And that’s one of the reasons why using WordPress as a CMS or content management system makes sense.

What is a content management system?

In simple terms, a CMS separates the coding and design of a website from the content. For the end user, which for many small businesses is the owner or manager of the business, a CMS allows them to update their own website content – such as headings, text, images and links – without having to learn about website coding. Many content management systems also allow users to set up blogs, which are increasingly becoming popular businesses tools.

There are many different content management systems available worldwide, many of which are free. Importantly, once a website is built on a particular CMS it can’t be simply swapped to another CMS.

Why WordPress is the best CMS

Having a CMS is obviously attractive to most small business website owners. The ability to edit information, change prices, add pages, insert images and make other changes without having to call a website developer makes sense, from a cost and efficiency perspective. Unfortunately, I’ve seen many small business owners struggle with making even the simplest of changes because the CMS they’re website is built on isn’t all that easy to use.

To me this is the key reason why more small businesses should be using WordPress as s CMS. Compared to most content management systems, using WordPress is quite easy to learn. And once you learn how to use WordPress, editing is easy. This is important because if you’re like most business owners, you don’t have the time, resources or skills to spend on keeping your website up to date.

Here are some other reasons why I believe WordPress is the best CMS:

• For developers, WordPress is easy to install and is free to use. The developer still needs to design/code for each business’ brand, style, features and needs, but these points do help to minimise the cost of developing websites.
• While you will be able to edit your website, there will be times when you’ll need to call on your website developer to make changes and improvements. Most website developers can work with WordPress, which allows you to easily seek assistance elsewhere if required.
• WordPress is continually improved and updating is easy.
• There are literally thousands of WordPress ‘plugins’ available which either improve the user experience or help website owners administer their website.
• A WordPress website can grow as your business or resources grow.
• WordPress is a brilliant blogging tool. So if you’re interested in developing a blog, articles, news or posts section on your website, WordPress is even more attractive.

Another great thing about WordPress is that you can create a test website and see how easy it is to manage – for free. Go to www.wordpress.com and sign up for a new blog. While the resulting website will look vastly different from your intended business website, it will give you first-hand knowledge of what it’s like to work with WordPress.

If you’re interested in having a WordPress website design for your business, see our WordPress page for more details.

One of the first things you should do when thinking about creating a new small business website is to develop a website design plan template. It doesn’t need to be too detailed at this stage but should include points such as:

• What are the objectives you want your website to achieve?
• What do you want people who view your website to do? For example, do you want them to contact you, provide their details to go on a distribution list, buy products, etc.
• Who is your target audience?
• What are your business’ key points of difference or, in other words, what sets you apart from your competition?

It’s also a good idea when developing a website design plan template to think about the key aspects of your website. Again, you don’t need to go into too much detail but outline points such as:

• When do you want the website completed?
• Do you want a website that you can easily update yourself?
• How many pages are you likely to want and what are they likely to be? For example, Home, About Us, Services, Testimonials, Contact Us.
• Do you have a logo that you want to include on the website?
• What colours do you want your website to include?
• Are there images you’d like to include in your website or do you want the website designer to provide images?
• Will you write the content yourself or do you want the website designer to develop content?
• Is search engine optimisation important? In other words, do you want your business’ services and/or products easily found by customers in search engines such as Google?
• Have you already organised domain registration and web hosting? If yes, your website designer will need the details.
• What features do you want your website to have? E.G. Ecommerce, customer forms, animation, drop-down menus, etc.
• Have you seen other websites that you like, whether or not they relate to your business?

A good website designer will help you complete your website design plan template will very likely have ideas that will greatly enhance your planning and thinking. But by doing some homework before you contact a website designer at the very least you’ll have a better idea of the website you need for your business.

To help you make a great start to your next affordable small business website design, click here to download a website design plan template form.

Traffic

It still amazes me that many small businesses don’t have access to or don’t regularly look at their website statistics, because these statistics can provide very useful information, particularly if you’re trying to increase sales online. A good statistics package will tell you much more than how many visitors your website has enjoyed in the past month (or other given range). It will also highlight key information such as average time on the site, which pages have been viewed and which keywords people used to find your site.

When I’m designing a website for my small business clients using my favourite content management system, WordPress, I always include a statistics package in the Dashboard. This allows small business owners to quickly and easily check their website stats each time they login. If you can do similar for your website, I’d recommend it.

Conversions   

Now that you know a little more about the traffic that is coming to your website, it’s time to look at the next key factor to increase sales online: conversions. Put simply, this is the number of visitors to your website who did what you want them to do. Depending on your business and your website, this could be any number of things, such as:

• Purchase a product
• Download a free tool or product
• Submit a form for more information
• Phone or email the business
• Go on your business’ email distribution list

You may have heard of a term called conversion rate, which is the number of conversions divided by the number of visitors to your website. Generally, a conversion rate of between 1% and 5% is considered normal.

Sales

Next comes the bit we all love and it requires little explanation. It is wise to note, however, that you need to focus on sales derived from your website, not other marketing tactics.

Put it together and what have you got?

Now, here’s a commonsense yet often overlooked observation: By taking a look at these factors more closely, we can determine where our online endeavours may be failing and then take steps to increase sales online.

So, for example, if your website is getting very few visitors you’ll need to put more effort into getting more traffic. If you’re getting plenty of traffic but few conversions, you’ll need to look more closely at why your website isn’t converting customers. If you’re getting enough traffic and conversions but few sales, examine your sales process or the services or products you’re providing.

This is when the real work begins and you may need to enlist the help of an online marketing specialist, small business website designer, sales expert or other professional to help you increase sales online. But at the very least you’ll have a better understanding of how your website is performing and where improvements can be made.

The reason? Small business use email marketing to sell to rather than inform their clients.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not inappropriate to use email marketing to spruik your small business’ products or services. To be effective, however, you need to maintain a balance between selling and providing valuable and interesting information to clients.

For example, if you’re a lawyer who distributes a regular newsletter to clients, the majority of the newsletter should provide engaging information that’s likely to be relevant to your readers. You might pop in one or two articles that are selling pieces, but they shouldn’t make up the bulk of the newsletter. Better still, directly link your selling pieces to your information pieces. If you’ve written an article about the importance of having a will, mention your legal will making services or provide a short-term discount offer to clients.

What if you want to inform clients about a special offer your business is running? Personally, I see nothing wrong in sending out occasional emails such as these. Just make sure the offer is genuine and indeed worthwhile and don’t do it regularly. If you’re emailing clients weekly or even monthly with special offers, your emails will quickly be deleted or blocked.

With some thought and regular effort, email marketing can be a valuable tool for your small business. Just keep some simple factors in mind to make it work for you.

So here are my personal top four things to watch out for if you’re considering website development for your small business.

Website hosting and domain registration

While all websites require ongoing payments for domain registration and web hosting, be careful of web designers who charge fees well in excess of normal. These fees should be approximately $15 a year for domain registration and shouldn’t exceed $200 a year for web hosting (most small businesses can actually pay much less than this).

It’s worth noting that in some cases it can be wise to pay your website designer a little extra for web hosting. Then, if something goes wrong, you can pick up the phone and call your website designer rather than trying to get in contact with your web host yourself. Web hosting services can be notoriously difficult to contact on the phone and in many cases will be difficult to understand for most non-IT people.

Content management systems

Most websites these days are built on content management systems, which allow small business people to update their website without having knowledge about website coding. Make sure you know what content management system your website will be built on and be careful if it’s the website designer’s own system. My reasoning for this is that if your relationship with your website designer turns sour or they go out of business, you may need to develop another website. If you have your website built using freeware such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, for example, you can simply go to another website designer for support.

Search engine optimisation

There are too many search engine optimisation (SEO) cons to list here but, in general, be wary of web designers or search engine optimisation companies who make guarantees. A common one, for example, is a guarantee that a website designer or SEO firm can get your business to number one in Google. The obvious response to this is number one for what? If it’s for your business name, in most cases this isn’t too difficult to achieve but it serves little value. What you want is to be number one or top 10 for your services or products and to achieve this is something that nobody can guarantee.

Price

I had a client who showed me his business website and mentioned that it cost him $6K to develop. It was less than 10 pages, had only basic features, no SEO and he had to provide the content himself. I had to put on my best diplomatic face and tell him it was great, knowing that I and many other website designers could have produced a similar website for $2K or much less. Worse still, the $6K website wasn’t bringing customers to his business.

The lesson here is to that if you’re in doubt about any aspect of a website design quote, get another quote or two. You may still go with the original quote but at least you’ll be satisfied that you’re not getting ripped off.

The updated website features a new look and new information about the business and our services. It also features the colours of our new brand – predominantly mid-blue and grey – and a slight but important change of service focus.

While in the past we’ve focused on offering a total marketing communications service, En Pointe’s prime focal point moving into 2012 and beyond will be providing affordable website design for small businesses. This simply brings our focus into line with what the majority of our customers are asking for. We’ll still offer our other valuable services – copywriting, email management and marketing materials – but they’ll be less the centre of attention.

Please take a look at the new website and brand and let us know what you think. Also, keep a look out for some special announcements when we launch the changes in early 2012!

This decision needs to be based on many factors but in general if you want to update your own content a CMS is the way to go. Once you decide that a CMS website is your best option, choosing a content management system is your next decision. There are literally thousands available, so you can place your trust in a web developer and go on his or her recommendation or you could use what I believe is the best CMS for most businesses – WordPress.

Choosing a content management system: Why WordPress?

WordPress is the number one blogging web development tool on the scene. It’s also a great platform for CMS, even if you have no thought of ever having blogs, posts or articles on your website. Benefits include:

• Quick and easy to install.
• Open source, so it’s free to use. However, most businesses will need to hire a web developer to customise and set-up WordPress for their needs.
• While less relevant for businesses who need a customised look and functionality, there are thousands of WordPress themes and plugins available. Many of these are free to download.
• Self-updating to increase security and reduce spam.
• Because it’s open source, support for issues is often only a Google search away.

While all these benefits are important and are perhaps enough to get WordPress over the line, one of the keys reasons I lean toward WordPress when choosing a content management system is ease of management for the end user.

In the years that I have developed websites for businesses, most of the business owners I’ve met don’t have much time, resources or skills to keep their website updated. For these people it’s obviously imperative that their website is easy to update.

This is the beauty of WordPress. Anyone with a reasonable level of computer-literacy should pick up WordPress quite quickly. As with any new system there are basics that need to be learned, but most people will be able to learn these basics in a few hours or less. It’s probably comparable to learning Word or Outlook for the first time.

Still not convinced? Then go to www.wordpress.com and sign up for a new blog to drive-test WordPress. It’s free and you’ll be able to create and update pages and posts to your heart’s content. While the look of the resulting test website will be vastly different from a business website, the way you create new material and update existing posts and pages will be the same.

Footnote: When you’re ready to take the next step and develop an affordable small business website design using WordPress, contact En Pointe for a no-obligation discussion and quote.

It’s perhaps arguable but I reckon if you answered ‘customers’ you’re spot on. Let’s face it, while the business owner, the business’ people and the business’ products and/or services are vital, without customers there is no business.

So how much do you really know about your customers? How long has it been since you gained feedback from your customers? Conducting either casual or formal surveying of your customers is a great way to find out more about them and their needs, and can highlight ways that you can improve your business.

Tom Bishop has further insight on the importance of staying close to your customers.

What matters most to your customers?

If you want to know how to increase your business, just ask your customers. Asking for customer feedback is one of the most important elements of doing business. Developing lasting customer relationships and customer loyalty requires an understanding of their needs and the reasons behind their buying decisions.

Survey your customers and ask them what they expect from you, what features of your product or service they most enjoy and what they think about your customer service. It’s also important to ask your customers for suggestions to improve your business. Your customers could be noticing areas that need improvement that you may be missing.

Listen to your customers, discover their pain points, and bring innovative solutions to market to address their issues and challenges. Paying attention to what your customers are saying can give you better insights to what matters most to them and gives you multiple ways to engage with them and build stronger relationships.

• Customer surveys help your organization:
• Discover new product and service ideas
• Learn what keeps your customers loyal
• Understand customer needs and challenges
• Gain insight into customer service care
• Keep a competitive edge with your market
• Realize areas for improvement and ways to fix them

Gather demographic information within your customer survey to help segment your data during the analysis. You can easily collect gender, age, and geographic location. It’s important to realize the demographic that uses your product or service in order to accommodate their needs. For example, if you manufactured boots, it would be vital to know that your most loyal customers are women ages 35-45, who live in the north region of New England. This way you could focus you marketing efforts for women in that age range and develop store locations in the region that your customer base lives. This could save your company money and time by focusing your efforts on your target customer.

Once you’ve segmented your list, you can stay relevant with your customers via ongoing communications that involve them with your brand. When you know customers more intimately, you can craft your messages around products and services throughout the life cycle that address their needs and interests and maximize the lifetime value of each customer. For instance, if a blizzard comes through New England, the boot manufacturer can send emails relevant to the blizzard. Possible subject lines include: “Brrr…Our Boots Keep You Warm in Any Amount of Snow” or “Feet Wet? We Guarantee that Our Boots Will Keep You Dry!”

Targeted, highly-relevant, timely messages will outperform every time. Use this strategy and get superior response to your efforts.

By Tom Bishop on June 1, 2011

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Thomas_Bishop

If you’re a business owner and sell products (or perhaps services) you really need to start looking at selling online. The trick is to find a way that’s effective, while at the same time being affordable.

Thankfully, there is a way, and it’s not expensive to set up or maintain.

As their website suggests, PayPal is one of the world’s most popular ways of paying for goods or services online. It’s a faster, easier and safer way to make and accept payments online and via mobile phones. Companies such as Myer, Jetstar and Big W use PayPal, so you can trust that it will work for your business too.

What’s more, an ecommerce solution can be set up for small change. The only other cost is PayPal’s transaction fees, which are 2.4% plus 30cents for each transaction for most small businesses. Transaction fees can be even less for businesses that do significantly more business online.

Compare this with the cost of a merchant facility from a bank or credit union – which will likely amount to hundreds if not thousands in establishment fees and ongoing fees – and it’s easy to see why more businesses are choosing PayPal.

Integrating ecommerce with PayPal:

• First, you need a PayPal account linked securely to your chosen bank account.
• You create a button (such as a Buy Now button) for each product and set your price and postage and handling costs, in PayPal.
• You create a page on your website where you provide details on each of the products you are selling.
• Alongside each product you have the product’s unique PayPal button.

When a visitor clicks on a PayPal button they are taken to PayPal, where they enter address details and make the payment. They don’t need to be a PayPal member to purchase; non-members can use their credit card to make payments.

You can see a working demonstration of a website’s online store that’s been integrated with PayPal at Citywide Investigations’ website. The entire Citywide Investigations website was recently developed by En Pointe.

Get started

It really is relatively simple and straightforward to set up ecommerce on your website. Any web developer can help you through the process and it should only cost $100 or so for a few products.

So what are you waiting for? Start with a product or two and see how it goes. You’ll then be part of the online shopping phenomenon!

Going a step further, I thought it would be great to look at what I believe are the biggest business web design trends of 2011. Some of the trends are the same as the trends for website design in general, but there are a few unique topics that are relevant for businesses.

Flash less flash

Flash, or more correctly any technique that produces animations, is on the decline. Personally, I really like Flash and where used appropriately it’s a great way of catching the attention of the website visitor. When used the wrong way, however, it can distract the visitor and perhaps even annoy them. Flash can also impede the loading speed of your website and doesn’t help search engine optimisation.

Online shopping

The popularity of online shopping may have been growing steadily over the past several years, but lately it has gone gangbusters. There are a variety of reasons for this but rest assured that if you sell products – and in many cases services – and you don’t do so over the net you’re being left behind. The trick for small business is to find ways of selling online without breaking the bank… And the secret is to ditch the banks! Merchant facilities are expensive to set up and maintain, so if you’re a relatively low transaction or low revenue online seller consider using a facility such as PayPal.

Back to basics

Thankfully, website design is becoming simpler, cleaner and more uncluttered. To quote a section from the Stephen Loates article: “There’s nothing quite as ‘attention grabbing’ as an honest, straightforward message on a quiet backdrop.” Cleaner designs, less animation, fewer images, simple menu systems and choosing two or three main colours for your website are all ways of producing the uncluttered website that people now prefer.

Less annoying features

In the same vein as simpler website design, I believe that less is becoming more when it comes to features. Don’t get me wrong, features such as the talking person who pops up on the home page, complex forms, pop-ups and animation (dealt with earlier) all have their place but they have been overused in the past. The key is to provide the features your potential customer is likely to need or want. Also, add features in a way that doesn’t distract or annoy your visitor, or detract from your key messages.

In addition…

Other trends to note include mobile compatible websites, large photographic backgrounds, quick response barcodes and more fonts, to name a few.

The question is, what will the trends be in 2012? While the trends for 2011 are likely to continue there are sure to be a few others that will raise their heads. That’s one of the fantastic things of web design – the scenery is constantly changing!