No, I’m not trying to put my designers out of a job. I just know that many people starting a business have time to set up a website themselves, but not all the skills. Here are a few websites you can use to get free designs. Warning: You will still need to modify some code to fit these to your specific needs.
Finally, we’re going to talk about the best way for a website to turn a profit, and that’s making actual money.
There are a many, many ways for a website to make money, and we’ll talk about a few of those.
First, you can sell advertising on your website, either directly or through a broker like Google AdSense, where they find the advertisers for you and automatically place them on your site. Direct selling of advertising on your site cuts out the middle-man and can, therefore, be more profitable. However, Google makes it very easy to set up AdSense on your website. AdSense scans the content of your site and links to relevant sponsors that pay Google when someone clicks on those links. Then Google pays you when someone clicks on the links, taking a cut off the top. The ads can be placed anywhere on your website. You can see in the screenshot to the left where ads were placed at the top of the website.
A website can be a lead-generating tool. You can find people who are possibly interested in your product by offering an e-book or report on a topic related to your business that potential clients and customers would find interesting. Just ask for very basic contact information and have your website automatically email them the report for free.
You generate leads similarily with giveaways, newsletters, or even with a simple “Get a Quote” form. Anything that collects very basic contact information and offers a benefit can help you to capture leads with your website. And the less information you request, the more likely people will be to sign up.
When you link to any such form, make sure the link is prominent on your website. It needs to be one of the first things that visitors to the website see. Website visitors tend to start looking at the top right of the page, then they look to the right, then down the page. So towards the top is generally a good place for the button. You can see good button placement on the website screenshot to the right.
The last method for making money on your website is probably the one people think of the most, and that is selling product directly on your site.
The key with selling anything on your website is to make it as easy as possible for people to buy. While there are both free and paid shopping cart solutions you can install on your website, those are often not necessary if you only have a few items. PayPal and Google Checkout both offer easy to integrate shopping carts. All you do is create an account with them, copy their code for “Add to cart” buttons and your website is ecommerce capable.
Of course, it helps if you also have items in your store that are appealing and easy to ship. While you may not want to list all of your available inventory online, your best bet is small items that are $20-$50 dollars. People are generally pretty comfortable buying something online in that price range, and will be that much more likely to impulse buy.
Now you’ve seen how websites can give you a great return on your investment when you set them up to save time, save money and make money. You should not be satisified with a simple brochure website that gives you an “online presence.” Instead, the website needs to be actively contributing to the bottom line of your business, or it’s not worth the money you spent on it.
While it’s certainly important that your website looks good, the real goal for your business’s website should be for it to benefit you financially. There are three main ways this can be done.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be writing about each of these categories, and some ways different clients of ours have accomplished these goals. But let’s take a quick look at all three of them right now.
Save time
If you’re like many small business owners and dedicated employees, you’re spending plenty of time on your business. For some, the only real way they can make more money is if they can save time somewhere. A website can be a huge help in this area. At the least, it can be marketing for you day and night. But realistically, every single business has something process or task that can be sped up with the help of a website.
Save money
A website can actually save you money as well. I can’t count the number of people we’ve sold websites to that made their money back within a year just by cutting back or eliminating other forms of advertising.
Make money
Done well, a website has the possibility of being a money making machine. While this can, of course, vary greatly based on your industry, there are few who can’t actually make money with their website.
Stay tuned over the next few weeks as we go into more details about turning a profit with your website.
As I’ve mentioned before, we check our websites in six different browser / operating system combinations. Just the other day, my programmer asked me if we could stop checking in one of Opera. For Internet Explorer 6.0, there’s even an IE Death March website dedicated to telling others they should stop checking their websites in that browser.
To make things even more confusing, Wikipedia’s page of browser comparisons lists a whopping thirty-five current web browsers. Which ones should you check your website on?
Although we do take into account usage, as I mentioned before, we also take into account how easy it is to code for that browser. It’s a balance between the two. There are currently seven different programs on the browser usage list at w3schools.com. We check five of those seven. I’m going to talk about a three that are outliers in either usage, ease of coding, or both.
Internet Explorer 6.0
IE6 is a pain to code for. Thus the previously mentioned IE Death March website. However, it still has a significant market share, somewhere around 25% of the web surfers out there. Although it frequently frustrates our programmer (and many other programmers around the world), we continue to make sure our websites work in IE6, because we don’t want 1/4 of the website’s visitors to get less than the full intended effect of the website.
Internet Explorer 5.0
If you can imagine that IE6 is hard to code for, just imagine how much harder IE5 is. Combine that with the fact that it has less than a 0.5% market share makes it obvious why we don’t bother checking our sites in IE5.
Opera
Opera has a relatively small market share at 1.9%. However, it is fairly “standards compliant.” Simply, this means that once you code for other browsers that comply well with the web standards, (Firefox and Safari in our case), 99% of the time the website works correctly in Opera as well. So the low cost in terms of time means that we still check in Opera, despite its low market share.
Hopefully this gives you some indication why we check in the browsers we check in.
If you’re only checking your website in the web browser you use, others may not be seeing the site how you intend them to. After all, chances are pretty low that everyone looking at your site is using the same browser you are.
Here at T&S Web Design, we test on several browsers on Macs and several on Windows. Here’s the breakdown, along with the percentage of usage from w3schools.com, taken June 2008. Obviously the percentages will not be exactly the same on your site, but they shouldn’t be too far off. (Note that Firefox, Safari and Opera have the same percentage on both Mac and Windows, because w3schools.com does not differentiate between operating systems)
Of course, the best way to check in both Windows and Mac’s OSX is to have a Mac and a Windows computer. Barring that, another viable solution is Browsershots.org. There are tons of browsers available across four different operating systems. Note that they have Opera on Windows, not Mac, but it shouldn’t make a difference.
We’ve all heard it before: less is more. I couldn’t stress this enough when it comes to website color schemes. A common misconception is thinking every color on the wheel will enhance your site, but in reality, choosing a scheme and staying consistent is your number one goal.
Depending on the site I’m designing, I tend to stick with two to three colors at most. For example, if you look at Missi Bryant’s website in our portfolio (also pictured here), you’ll see that I chose yellow, pink and burgundy. I was able to use different shades of burgundy to enhance the depth and the brighter colors as accents. Once again, the bottom line always stands: simplicity.
Here are some random things that annoy me about websites. I’m not going to link to any specific examples, as that would be too mean. That, and I’ve probably been guilty of some of these in the past.
Make sure you don’t do any of these things. Or if you do, you’d better have a really good, well thought out reason.
T&S Web Design's quick responses and flexibility were vital to completing our redesign project so quickly and with remarkably few changes after the first draft was complete.
Mike Bosley
President
Beam's Industries
