Small Business and the Web

There is no question that small businesses need to have an online presence. A new business owner should have the name, function, hours and contact information online at the very least. If there is a potential customer exploring options chances are very good that they will look to Google. When the new sales prospect looks in a search engine to locate a product or service, you want to let them know your business is there.

Topics a small business needs to explore involve a review of three basics:

1. Budget - The Budget can range from $500 to $5,000 of setup depending on the requirements.

2. Design - Take a look at some websites. When you find one you like, copy the address to send it to your website builders. The best way to get the design you like is good communication.

3. Content - Gather as much marketing material as you can. The more you gather, the better informed your visitors will be.

Find a website firm you trust. Just like an accountant, it will be an ongoing relationship.

Morgue Files

A great tool for any designer is images. An emotion or point of view is emphasized well with a pointed image or two. A fantastic collection to use free of charge is at morguefiles.com. This collection has a wide variety that is sure to compliment a blog post or web page. Animals, objects, people and so much more. For creatives by creatives and free to use personally or for commercial sites. Check out the Morguefile license and get ready to get creative!

Learning ASP.net

The focus of Creativ Code for the next few months will be learning ASP.net. ASP.net is a structured form of ASP. A Microsoft developed framework, ASP.net encompases thousands of objects aimed at producing a rich user interface. There are two languages widely used for the .NET framework, C# and Visual Basic. The code I decided to focus on is C#. Why? C# is structured for .NET and was written primarily for .NET. There are two approaches that I am taking. First is "ASP.net 3.5 Unleashed" , a bear of a book 34 chapters but one which my Web Development Professor assured would have everything I needed. Second is the development of a web site that offers information to consumers from other consumers. I hope that you as a reader will take away some of what I learn along the way to use for your own project.

Content

Content of the website is just as important to the design and the functionality,and well written content can put you in with the higher ranks on Google. The small business site developer, however, usually will rely on the client to put it together. When doing the initial sales call it is important that it is understood that development and content are two separate tasks. Get as much information about the business as possible to create a final product that stands out from the rest. In the sales stage, give the client a rough estimate of the number of pages he/she has to work with primarily to give a cost estimate. When the contract has been signed that gives a cost to the client and a completion time for developer, the work begins. Give the client an outline of what websites normally include such as a background on the company, where The location of the business is, and contact information. Ask what they want the website to convey to the people visiting, etc. The text should be submitted to you in a .txt file, but always be willing to work with the client to get the site up as soon as possible. Keyword and rich content gets the search engine rank up and promotes a click through.

CSS

CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, were created for placing elements on the web page. Before CSS, if there was anything other than text on a web page, it was placed by a clever use of tables and images. CSS style sheets place elements precisely on the page and can do so much more. W3Schools has a tutorial that covers the basics and gives some examples in a screen that allows you to try out different scenarios.The Zen Garden is a website that offer some insight into the beauty of CSS. Graphic artists showcase extraordinary CSS accomplishments. They are all given the same HTML and the only difference between the works is an external CSS file. Zen Garden also references a resource guide that cover hacks, designs and tutorials. Though CSS is fully integrated there is still some debate on wether it makes sense to switch an established site to completely CSS. The Firefox browser offers an addon called Firebug that is a brilliant tool that enables viewing real time effects of changes made to the CSS file. The CSS file is usually called when the page is loaded from a link tag within the head tag set. <head> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mystyle.css"/><head/>

Images

Photo editing software standard for the industry is Adobe Photoshop, however there are several less expensive alternatives that will work just fine for a basic site.
There are a few rules to adhere to when creating and publishing images on the web. Speed , format, and colors. Speed is a function of the size of the image. There is no need to have an image for the web any more detailed than 72-100 ppi(pixels per inch). There is a tool in most photo editing software to save the image for the web. This is one of the best features for optimizing an image. The formats that are compatible with all browsers are JPEG, GIF, and PNG. Images that have vivid contrast and large areas of a single color are better in GIF, and images like photographs that use continuous tones are more suited to JPEG. Most monitors today conform to true color which can display 16 million colors. 16 million colors gives the developer an ability to use any type of photography.Strict xhtml will require text alt tags for photos. It's always a good idea to include keywords in the alt tag to increase searchability.

Menus

Menus can make or break a site. There needs to be a flow to the information that keeps the person visiting interested in what information there is and where to find the information. A totally CSS,javascript menu system makes good sense because there is cross browser compatibility. There are plenty of sites that offer templates or tutorials for navigational menus and most are fully customizable. If time is precious in getting the website functional there is the option of a buying and downloading a ready to go navigational menu creation software. There are many support forums throughout the internet that provide access to many problem solving techniques for CSS menus. Using frames can isolate the menu from the main content but this system has pros and cons. There is the benefit of not rewriting the navigation code to every page, but can get complicated if there are several frames being used,or the person accessing the site is using a browser that is not frames compatible. For example, the index page consisting of a main frame and a navigation frame would be alot less complicated than one with a header, footer, navigation and main frame.