Small Business Website Checklist

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I have been spending a lot of time on small business websites recently, and the quality of them in general is fairly disappointing. And since there seems to be some confusion over what a small business website should contain, here is a handy checklist:

The small business website checklist

  • Name
  • Photos (outside and inside)
  • Location
  • Opening hours
  • Services
  • Active social feeds
  • About the business
  • About the owners
  • Testimonials
  • Prices
  • FAQs

Let’s go through each of these one-by-one:

  • Name is obvious – I include it here merely to have a complete list
  • Photos – As a user, I need an outside photo to see more easily where I am going (particularly true for accommodation) and I need photos of the inside so that I can try and judge the quality of the place.
  • Location – I need the exact location. Ensure that is right on your map. Draw a map with nearby landmarks if it makes it clearer where you are (e.g if you are off a main road).
  • Opening hours – Don’t make me call up for these. Just don’t. If you have ‘normal’ opening hours you still need to tell me that.
  • Services – You cannot put down too much detail about what you do. For example, most bicycle shops can carry out a bicycle service. Not many go to the trouble of detailing exactly what the service entails, along with a pricing for it. This sort of thing really drives home the value that the customer is getting.
  • Active social feeds. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Keep these reasonably up-to-date (postings within a week in slow times). If it is too much work for you, focus on fewer outlets and remove links to dead feeds from your site.
  • About the business – how long you are going, how you have changed, future plans perhaps – be concise but tell as much of your story as will interest others.
  • About the owners – this is a follow-on from the previous point. What drove you to start the business? How do you differentiate yourself from others? Why do you like doing this work? What makes you qualified to do it?
  • Testimonials – don’t go overboard with these, just try having two or three. The line of business that you are in will determine how credible they are. Aim for testimonials from people whose identity can be verified.
  • Pricing – somehow this seems to get left out of websites. It is absolutely vital that you include this. If your service is bespoke then include examples. But don’t just leave it out or tell people to call you. The internet exists so that people don’t have to call you.
  • FAQs – Frequently asked questions should be as extensive as possible while remaining relevant. Put in every question about your business that you can think of.

Get your small business website right and convert prospects to customers quickly and effectively. All of the above apply to you. Put in the work and your rewards will come.

 

Web content strategy – your website message

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What is the reason you exist?

Or, to be more accurate, ‘why does your website exist?’ – this will come out of your web content strategy. What does your website do better than every other website out there? If you can’t answer that then you can’t think of a reason for people to visit your site.

If you know the answer, if it is ‘the best value furniture in X area’ or ‘the most comprehensive guide to y area’, or ‘the best way to waste time at work’ then great. How are you communicating this?

On the header of cycleireland.ie, I have a tagline. I chose to put the three most important pieces of information into this, so that it would be entirely explicit what my site did.

The tagline

Web content strategy in the tagline

Web content strategy in the tagline

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Gather Content – organise your content

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Gather Content (www.gathercontent.com) is an intriguing new way of organising your content planning. There, of course, are various methods you can use, starting with the trusty old spreadsheet (it’s a classic for a reason).

Gather Content is a piece of cloud software that does a few neat things. Once you enter the content that you have, and need to plan, you can assign each piece to an individual and give it a deadline. A content map is automatically created, which is great, but the pages are not clickable, which is a disappointment.

You can assign a current state to each piece of content – a feature reminiscent of WordPress.

When you would use Gather Content

Gather Content appears to come into its own when managing multiple different projects as you can do it all in one place.  You can give elaborate structures to pages beyond defining what text is required. The ability to make notes on an individual page is neat, and this is the area in which it goes far beyond the spreadsheet concept. You can attach images and metadata to individual pages.

Gather Content Logo

Gather Content Logo

While it feels a little early stage, it is a promising piece of software. The more complex your planning is, probably the more likely you would be to benefit form it. For any content strategist, it is worth taking a look to see if it is a fit for you.

 

What is Content Management?

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Content Management is misunderstood by many people. They don’t know what  a content manager does exactly.

Well it’s easy to answer. Content Management is the generation and publication of information for your users. This information will be different for different organisations. An online store will have info on products, returns, delivery times etc. A company’s intranet will have info on company policies, background, strategies and plans etc.

An online magazine will have articles, quizzes, photo galleries and more. A forum  will have numerous threads (usually requiring monitoring) and info on policies.

The types of content possible are numerous and varied. You need to determine what is useful to your users and what they want, and manage your resources so that you can give them as much as possible.

Content Management

Content Management

Content Management and Content Strategy

Content strategy involves the analysis of data and the investigation of your users’ needs and wants. Through this you will identify what you most need to provide for them and examine what you can provide with the resources that you have. Who will you target and how will you attract them?

Once you have decided this, you then move on to the planning phase.

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Web Content Planning – 1 easy tip

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Web Content Planning can be tricky to pin down accurately. Creating a new page can take an hour or a day or more, depending on how well you know the subject and on what exactly you need to do. Here is a method I have been using to finish the content required for the launch of the Cycle Ireland App – a process which has lasted over 6 months.

I mentioned Workflowy as a great project management tool and a way to keep everything in one place. But I found it lacking as a task tracker. For this I will use trusty old Microsoft Excel.

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Workflowy Review

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Workflowy is an apparently simple but extremely clever tool to manage your projects.

You start by writing a list.

Click on any item on this list and you can now write another list underneath it.

Click on any item in this sub list and you can now – yep – write another list beneath it, and so on.

Breadcrumbs allow you to navigate up and down the levels easily.

Workflowy Logo

Workflowy

The clever part is that you can delve into a lower list in 2 ways, by isolating it on its own page or by viewing it as part of its parent list.

Everything is stored in the cloud, but you can continue to work offline. It won’t save until you are back online, but you can export everything if that is a problem.

It is really neat to keep an overview of your upcoming tasks, divided into neat and easy to read sections, and to keep them all in one place.

The other clever part is that you can tag every task. You can label everything either #critical, #soon, #medium or #longterm (as an example). Then you can instantly pull up a list of your #critical tasks and knock them off, then scan your #soon tasks. You can label them for days or dates. You have complete freedom to organise your work in the way that you want it.

You can outline a content plan and add notes on any item at any time, which are neatly hidden in the ordinary view.

The key thing to remember is that everything can be a list, once you think about it in the right way.

There are free and paid versions of Workflowy.

Workflowy review conclusion

As things stand, I am currently measuring my work in blocks of time, which (to my current understanding) doesn’t suit Workflowy, but I am using it to keep track of high-level tasks which will stretch over the next few months. People use it in various ways, and everybody should check it out.

Logo Design Tips

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In July of 2012 I got my logo designed for cycleireland.ie. I had put the task off for a while as I was nervous about ending up with something that I didn’t like, and I felt that a bad logo would leave the whole project looking about as attractive as a tramp in a heatwave’s underpants.

#1 Don’t stress over it

That was my first mistake – I attached too much importance to it. Logos can be amended, improved and changed at will. It is not the most important thing in the world. There is a very clear process to follow. If you end up with a bad result just examine what went wrong, change what you need to change and start again. If you don’t have time to do that, review it an appropriate later date and keep that in mind when you are doing any printing work.

#2 Verbalise what you want

Some people have the idea that they don’t want to influence their graphic designer and would prefer that they come up with a blue sky idea. If you are one of those people, you are a designer’s nightmare, and they are only working with you because better people won’t hire them. You don’t want to be in this situation.

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Web images – bigger is better

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As broadband speeds slowly – painfully slowly – improve in country after country, it’s important to look at how that impacts the web content that we create. Web images are second only to videos in their impact on downloading times for your site.

Web images can now be used more creatively

Optimising your images has long been vital to having efficient sites, but it is time to loosen the restrictions we place on our image sizes, if we haven’t done so already. Web design is trending towards larger and larger imagery, and if yours is any good you should show it off in its most impressive way.

I have just reworked Cycle Ireland to make all of the imagery bigger and more prominent (that’s not a tautology – I placed it higher up in the page so that it is the first thing the user sees on a route page). In optimising images my only priority was how good they looked. File size came a very distant second. That said, all of the images were jpgs, and from my experience you get no discernible benefit with a file size above 80% of the maximum.

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How to be an entrepreneur

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How to be an entrepreneur: 5 lessons from 2012

I spent much of 2012 working on cycleireland.ie – making exploring Ireland by bike easy. The site has just been reworked to its second iteration (but I like to think of this as its birth) in preparation for a product launch in April. It has been a brutal but enjoyable learning experience in how to be an entrepreneur. I learned a few things (I think – I might think the exact opposite of all the points below in twelve months time).

Cycle Ireland on Mobile - my lesson in how to be an entrepreneur

Cycle Ireland on Mobile

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