A while back, a friend of mine pointed out that his Web site (which is very basic) gets a fair amount of new business for his family-owned printing company. The secret: there’s a snapshot photo of him and his wife on the Home Page, and many new customers comment that they saw their photo on the Web. (Very few, except curmudgeons like me, comment that the site looks dated and boring.) The crucial lesson: be personal on your site.

Larry and Charlotte are not models. But they are likable in person, and the snapshot makes them real to people surfing for a business. It puts a face on the business, which is otherwise just a logo.

Another client started a “Meet Captain John” feature to introduce a new expert on staff. Response has been so good, it’s become a regular feature on the Web site, and Cap’n John is now answering online questions from customers. When people come into the store, they seek out John and introduce themselves.

Today, I stumbled across the Web page for Scott, The Nametag Guy. He’s taken this to an extreme, even tattooing his nametag on his chest. And though I haven’t heard him speak or read his books (yet), I instantly love Scott — and clearly a lot of other folks do too.

On the Web and in business, competition is fierce. Projecting your personality is a powerful way to connect with potential customers.

Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of dense Web sites. You know, three columns jammed with stock quotes, recent news, ads, highlights, customer login boxes, sale-of-the-day. The clutter in these sites drives me mad. It’s like a pack rat was turned loose on the Web, armed with everything that could possibly go on a Home Page. (For many bad examples and an occasional good laugh, see Web Sites That Suck).

But when a client sends me several of these jumbled messes as examples of what-are-you-looking-for-in-a-site, I get nervous.  ‘Cause I like clean, open Web pages, even if it means that something doesn’t get to go on the Home Page. And since I like clean, open Web sites, I design them that way. But then there’s the client: well, let’s just put the news crawl right… there. In that space there.

We can’t because it’s there for a reason. Remember, the Home Page is about branding as well as information. Put too much information on the page and you lose the branding. Empty space helps break up the dense blocks of stuff that you insisted we jam onto the page. Like taking a deep breath in the middle of a long sentence, white space gives our eyes a break as we’re scanning the page. Users need this.

As Web sites become more crucial to a company’s marketing and visibility, good site design is becoming critical to the long-term success of a site. (Some would say it always has been critical, but let’s not get lost in that point just now…). Problem is, as sites are being more heavily designed, navigation generally suffers.

I’ve recently looked at a number of high-end sites (generally Flash-based) whose overwhelming design makes the navigation difficult. These tend to be youth-oriented sites, and I guess someone must be asserting that kids are more welcoming of sensory overload, or these crowded, unfriendly sites would fade away.

But if there’s a study out there that demonstrates that today’s youth prefer a difficult design to a simple, organized one, I’d like to see it. Until then, keep the site navigation as clear as possible. 

• Avoid hiding too much content under broad categories. Use dropdowns or tooltips to reveal what’s in each category (and to make skipping directly to deep content easier).
• Be sure the navigation is complete. Omitting obvious items such as Contact Us is fairly common, believe it or not…
• If your design uses them, make animation or strong visual elements “point” to the main task (e.g. the “buy now” or the site navigation).
• Use space to separate zones (especially navigation).
• Keep nav elements together (except utility links such as Privacy Policy or Login/Logout — they can stand alone).
• Avoid making your nav look like ads (or, for that matter, anything but navigation).

Be careful to use key words that are simple and clear for your visitors. Web site visitors don’t really read — they scan. Usually, they look for highlighted text and other noticeable keywords that give them quick clues to 1) “What’s on this page” and 2) “What can I do from here?”

The trick is to choose keywords that a user will notice and that will be instantly meaningful. But be careful: words that have multiple meanings can trip up your site visitors. Bottom line is: be sure to use words in the way that your visitors expect — and if in doubt, rewrite.

Consider a woodworking site, whose navigation includes “shop.” Will the user expect it to mean online shopping or about the workshop? If I’m looking to buy, I’d click that link — and if I ended up at a page about the workshop, maybe I’d go back and start over. Or, maybe I wouldn’t, if the phone rang at that moment.

There’s an easy fix for this scenario. Adding a small cart icon or a dollar sign to the nav button (or using “shopping”) would probably clear things up. Or, substituting “woodshop” or “workshop” would provide clarity in the other direction.

To get started with your online business, you’ll need a Web host. This is simply a company that hosts Web sites like yours. It could be a guy running an operation out of his garage or a giant server farm located in another state. There’s a lot of competition for hosting, and the what you pay vs. what you get benchmarks keep changing. Shop around, and check out recommendations.

Bottom line is pretty simple, though: your Web host must be able to keep your site available 24 x 7 x 365. If something crashes (and, eventually, it will), your host must be able to restore your site immediately. In addition, good customer service, via phone and e-mail, is crucial.

You can get hosting for free, but if you’re running a legitimate business, I don’t recommend it. Likewise, your DSL, Cable or dialup provider may offer basic hosting, and the cost may be included. Again, I don’t recommend it for business use.

I recommend that businesses start with an established, inexpensive host. You don’t have to pick the cheapest plan with one of these hosts, but if you do and you grow out of it, they will happily convert you to a more robust plan. Of the zillions of hosts out there, I recommend and use Bluehost and ixWebHosting. Why? Good features, competitive price — but most of all, excellent customer service. Likewise, I don’t recommend Yahoo (reputation for poor customer service) or GoDaddy (hidden charges and constant upselling).

How much should I pay? What should I get? Prices can be all over the map, and the features offered are also hard to compare. At a minimum, you should get:

• No setup fee
• 30-day moneyback guarantee
• More than 10 Gb space (This is for storage of your Web site files on the server. You’ll only need about 100Mb, so any host offering less than that is suspect.)
• More than 250 Mb data transfer per month (when people access your site, they request a page and the files are transferred. More pages = more data transfer. 100Mb/mo is probably enough, unless you get featured on Oprah.)
• More than 100 email accounts including webmail access to those accounts (This is addresses like name@yourdomain.com. You might only use a few e-mail addresses, but I’ve seen clients pay a lot for extra e-mails due to a bad host.)
  TIP: If you want to be seen as a legitimate business, don’t show your e-mail address as bizname@aol.com or jerry@sbcglobal.net. You’ve got a business domain name — use it for e-mail names too.
• Most hosts provide daily/weekly backups of your Web site data. (If your site ever crashes or — gasp! — gets erased, you’ll appreciate this feature.) Some hosts, however, charge extra to access the backups if it’s your fault the data disappeared.
  TIP: Think for a minute about backups and disaster recovery. I’ve lost entire Web sites due to a server crash, operator error or other snafu. If it happens to you, it’ll be too late to start thinking about a plan. (See here and here for the gory details.)
• Tech support: I’m good at this stuff, and I end up calling tech support from time to time. If you’re not experienced in working with Web servers, find a host with good tech support. (Note: don’t expect them to train you as a system administrator; but you should be able to ask a question and get a clear answer.)

Some businesses pay more for hosting. Why? Most hosts offer a shopping cart of some sort, but you can pay a bit more to use a host that specializes in e-commerce and reduce the setup time or have better support available. If there’s a good business reason to pay more, go ahead. Otherwise, save your coins.

TIP: beware the smallest companies — if they go out of business or are bought out by a competitor, your site could disappear or the services and pricing could change with little warning. (I once spent two weeks getting a site back after a host went missing — and took my site with them!)

Sometimes when I present my E-Biz seminars, an attendee is lost about the foundation of the Internet — what is it, exactly? Here it is, for those who like to start at the very beginning (a very good place to start)…

The Internet is a city (ooh, a metaphor!): There are roads, big and small; traffic lights that regulate traffic; homes and businesses that you can visit; and sometimes, traffic jams. Sure, the Internet is really a massive network of computers, all connected by wires and routers that pass information back and forth. But the metaphor helps: a Web server is akin to a home or business within the city. The wires of the network are like roads (some allow traffic faster than others). Every destination on the Web must have a unique address — that’s how the information gets from one place to another. There are even private roads and gated communities that you must have permission to use. Now, let’s mash up the metaphor…

A Web Server is usually a souped-up computer that runs Web server software designed to listen for, and respond to, requests for information. Think of it like a business in Internet City: It is always on and connected to the Internet, and it just hangs out and waits for a request to come its way. (Actually, Web hosts can handle many smaller Web sites per server machine, so in theory your Web site might reside on the same box as your competition.)

A Web Client is your computer, which connects to the internet in one of several ways. From the Web browser, you send requests for Web pages. These requests head out your driveway, make a right on Main, hop on the freeway, and finally arrive at the destination business (the Web server identified by the domain name you typed into the Browser’s Web Address box, or the Web Address of a hyperlink that you clicked on from another Web page). On arrival, your request identifies itself to the Web server and says, “Gimme the Home Page,” or whatever page you requested. Then it heads back to you. When you’re connected to the Internet, your computer has a unique identifier (your IP Number), so that the request can correctly find its way back to you. When it arrives back, information in tow, it presents this information to the Web Browser.

A Web Browser is really an interpreter of HTML, which is a way of marking up plain text so that it has formatting, style and shape. (See this bold text? It’s been marked up; otherwise, it would be plain.) Most people use Internet Explorer (IE) as their browser, but many Mac users use Safari, and more and more people (including me) are using FireFox. It doesn’t really matter, except that each interprets HTML a bit differently, and some Web page designers don’t bother to check that their pages work in anything but IE. So the browser takes the HTML and sets about arranging it on the page so you can view it. Images and other visual content are delivered separately from the HTML, so when the browser runs across an image placeholder withing the HTML page, it sends a new request to the Web Server: “Gimme image ‘logo.gif’.” Once that image arrives, it is placed into the page (that’s why, on slow dialup connections, the text loads first). If a Web page has HTML plus a dozen images, your browser will have sent thirteen requests to the Web server by the time the page is completely loaded. Same with movies and Flash animation, except they take longer because the file is bigger.

When you click another link, the process repeats: your request heads out the door, down the street, says “gimme” to the Web server, returns to you and hands the HTML to your browser so it can display a new page. All this happens in seconds…

…unless there’s traffic on the Interstate. Or the Web server’s getting a lot of customers at the moment your request arrives and yours has to wait… or the HTML markup has problems that slow the browser down… or the images are huge, so it takes longer for them to completely load.

Thus, the speed at which a Web page displays is dependent on several factors — but usually, it’s the total size of the HTML file plus all the images and other visual elements.

Summary: For your web site to work, several key things must be in place.

1. You must have a domain name (also known as a URL or web address).
2. Your domain name must point to a specific Web host running Web server software that hosts your Web site (the Web uses DNS records to keep track of which domains point to which hosts — kind of like the yellow pages).
3. The Web server must be on and accepting requests for HTML. (Sounds simple, but if the server crashes, so does your Web site.)
4. You must have placed at least one page of HTML on that Web host. If your page includes images or other visual files, these must also be placed on the Web server that hosts your site. If your page links to other HTML files, they must also be placed on the Web server. You probably created these on your personal computer, but for the site to work, they must be moved (”uploaded” or “published”) to the Web server. Or, you might have filled out a Web form and saved the files in that way, but in any case, all necessary files must be on the Web server.

Before you register www.myname.com, consider:

Choose carefully: pick a name that’s easy to say, easy to remember and easy to spell. Shorter is good, but easy and memorable is better. Avoid traps like these:

• TWOWRITE.COM: over the phone, you’d have to spell it out, or somebody’ll think it’s tooright.com.
• WHOREPRESENTS.COM: Who Represents makes sense, but when you cram the two words together, it reads differently.
• WHITEHOUSE.GOV: Be careful that mistyping will not send your customers to an unwanted site. In this famous real-life example, whitehouse.com was a porn site, and whitehouse.org is still a parody site of the real White House Web site. Imagine the kids’ surprise!

Domains are cheap these days. Consider getting alternates (misspellings, abbreviations, slogans, etc.). You can easily point more than one domain name to your main Web site.

A quick note about search engines: key words in your domain name help your site to show up when someone searches for that key word. So www.abccorp.com might help brand your company, but www.small-widgets.com will score higher with search engines if people are looking for “small widgets.” (For more on search engines, see SEO Basics.)

In my opinion, .com is preferred unless you’re a nonprofit or educational organization. (Maybe in the future, .biz or another variant will catch up).

TIP: Every registered domain name has one to four contact names, who are authorized to manage that domain. Be sure your name is listed as one of them! (I’ve spent weeks retrieving domains for clients who didn’t do this). For example, you can list yourself as the Administrative and Billing contact, and your Web Consultant as the Technical contact.

As you may know, Microsoft recently released a major upgrade to Internet Explorer (version 7.0) and about the same time, the Mozilla Foundation came out with Firefox 2. Both are major upgrades, but IE in particular is significant, since it had been so long since the last major upgrade (and since about 80-90 percent of your site’s visitors use IE). Later this month, the upgrade to IE7 will come down as part of the automatic updates for Windows users — in other words, many people are gonna upgrade without really realizing it.

Which means… people will be viewing your Web site a little differently than they used to — or, maybe, a lot differently.

When I build a site, I test in a variety of available browsers, and while a few minor differences are okay with me, I’m pretty certain the site looks right in the most likely browsers before it launches. So for me, a new set of browsers means going back and testing again.

I just finished testing all the Web sites I support using the new IE and the new FF. Good news across the board:

• The new IE interface is vastly improved (over the old IE6; IMO, however, FF is still better). For people who relish their rut, it’ll take a while before they get used to the new chrome — and I will no longer be able to tell people how to find the refresh button by saying, “it’s the one next to the back and forward buttons” — but overall it’s better. Most people won’t start using tabbed browsing right away (but eventually they will, and that’ll change their behavior a bit).
• In FF, my favorite new feature is the programwide spelling checker, which flags possible errors anywhere you can type. This’ll be great for Web-based e-mail (and, frankly, this blog — which would suffer from haste and stubby fingers, were it not for my esteemed brother’s eagle eyes).
• All my sites performed well in the new browsers. I’m happy to avoid major triage, but I’m also not too surprised: I generally insist on using Web standards rather than browser-specific widgets, and this is the payoff.

If you’ve got a Web site — especially if you’re using more-advanced functions like forms, javascript, browser-sniffing, or custom programming — you should test it to be sure it’s still working. (Or, I’ll be happy to do it for you…)

People are in a hurry, when they’re looking for something specific on the Web. They hit your homepage, and all they want to do is get off it — ideally, to the thing they’re looking for.

So, give them clear visual cues to help them along. Make your main navigation clear and simple. Don’t bury it in fancy design or distract from it with other page elements. Use terms that are clear, such as products, links, and contact us, rather than cute metaphors, such as first course, sampler, meet the chef (unless you’re a restaurant and that’s your menu). Beware of using easily confused categories like products and for sale. Finally, use dropdowns or tooltips to help further explain what’s where.

One of the crucial things I cover in my Web 101 for Business seminars is an overview of the development process for building a Web site from scratch. (Those of you used to project management life cycles will recognize the basic Plan > Develop > Test > Implement > Evaluate project cycle.) In the seminar, we cover each a bit. Here, for brevity, we’ll barely hit the main points.

First, a Plan: If you don’t know what you’re aiming at, how will you know if you hit it? Spend some time in this phase, and you’ll have better results.

• How will this help the business? (Save money? Increase revenue?)
• What’s my budget? How much time do I have to invest?
• What are my specific goals?
• What are my competitors doing? (what’s working — and what’s not working…)
• Who is my (specific) audience? What do I know about their needs/wants/preferences?
• What are the relevant marketplace trends and how can I get ahead of them?
• How will this integrate with my current business functions?
• How will I promote this site?
• How will I keep it all up-to-date?

Step 2: Develop Your Web Site

• Register a domain name (or names) and choose a Web host. Most people do these at the same time and through the same vendor, but it isn’t necessary. In fact, I recommend grabbing domain names early in the planning process, and then setting up the actual Web hosting when you’re ready for it.
• Design and build your site. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? You might hire somebody for some or all of this, or you might do it yourself with in-house staff. This is the exciting part, because all your planning pays off. Here’s a tip: build in some extra time and budget for surprises — even with careful planning, often when you see the first real product you’ll have an inspiration. Good ideas that will help the bottom line should be encouraged. Just be careful not to lose sight of the initial project scope.

Step 3: Test, Test and Test Again. You’re almost done and you’re tired. You just want to launch the durn thing, right? Wrong. If there’s a problem, it’s better if you find it before the ad campaign starts.

• Test your technologies to be sure they work.
• Check the pages in various Web browsers, computer platforms, display sizes, lighting conditions, download speeds, etc.
• Test your backup/disaster recovery plan.
• If you make any changes, retest carefully — sometimes last-minute changes will create new problems.

Step 4: Publish & Promote. Launching the site is usually easy — just publish the pages, etc. to your production Web site with the Home Page correctly named (as index or default). Now congratulate yourself, but not for long — ’cause there’s more work to be done.

Promotion is a major consideration in Web site strategies, and it deserves careful planning all on its own (probably a future post, so check back — meantime, see my post on Search Engine Basics). Even if you have a built-in audience, your promotion efforts will likely make a crucial difference in the success of the site.

5: Evaluate & Maintain. You should constantly monitor your site’s effectiveness, survey your customers (and complete strangers), review your competition, and track the effects of your promotion efforts. Likewise, maintaining a current site should be obvious — but we’re all busy, and if you don’t add regular updates to someone’s job description, it’ll quickly go south.