Planning Your Website Structure

If you’ve been following along in this How To Make A Website series, and completing each step in the process, you’ve taken huge steps in building just the website you need for your business.

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Choosing Your Website Software

Often, choosing software is one of the first things new business owners do when they decide to make a website. As you’ve learned from this series though, you’ll know that you should really start with researching your business’s goals and your customer’s goals.

Once you have this information, you’ll have a much better idea of what features and benefits you need in the software you choose.

Generally speaking, your website needs are going to fall into these categories:

1. Your customers want to find your location or call you or send you an email. They may want to read some information about your company, but you’re not selling your products online.  If this is your company, than you may just need a basic brochure-style website that doesn’t change often, but does appear in local searches. Software for these sites that I recommend include:

• Expression Web — If you live south of Oklahoma City, you can learn to use this program in my web design classes at Mid-America Technology Center
• Wordpress — This software is usually thought of a as a blogging platform. But you can use it to easily build and maintain a small site.

2. Your customers are looking for information about your industry and product. You’ll need to update the site frequently and give visitors ways to easily access previous articles. In this situation, I recommend software that lives on your hosting account, so you can access it anywhere. The product I recommend is:

• Wordpress — As I said before, this software is usually thought of as a blogging platform. If you’ve seen blog written using Wordpress, you may not want to use it for your site, thinking that you’re site will have to look like someone’s teenager’s angsty blog. But this isn’t true any more. You can setup completely respectable business websites that look nothing like your typical blog.For example:
  • Product Sellers Talk Radio
  • Watersweb Solutions

3. Your customers are wanting to purchase your products online through an automated shopping cart system. If this is the case, you’ll need shopping cart software, a Paypal account and/or a merchant account, and a system for receiving and shipping out orders. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to just recommend some shopping cart solutions for your consideration:

• Shop Kit Plus — The Shop Kit Plus is an excellent solution for the small business owner who is either new to the Internet or doesn’t want to learn HTML. Not only can you add your products and categories easily, but you can also manager your site’s pages from within the admin area. You can also use just about any template design to give your site the look and feel you want it to have.
• CubeCart — This product is more complex than the SKP, but it has a ton of features. Once you get over the learning curve, you’ll discover that it’s very powerful and can handle even the busiest sites.
• WAHMcart — The Shop Kit Plus is geared towards physical products specifically. Cubecart can handle digital products, but doesn’t allow you to take advantage of many online marketing techniques. WAHMcart, includes many internet marketing features built right in, such as several mailing lists. The downside is that you’ll need to build your own website to use WAHMcart, but the plus side is that you can manage your website with either Wordpress or Shop Kit Plus.

Generally speaking, your website should fit into one of these categories. If not, I’d love to hear from you. Just comment below.

Researching Your Website Visitor’s Goals

Successful online business owners know that that their websites must meet visitor expectations. When a potential customer shows up on the owner’s virtual doorstep, the website must be ready to give the visitor what she wants. If it doesn’t she’s outta there.

For example, if you are running a local children’s boutique, your visitors may be people in the area who want to call you or find your location so they can shop in your brick and mortar. But if all you have on your website are links to purchase online — no map or local contact information — you may have lost that customer.

On the other hand,what  if you are an online retailer of office supplies, like printer cartridges, and your site visitors from around the globe are wanting to buy online, right now? You can’t just offer them a  few pages with pictures of your products and a phone number, or an order form they must fill out and mail in with a check. Your visitors are going to head over to your competitor, who offers an automated shopping cart allowing the visitor to choose her products, enter her credit card number and be assured that the product will arrive in the mail shortly.

What this means is that your company’s website goals and your visitors goals need to mesh. Your site needs to be easy to navigate and make sense to the people who will be using it — your visitors.

The first step you need to take to make sure your website serves your customer’s needs, is to actually ask your customers.

If you already have a business, you can talk to current customers and ask them what they’d like to see on your website. And if you are just considering starting a business, you can find your customers in online forums where they congregate. Search through threads on those forums to see which website they are buying from and what complaints they have about websites.

The second step you need to take is to research your competition.

Once you’ve found your target market on related forums, you’ll see who they are purchasing from now. Take a look at those competitor websites and see what they are doing right. Take notes. And while you’re at it, see what they are doing wrong on their websites so you can correct those problems on yours.

Survey the visitors on your website

Once you have your website up, that doesn’t mean it’s time to keep back and watch the money roll in. You need to stay in touch with your customers and find out what you can do to continually improve your website.

One way to do this is to randomly call customers. You can also send emails to random customers, asking their opinions.

And you can automate the process by including a survey directly on your website. Services that allow you to easily setup a survey on your site include:

• Survey Monkey (free)
• Easy Internet Survey (paid, but well worth it. Michelle’s pick!)

Once you have determined what your customers need in your website, you can start researching software options and considering the structure of your site.

Determine Your Website Purpose

Before you can build a successful website, you have to know what it’s supposed to do.

You’ve probably heard it before: Ready…aim…fire! Many website owners have a tendency to fire, then do their research and tweak their website’s to aim at their customers.

The trouble with this approach is that your visitors who arrive at your site will be confused. What are they supposed to do?

And you know what a confused website visitor does right? They leave!

As I stated in the introductory post, you’ll need to have already researched your target market. So you know, for example, that your customers are young mothers who are into attachment parenting and want to carry their babies close to their bodies most of the time. These mothers love cloth baby slings and tend to collect various fabrics in many colors. That said, they are opinionated about which style of baby sling they prefer.

As a product seller, you’ve purchased several styles of baby slings at wholesale and now you need to learn how to make a website that will help you reach your business goals.

So, what are your goals?

1. Convert your website visitors into buyers
2. Educate your visitors about why your slings are better than another type of sling

You might think you’re done with your reseach, but there is one more step. You’ve got to understand what your audience’s goals are:

1. Compare and learn about multiple sling styles.
2. Decide which sling will meet their needs.
3. Find the specific baby sling they are looking for
4. Easily purchase the baby sling.

Knowing exactly what your audience (prospective customers) are looking for will help you provide them with that information.

Website Design

Once you know who your market is, what your goals and what your market’s goals are, you can determine how to  design your site. Do you need to use muted colors and conservative graphics — or pastel colors and cutsy baby graphics?

Website Structure

Understanding your market will help you immensely when you’re ready to create your site’s structure. Just looking at your competitor’s sites can help you learn how your market expects a website to look. Knowing your market can also help you find ways to improve upon the expected and existing structure. We’ll talk more about these issues later in the series when we discussion site structure and navigation.

Stay tuned, the next post in our series will discuss why you need to know how you want your visitor to respond when she arrives on your site.

Understanding The Website Building Process

Small business forums are full of posts asking for information on how to build websites. And when business owners aren’t trying to figure out how to build websites, they’re trying to figure out how to work with their website designers.

Over the years, I’ve worked with hundreds of business owners who are wanting to build their own sites, or who need someone else’s help. So I decided to put together this series of “How To Make A Website” blog posts to help you understand the website building process.

Before we get started, we need to make sure we’re on the same page. Starting an online business doesn’t begin with building a website. That’s one of the last getting started steps.

Before You Build Your Website

You need to begin with researching your target market and creating a system to deliver a product to those customers. You’ll need to choose a domain name and a web hosting company. You’ll need to look at your competitor’s sites and other industry sites to see what else is out there.

Then you’re going to need to decide if you would prefer to build your own website, or hire a web designer to create the site for you.

Building Your Own Website

This option is definitely going to be the least expensive. You may need to make an initial software investment, but you don’t need to pay someone else for their time or expertise.

Of course, what this means is that you’re going to be spending your own time building the site and building your expertise through research and trial and error.

Hiring A Website Designer

Alternatively, you can hire a website designer. If you are completely unfamiliar with building a website, you’ll still have a fairly steep learning curve — and that’s just figuring out what various terms mean, like templates, HTML, CSS, layout, mockup, etc. If you are familiar with the lingo, then this method will definitely put your mind at ease, if you can let go and let your designer work her magic.

Of course, even if this is the case, you may still run into speedbumps.

Whichever option you choose, this series will help you understand how to make a website that you can use to grow your product-selling business.

How To Make A Website

Welcome to my How To Make A Website guide for product sellers.

On this page, you’ll find links to a series of website building tips that I’m writing with business owners new to the Internet in mind. This series unpacks the basics of website building and the concepts that you’ll need to understand and consider when you’re building your website or working with a website designer.

If you enjoy this series and would like to keep in touch with Product Sellers Talk Radio, you can subscribe to our blog RSS feed, or our podcast RSS feed.

Introductory Posts

• Understanding The Website Building Process
• Determine Your Website Purpose
• Your Visitor’s Response
• Website Software
• Website Structure
• Page Layout

Building Your Own Website

• Website Templates Or Custom Design
• Page Titles And Descriptions
• Working With Text And Links
• Understanding Link Styles
• Building Structure With HTML
• Creating Style With CSS
• Working With Pictures
• Working With CSS Layouts
• Creating Your Site Navigation
• Designing Your Site Navigation
• Working With Tables
• Creating Website Forms
• Testing And Publishing Your Website

Working With A Website Designer

• Hiring A Website Designer
• Understanding The Web Designers Contract
• Working With The Designer
• How To Tell Your Designer You Hate It
• Working With Graphic Artists, Copywriters And Programmers

Simplify Your Shipping

A friend of mine shut down her successful diaper cake business several years ago.

I couldn’t understand why she would shut down a business that was doing so well, so naturally, I asked.

Her answer? Success killed her business. She and her family were spending their days creating, packing and shipping the diaper cakes, instead of being a family.

Now, like I said before, that was several years ago and I’ve lost touch with her.

But in the years since then, I’ve wondered: Could she have done something to streamline her packing and shipping process?

Could she have outsourced to local moms or  a fulfillment company?

What advice would you offer to her, if you could go back in time knowing what you do now, to help her keep her business and the extra income it afforded her family?

Top 5 Wordpress Plugins For Product Sellers

Whether you’re using Wordpress to power your entire website or just run manage your blog, plugins will help you expand the software’s capabilities.

That said, the last thing you want is to have 50 plugins installed on your site. Why? You run a greater risk of incompatibilities causing problems with the way your site works.

I’ve been using Wordpress to power several of my websites for the past two years, and have dabbled with it since 2003. In my years of experience, I’ve run across several plugins that I think will add useful fuctionality to your site, make things easier for you or that are just plain fun for your readers.

So, let’s get started.

Akismet — This spam eater is now included in the Wordpress core, so you don’t have to download it separately. Once you activate it and add your API key, you never have to think about it again. Or the tons of span you’d receive otherwise.

1. All-In-One SEO Pack — While Wordpress is pretty SEO friendly all by itself, this plugin enables you to manage the title tags and descriptions for each page as you’re writing or editing. Even better, it’s extremely customizable.
2. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer — This isn’t exactly a fun plugin, but it will help you keep the search engines happy. Basically, it keeps you from getting marked as a ping spammer. Click the link to find out more on the plugin website.
3. ShareThis — Just like it’s name, this plugin enables your visitors to easily share your post or page with social networking sites.
4. wp-Ecommerce — Slick and socially savvy shopping cart plugin that integrates seamlessly with your wordpress site. Great for small business owners, artisans and service providers.
5. Google XML Sitemaps — Generates a sitemap that is easily read by Google and other search engines. Helps them index more of your site, which means you can rank for more of your keyword phrases.

Any Wordpress favorites you’d like to share?

$15 DIY Lightbox

Joe King of FamTrek.com took this post of his rather cleaver lightbox. It’s perfect for taking pictures of small products, when you want a white background.

Moving Your Site To A New Domain Name

Changing the domain name of your site seems pretty easy at first.

You just submit a helpdesk ticket to tech support, they wave their magic wand over the server and your domain name is changed.

Right?

Unfortunately for one of my SKP clients, it’s more complex than this.

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