Before creating and uploading a website, it is important to take the time to plan exactly what is needed in the website. Thoroughly considering the audience or target market, as well as defining the purpose and deciding the content will be developed are extremely important. Websites and Blogs are living and breathing extensions of you and your business. They are rarely ever complete like a printed brochure.
Websites and Blogs require constant updates and refinement. You as the business owner or publisher of the Website or Blog will have to determine what your requirements are today and what they will be 2 years from now. Share your long term and short term requirements in WRITING with your partner. It is difficult to plan on what skills and tools will be required beyond 2 years for a small business. If the developer makes recommendations, take them, because you will thank them later on for their insights.When it comes to website design, less can often be more. Your website should load quickly and still be visually stimulating.
Try to maintain a consistency of look with any pre-existing marketing material you have in place. Avoid bombarding your visitors with tons of miscellaneous information and links, keep your content accurate and to the point, and be sure all of your links work correctly and that information is presented in an organized manner. Further development can allow you to take online orders, process payments, store customer info in a database, etc. The type of development you need will depend on what your company wants to accomplish with the website. The bottom line is that even a simple website should be beneficial to your organization when well designed. Usability is as much about code as it is about flow.
Your site should allow the user to see what they want to see, but also make them see what you want them to see. This is sometimes easier said than done. As an example of what I'm talking about, let's talk about ads. First of all, you can assume that the user looking at your site is looking at your site because they saw a keyword they were interested in (ie they searched Google for your sites topic). So whatever ads you include on your site should fit nicely with your main content. A great way to accomplish this is with Google Ad Sense, but that's another article. The point in this is that you want your ads to be relevant, but you also want them to grab the user's attention. The best place to do this is at the top or right-hand side of the page. If you have an article-based site or a blog, you may try to incorporate the ads into the content of your site by placing them between each paragraph. That way your users see ads about things they might want, and you want them to see the ads. This increases the overall usability of your website design.
