You need to answer the questions Who? What? Where? When? And How?  Who you are?  What services or products do your offer?  Where are you located?  When you are open – your hours of operation?  How can a potential client contact you?

 

Your website should be easy to navigate.  Some ways to avoid having that potential client get lost in your website and giving up altogether is to have a “Site Map” button which shows a map of the entire site and a “Find” function which allows searching for a particular word.

 

There is also a big discussion on the number of graphics it should have.  According to Jim Green of OpenNet, Inc., “only companies that need a graphic-intensive website are graphics companies.”  Flash animation looks cool, but it can be costly to design and can take a long time to download.  You don’t want to put off an impatient potential client who is annoyed with waiting.  Other companies should only have graphics for staff, products, and services.

 

Sites should be kept up to date.  I can’t tell you how many website I saw while doing research that had not been updated in 2 or 3 years.  I didn’t know what to think.  Is the company still in business?  Are the prices correct? Is the staff current?  It kind of turned me off to that company because they were not professional enough to keep it up.  So, if you are going to put “The Last Time This Site Was Updated” on your site make sure it is up-to-date.

 

Buy your own domain name!!!  An article in one of the massage magazines featured websites that were sub-pages of someone else’s website.  This is a poor idea because it looks as if the business did not consider itself important enough to invest in its own site. I admit that I am not that Internet savvy, but I am sure that there are other people like me and those are lost clients because they gave up trying to find your site.  It costs so little to register your name and maintain it on a yearly basis that I strongly recommend you do it.