Although Facebook and other social media platforms are constantly offering new and creative ways to reach out to constituents, there is no substitute yet for the good “old-fashioned” website. A well-thought-out website with a design that reflects your business style is a must.
Here are some basic things to keep in mind about a website for your business:
Websites give you the ability to change content quickly and cheaply, making it easy to keep information up-to-date and showcase the latest items you have to offer. Printing a brochure does not afford you that ease of change—to keep costs down, brochures need to be printed in high numbers, meaning you may still have hundreds left when you want to change something on it. You will need to decide whether to pay to have your website designer change content or learn how to do it yourself.
Customers can readily get information, or more information, about your business just by looking at your website. In the food industry, this might mean weeding out a lot of phone calls from those who quickly discover you are not for them, saving you time to focus on production or the customers actually in your store instead of talking on the phone.
You can track the results of your marketing efforts more easily with website “hits,” questions, and follow-through sales you get from your site.
You are open 24/7/365.
Mobile-device-friendly websites have been around awhile. With the use of smartphones for web searching continuing to increase and the closer we get to the wrist-worn smartphone being in common use, the world is on the verge of a yet another paradigm shift in the way we use computers. Creating a website that is more easily viewed on these smaller devices can be a smart move.
Many people still choose to download the entire website no matter what device they are using, so if you don’t want to spend the money on having a separate site created, it’s not the end of the world. However, the more easily used your website is, the more it will be used.
If you are adept at computer software and want to design your own website, you might be perfectly suited to creating your own site, especially if it’s going to be an information-only site that won’t need the complications of interactive features.
However, no matter who designs your website, you need to be sure it is professional looking. Just like when you are meeting a potential customer in person, you need your website to express your business’s style and culture. Check out websites of food business in your same category and take notes on what they offer that you think is a must and what is not so pertinent to your business or customers.
If you don’t feel like you can create the right website, don’t hesitate to hire a professional web design company. The cost is not necessarily out of reach, but be sure to hire a company with the ability to do what you want it to do. You will also incur monthly charges to have it “hosted”—someone with a large server keeps everything coming and going. Hosting fees can range from as little as $30 a month to several hundred, depending on the complexity of your web business.
Usually included in the hosting fee is a certain amount of monthly changes. However, it is highly recommended that you not only learn to make changes to your website yourself but also that your contract allows for you to do that. This is critical, even if it requires sending a staff person to a class to learn HTML or whatever language your website operates with. Internet users today expect websites to be dynamic. Most food businesses change up their products regularly. If you have a storefront, your hours may change seasonally, you may constantly be running new events, or you may want to showcase publicity you are receiving, so keeping your website up-to-date with all this changing information is a must.
Before you hire a designer, look at lots of other websites and give the designer ideas on what you like and don’t like. Your designer will likely provide you with a few options that you can choose from, either in their entirety or plucking bits and pieces from each.
Find web designers by searching online or noticing who designed the sites you like. The designer doesn’t have to be local to design your site—everything can be done, well, online!
You can also buy “template” web designs—you fill the details into a basic design. There are many template companies to choose from, such as weebly.com, web.com, wordpress.org, or baskweb.com, which includes a shopping cart system. You don’t have to be a computer programming wiz as they are designed to be put together by anyone with basic computer skills. Some wireless networks offer the ability to create a website through them. GoDaddy and other domain hosting sites also have templates, although they may cost a modest fee to use.
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Using a template doesn’t mean you need to or should create a cookie cutter website—creative and changing content will make your site stand on its own.
But if your business is a little complex, pay the price for having one designed by a professional. Perhaps your business is not complex now, but who knows what the future holds. If you have plans to expand, you will want a website that can easily expand with you.
The design of your site should be simple yet comprehensive. By the time people have spent a few minutes on your website, they should have a pretty good sense of what you offer—and whether your business is the right one for their needs.
If your business has a mail order component, you will need to have your designer figure out the best shopping cart platform and cash-out system for your type of consumer. Shoppers expect to be able to do the whole shopping experience, soup to nuts, online.
As you create your website, these are “must-haves”:
Homepage
“Contact Us” page
“About Us” page
Testimonials from customers. Use real names (only with permission), not initials after the quotes, if possible.
Photos (make sure you have permission from not only the photographer but from any recognizable people)
Your business’s logo and address. If your business is a retail location, your address should appear on all of the pages of your website—don’t make people dig for the basic information they want/need or to figure out whose website they are on and where you are.
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There is no quicker way to undermine your credibility than to maintain a sloppy website. Be sure that words are not misspelled. Misspelled words reflect carelessness and a lack of professionalism. It’s worth spending a few bucks to pay someone to proofread your site before going live. And keep it up-to-date. Outdated information makes you look like you are out of business.
Viewers will first come to your “homepage” (also called a “landing page” if this is where a search will land viewers) where you will introduce them to your business and tempt them to spend some time on your site browsing other pages—and ultimately be enticed enough to pick up the phone and place an order, visit your retail location, or whatever it is you hope to inspire them to do by visiting your website.
You should include a short “Our Story” section either right on your home page or in a drop down menu. This is chance for people to feel like they understand your business, can relate to you, and therefore want to do business with you—but don’t go into such detail that you lose them right at the homepage!
Be catchy but avoid being too clever. The web customer should open to your site and immediately know they got what they are looking for. Be sure your name and contact information is right there (you would be surprised by websites that don’t have the business name on every page, including the home page, leaving viewers wondering whose site they are on!). Be sure any pictures are of the highest quality to reflect the quality of your goods.
You don’t need and don’t want to show everything you do right at the start. First off, the “landing page” that the viewer comes to might take too long to download, which will be frustrating and cause the viewer to move on to the next thing before you are able to snag him into looking more into your business. Keep the homepage simple but informative.
Include a menu of items along one edge of your homepage—top or either side—with headings that the viewer can click on to get to that section of your site. Think of it like the signs you see overhead in the grocery store or the pharmacy—direct people to the sections they are interested in. The person who came to your site probably has one specific interest—catering menus, your retail schedule, what your next batch of fresh jam is going to be—and doesn’t want to have to view everything you are up to. Make it easy for the website visitor to find what is particularly relevant to them. Here are some ways to do that.
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Update the look of your website every couple of years, perhaps, but don’t change it so often that repeat viewers aren’t sure if they got to your site or not. And when you do plan to update, plan to provide some teasers a couple months in advance so your regular customers and viewers know to expect a different look.
Each time the viewer clicks a button on your website they get further into your site. This can be accomplished in two ways—one is with a “pop-up window” where, when they click on a category, the new section pops up over the main page and when they are finished browsing and close it out, they end up at the page they started from. The other “drills” them further and further into your site. Drilling down like this is a common way that websites are set up but it can get frustrating if the user can’t easily get back to a point where they saw something they wanted to look at further. One way to help this is to always have a “home” link/button on every page—all they have to do is click “home” to get them back to the beginning and find their way forward again from there. It’s like having Dorothy’s ruby red slippers on your site at all times—unlike for poor Dorothy, make sure it’s clear how easy it is to get home without having to deal with flying monkeys and sleep-inducing poppies before getting there.
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When writing the text for your website, be careful not to use “business speak.” Terms like “POS” and “Deliverables” are not meaningful to the general public who is looking at your website.
Your homepage is one of the most important parts of your website. If you don’t capture your visitors at the homepage, they are unlikely to go any further than that. But if your homepage does what it needs to do, viewers landing there will be intrigued enough by your photos and your text to move to the other areas of your site.
If yours is a relatively complicated specialty food business, you want a button for each area of your business. For example, Stonewall Kitchens’ website has buttons along the top that include “Specialty Foods,” “Tableware,” “Recipes,” and “Barn Sale,” among others. They also have a list of buttons down the side that expand upon those buttons and include things like “Cooking School” and “Corporate Gifts.” This allows the viewer to really home in on that part of the business that she went to the site for to begin with. Now hopefully she will be intrigued enough to click on other things (like the yummy picture of “tropical fruit jam”), but if not, you haven’t irritated the viewer having to dig for the pertinent information.
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Always include your business’s name, address, and phone number on every page of your website. Once customers have drilled a few pages down into your site, they don’t want to have to backtrack all the way back to your homepage just to get your contact information.
Most websites will have their overarching category buttons running across the top, since they will all appear when you open the site and won’t run off the bottom of the page. If you only have a few categories, then that might not be an issue. Whatever you do, be sure it is designed as much for ease of use as for looks.
There was a time when websites were mainly marketing and information pieces—people came to the site to view what you do and offer, then called to talk with you directly. That is still an important role for a website. However, with the ease of use of today’s technology, keep in mind that people are often browsing websites at 11:00 at night from the mobile phone while on the commuter train—they can’t call you and speak to you then! If they have an impulse to contact you about placing an order, it should be possible to do that directly from your website.
For simple contact, be sure to have an email button. If you have employees but decide to have only one email address, be sure to have a mechanism in place to communicate to other employees email that is directed toward their function within the business.
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Few things will make a visitor click away from a website than finding outdated information. Keep anything that is time sensitive current and regularly change anything that makes your site appear dated, such as a reference to an event long past.
A good tool to make it clear to viewers that this is an active website is to have something on the site that requires a date—an archive of press releases, a copyright date that changes at least annually, or a link to your blog with current entries are some ways that visitors landing on your site see that it is current.
Nothing deters a viewer faster than going to a list of events that have all already happened—if you have a long list of events, it’s fine to keep the old ones on to show viewers what they missed. Be sure there are always upcoming events listed, even if it’s labeled “date to be determined.” Have at least something that will show viewers that the site is being updated. If not, they will suspect that everything on the site might be old.
Once you have created your website, don’t keep it a secret! While your website may be in cyberspace, be sure your web address is on every printed piece you create for your business—letterhead, business cards, print advertisements, newsletters (print and enewsletters), radio ads—everything that has to do with your business should announce your web address. Put the address in your answering machine message. Make sure it is on the door of your storefront if you have one so anyone walking by who either doesn’t have time to come in or wanders by during your off hours knows they can find you on the internet.
All of this is especially important if your web address is considerably different from your business name—which is not recommended, but sometimes can’t be avoided, as in the instance that another or business has already taken a web domain name similar, or even the same, as your name.
Your website has to have a unique address, called a URL or “domain name,” that will be used on the server it resides on. Using the name of your business is your best choice; if another business is already using the name you’ve chosen for your business, pick the next closest name; sometimes just adding the town your business is in is sufficient—greatcupcakesboston.com will immediately tell searchers that they have found you if someone already has greatcupcakes.com.
Get People Clicking
There’s no point to having a website if you don’t do what you can to get people to click on it. Here are some tips for attracting customers to your website:
Simply tell all your friends and family and ask them to tell all their friends and family.
Do the appropriate search engine registration (some web services will do this for you).
Make sure every printed and online piece you send to anyone has your website URL listed prominently.
Suggest visitors bookmark your site.
Trade web advertising with other websites.
Create contests with giveaways that drive people to your site.
Change your website content regularly to keep people coming back to see what’s new.
Join online discussion groups.
If you do public speaking, always mention your site.
Provide an “expert” column to newspapers and make sure to mention your website.
Connect your website to social media links (see Chapter 12 on social media for other ideas).
These are just a few of a long list of ideas for getting people to come to your website in the first place, keep coming back, and to encourage them to tell everyone they know. Click around to websites in businesses similar to yours or in any category that interests you, see what catches your eye, and get other creative ideas to drive people to your site.
Domain names must be registered for a minimum of two years, after which you can renew them. The cost to register a name for two years is quite reasonable, typically under $100 per name. You will likely register with the suffix .com but you can also register .net and others (and even more suffixes are being created) even if you don’t plan to use them so a similar businesses doesn’t snatch it up. There are several companies that handle registration; GoDaddy and Domain.com are two well-known ones.
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It can’t be emphasized enough how useful it is to spend time looking at other businesses’ websites, particularly in your category, before you design your own—whether you do it yourself or hire a designer. Keep a checklist of what you like and don’t like about these websites and incorporate these findings in your design plans. Choose colors, typefaces, and other stylistic elements that you feel work on other websites.
Once you get visitors checking out your site, there are some ways to keep them there as long as possible. The longer they are there, the more likely they are to look at everything you have to offer and find something they would like to purchase—or tell their friends who are ready for a food purchase.
Ethical (and Legal) Concerns
A brief word on copyright, fair use, and intellectual property concerns when it comes to your website.
It is not okay to use other people’s writing, articles, blurbs, photos, and/or music on your website without permission. Just because it is on their website and in cyberspace and you are not printing or selling their work does not make it okay for you to use it for free. If there is something you really want to use, that you think is perfect for your website and what you are trying to get across, by all means attempt to gain permission to use it. But if you can’t figure out who owns it or can’t make contact with the owner/creator, find something else, create something yourself, or hire someone to create something that you will own and can use however you would like.
Be sure they know immediately whose website they have landed on. Make it easy for them to contact you by having a “contact us” button that makes it simple for them to send you a message.
Keep your website fun and changing. Do contests, puzzles, or whatever you can for fun interaction, but always connect it to your business.
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Check out http://sitebuilder.com, www.web.com, or www.weebly.com for inexpensive web design solutions. Cheap or even free, these companies offer templates for website design, free domain names, and a web host site. Weebly, for instance, offers a basic template for free; more complex, customized sites cost a fee. These sites are good for startup purposes until you have some income and business success to have a site designed to exactly meet your needs.
You must select a service to host your website. Examples of well-known web hosts include DreamHost, GoDaddy, and HostGator, but there are many, many smaller hosts available.
Before choosing a web host, ask these questions:
How often does the site go down?
How long does it take to fix the site when it goes down?
What is its customer support system?
How many incoming lines does the server have?
What is the server’s experience with high-traffic sites?
How big is the server?
The price of web fame starts as low as $14.95 per month. Some of the hosts will also allow you to register your domain at the same time.