from return visitors, plan on producing new content for this page every week. Whenever you issue a press release, it should be mentioned here with links directly to the release posted on your site. HINT: If you find yourself at a standstill in coming up with content, visit your public library and review the current edition of Chase's Calendar of Events. This Chase publication is updated annually and has earned an international reputation for being a reliable resource of events happening every day throughout the year.
Profile (profile.htm) Here is where you go into more detail about your business. It is absolutely critical to include a tight summary statement at the beginning. Ideally, that statement will contain keywords used by your target audience to search for the services or products you provide. Also, try to keep your commentary for each explanatory HTML document within the 200-400 word count. Rather than creating one long document, split important content by subject into smaller documents.
Services (services.htm) Here is where you provide a summary about the services your company has to offer. If your budget allows, ideally, you should dedicate a separate page to each of your top services, highlighting their most popular features and benefits.
Feedback (feedback.htm) This page is where you conduct contests and surveys, giving your visitors an opportunity to provide feedback to you from the Web. It can serve as the entry page for your guest book and survey pages or it can be the guest book. If you purchased one of the Westward Connections do-it-yourself starter packages or we are developing your site for you, this will be your Guest book and the standard format is the same as what you see for our guest book. When you submit an entry in the guest book, you will get a response page, which is also included as a standard item in all the packages designed by Westward Connections.
How to Contact Us (contact.htm) This page is where you provide pertinent contact information, including not only email and web addresses but those used to visit your offices or send you correspondence or packages. If you have an office outside your home, you might consider including a public map and driving directions. As an added courtesy, you might include a link to the daily weather forecast for your area from The Weather Underground. HINT: An easy way to include a map is to use the mapping tool at Yahoo! And include a hyperlink to that page from your contact page.
Web Links (links.htm) Finding resources on the Internet can be quite time-consuming. While there are a number of tools to assist with your search, it has long been an Internet community custom to include a links page with each web publication. The links page points your visitors to resources on the Internet beyond your web. At a minimum, it should contain links to some of the most popular search engines and directories on the Internet. If you are interested in generating new business through the publication of your Web site, you will also find this page essential as it is where you will place hyperlink references to other Web sites with which you have negotiated reciprocal links. HINT: If you are going to encourage reciprocal links, be sure to develop and publish a reciprocal links policy. This will help you avoid claims of favoritism and having to respond to queries from publishers whose sites have nothing in common with yours. To give you a head start
on building your web links, we include the following
ones in our self-starter packages as well as with our
site development services. Essential Search Engines
Categorized Directories
Copyrights, Credits, and Disclaimers (legal.htm) As with any other type of publication, this one carries certain liabilities. There have been a lot of misunderstandings about what is required to establish a copyright in recent years. This would be a prudent time to consult with your attorney if you have any doubts about what you plan to publish on your Web site. It is not necessary to declare your copyright on each publication or to register a copyright for your claim to be valid but when it comes to satisfying a dispute, your efforts to protect a copyright prior to the dispute will bear weight in the final outcome. To avoid potential misunderstandings with your web visitors, be sure to link it to the "All Rights Reserved" statement in your copyright notice and place the copyright notice on the footer of each page of your web publication. For further insight on web publishing copyright issues, you might want to visit the Westward.Net Internet Legal Resources page at http://www.westward.net/archives/lawlinks.htm. Most importantly for any legal concerns you may have, you should consult with an attorney specializing in this area. Here is where you should also give credit to others who have contributed to your publication. It is where you give further recognition to trademark and trade name owners for the products or services of others you represent or have mentioned within your web publication. For an example of typical inclusions for this page, you are welcome to visit the Credits & Disclaimers page at our corporate Web site (http://www.westward.com/legal.htm) or our web hosting division (http://www.westward.net/legal.htm).
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Corporate Web Address: www.westward.com |
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Phone: 800-260-3094 (USA) |505.292.3094 (New Mexico)
Westward Connections | A Majority Woman-Owned
New Mexico Corporation