You are a small business and you know why you need a website. What is the next step? Before you dive into creting a website, you need to do some more planning and answer the main quesion: why do you need a website?

Like building a house, you need to know the purpose of your new project. Your house will look different depending on your main goal - raise children, for example, or entertain guests. What do you want your website to do: -

• advertise your company or your product
• sell your product online
• provide support to your existing customers
• attract new customers
• all of the above

After you figure out what your website goal is, you can craft a strategy. Why do you think your website will do it better than others? What is different about your services or your product or your website that your customers will choose you over your competition? When you figure that out, you have your website strategy. It is time for a website blueprint.

Your goal and your strategy will determine all your website features and content. For example, you would like your website to attract new clients. Your strategy is to do it by promoting your new and unique product. So, on the main page of your website you will feature your new product and outline the benefits. See? You just created your main content.

Once again, based on your goal and strategy in our example, this can be a sample list of features for your website:

• - let your perspective customers buy the product online
• - let users subscribe to news and updates about the product
• - support existing customers by opening up a forum to discuss problems, issues and opinions about how great your product is
• - create "contact customer service" link or live chat
• - add ways to return the product if you offer 100% money back guarantee

Did you notice that all we did is focus on one product? Start small, test it, figure out what works and what does not work, why it is not working, ask your customers for feedback, improve your website. And only after that you can add other products, services, features. The bottom line is, you do not add anything to your website that does not follow the strategy and does not help you to achieve your main goal.

Always focus on your customer. Always remember that your website serves them, even if their requests and desires do not make sense to you. Always know, what you want your customer to do on every page. Make sure it is clear to them as well, what they are supposed to do on your site. If you are selling your product, make sure that the button "Buy this product" is clearly visible and it is obvious that your customer is supposed to click on it. Your labels should be ordinary and easy to understand. If your button says "Enter a secret chamber" or "Go!" it is not clear what is on the other side of that button. Confusion creates hesitation, less clicks, less revenue for you.

Remember, when buying a house, you pick a neighborhood that you like. On the internet, the "neighborhood" picks you. Your website gets evaluated by multitude of search engines, users, robots, ranking services and eventually your website is placed in the "internet neighborhood" where it fits most. If your website is of good quality, structure, and content, you will be living large. If your website is confusing, hard to navigate and has bad content, you will be wasting money and effort. Your website will never go anywhere and eventually you will abandon it.

Therefore, it is very important to get it right the first time, watch your website deliver results and enjoy positive effects on your small business. And that is one more reason to hire a professional web developer and designer to help you through the process. They should understand your website goal, help you out with developing a strategy to achieve it and suggest functionality and content. They should be experts in writing content for the web - it is very different from writing for newspapers or magazines. And definitely, very different from writing advertisement. Bottom line - if your website is pretty and stylish but you have bad content, you are dead in the water. A professional will help you make sure your website does not look like a marketing campaign or a sales letter. Nobody reads those. Your customers will be annoyed and your website will loose credibility before it even acquired any.

It is also important to understand, that you will need to invest time into your website project. How much time? Well, it is up to you. If you decided to make your own website, you will be investing a lot of time. If you hire a website developer, you will still be investing time, but significantly less. Can you build a house with your own 2 hands using a hammer and some nails? How much research would you need to do to even understand the basics of building a house? Lucikly, there are tools to help you build it yourself. Result is a tract house. On the internet, it is a site created from a template. Your savvy customers will recognize a cookie-cutter website very quickly. Do yourself a favor, if you are a serious small business, invest in professional web design.