How do you build a professional, top quality web presence for your business?
Follow these steps to make sure that you have completed your site and to ensure that visitors to your site will find it informative and easy to navigate.

Steps to completing your site

1. Visit your competitors site
2. Pretend that you are the customer
3. Have someone review your site
4. Setup a domain name
5. Make your site easy to navigate
6. Create informative pages that are EASY to read
7. Add images of your products or services
8. Check your spelling and punctuation ***

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1. Visit your competitor's site
One of the best places to start is with your competition. Do a search and go to each of your top competitor's web sites. Write down what you think are the best qualities (design, content, and their sales message) of each. When you are designing your site try to incorporate the best of those ideas into your site.

2. Pretend that you are the customer
When visitors come to your site, they will most likely have no idea what you have to offer or how your site works. It is important to understand that when you are creating your site. On your home page you need to clearly indicate the products and service that you have to offer.

Pretend that you are visiting your site for the first time and you have NO background information. "What questions are you asking yourself?"

• Does this site have what I am looking for?
• Does this site have the information that I need to make a decision?
• Do I feel comfortable doing business with this site (based on appearance and information)?
• How do I contact them for more information? Do they have a phone number that I can call?

3. Have someone review your site
This is a great way to quickly improve your site. When other people review your site they will be able to give you feedback and suggestions for making your site more effective.

4. Setup a domain name
Make sure that you get your domain name setup. Ex. www.yourcompany.com If you have not already setup your domain name click here. Getting your domain name is the first step to creating a professional presence for your business.

5. Make your site easy to navigate
Navigation refers to the way in which visitors to your site find information on your site pages. You want to make sure that they can easily find what they are looking for. Here are some tips to improve the navigation on your site.

• Use pages to organize the information on your site.
• Do not create too many menu buttons. If you find that your menu is getting very long, try creating sub pages underneath each top level menu button.
• Put links inside your pages. Do not assume that visitors will find the menu button to get to a page. If the page is important, put a text or graphic link on the page to direct visitors to that area. The more ways that visitors have to access important information, the more likely it is that they will find it.

6. Create informative pages that are EASY to read
Keep your text in short paragraphs with bolded paragraph headings. This makes it much easier for visitors to read information and scan your pages to find what they are looking for. Most people do not like reading large amounts of text. They scan pages looking for the information that they are interested in and will leave your site if they cannot easily find it.

click here to view a sample of text formatting.

7. Add images of your products or services
Use images to enhance the appeal of your site and to show what you have to offer. Here are some tips for choosing images and placing them on your site.

• Use images to showcase your products or services.
• Make sure your images are not too large. Large images take too long to download and can alter the formatting of your pages.
• Add an image to a page that only has text to enhance the page design.

8. Check your spelling and punctuation ***
Make sure that the text on your site is formatted properly and does not contain any spelling or grammatical errors.