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For many of our customers having a website is a new adventure and they don’t really know where to begin. At the very least it is a good idea to determine what the primary goal is for your website. Do you need a basic online business profile where customers can learn about your business or do you need something more advanced with a shopping cart or customer login portal? Taking a look at your main competitors is a great place to start as well. Ultimately your web designer should be able to help you decide what is best for your business needs.
Every website can benefit from a certain level of SEO. Even if it just making sure that your website code and markup has been optimized for search engines to crawl and index. Essentially you want to make sure that people can find your website using Google at the very least. A great question to ask yourself is to determine how large of a part your website is going to play in your business’s overall success. If you do business in a competitive industry than SEO is probably going to be something that you need to commit to for an ongoing amount of time.
Typically there are two ways that a website is made. One way is to completely custom make a website from scratch where designers create a layout in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and “cut” that image into code such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This method is generally more labor-intensive but sometimes necessary if the website needs to be custom designed or needs to have custom applications or user experiences.
The other method is to use a Content Management System or CMS to build a website that is usually based on a customizable theme. As a company, we heavily favor and recommend WordPress but there are other popular platforms like Drupal, WIX, and Squarespace etcetera. A designer can help you determine if a CMS is right for your online goals. In general, however, these solutions help cut down on design and development costs and enable the user to manage their own website once it has been created and designed by a professional.
PPC stands for pay-per-click and is a great way to bring more online visitors to your website. The most popular method is by using Google Adwords to create the account and determine what keywords you want your website to show in the search results when typed into the search engine.