Website Design Checklist for Small Business Owners
Part I
This article is very basic and not all for IT guys and designers. It’s for people who own a business and do not have much idea about getting the design or structure of their website right. Very often I get customers who have no plans or lock themselves up with bare-bone ideas and become hesitant about putting in features. They are afraid that website visitors may find it complicated or the developer may fail to deliver correctly, resulting in an error-prone and hotchpotch site. Many do not realize that these days powerful features and facilities are available out of the box. A developer only needs to integrate or install.
Brochure Website Vs Digital Shop
Firstly, what is your objective for building a website? Are you planning a Brochure Website or a Digital Shop?
Brochure Website: It is common for people to downgrade the potential of a website to a brochure. If someone asks about their business they will simply refer to their website. So it functions like a brochure. And that’s it. There is nothing beyond. For most website developers this is a happy scenario. They don’t need to keep updating and taking on competing websites.
Digital Shop: In this day and age websites are a part of your digital presence. A website is a digital shop where people can buy, book or enquire. Websites can generate leads. You only need a few more features. When running a digital advertising campaign you typically need a website. If you are engaging a web designer why lower the potential to an “About us Brochure” for a small amount, when you can have a digital shop with product details, booking facility, Whatsapp connectivity for clarifications, popup form for lead capture, etc. A digital shop also goes hand in hand with Digital Marketing. But we will come to that later.
Pages, Links & Written Content
Many people focus on Menu Names, Heading text, and Link names and ask us if we can do it. For us these are texts. What you want, we type or copy-paste and, it gets displayed. There is no skill required to give a name to a Menu Link. What you need is the more written content. The more written content the more designs or layouts a designer can come up with. A business site should not be only pictures because they load slowly in a mobile connection and Google, Bing, etc cannot understand the subject matter of your page without text. This affects ranking in Google Search etc. There are many ways to format and present content. A very useful format is FAQs in accordion style.
Sample : Web Design Offers
Get Quality Pictures
Many pictures look fine at a casual glance. But pictures with uneven brightness, faded colors, dark patches, etc spoil the look of a website to a great extent. Pictures should look good even after compression. Uncompressed images slow down your site. Besides various picture compression tools in the web-like Compressjpg, the Microsoft Picture Manager is a nice free tool that helps you crop, rotate, resize, and compress pictures easily.
Very often clients send us pictures which can destroy the brand image. We do not realize that pictures are taken from a mobile often look good on mobile only. When displayed full screen on a PC, the colors are sometimes not rich enough. A digital camera, even a low-end model, often gives better pictures as they have a bigger lens which takes in more light. For free images, Pixabay and Unsplash are great sites to download from.
Choosing a Hosting Package – Some Hints
I have purchased a domain, do I need a hosting package? This is a question I have heard many times. Your domain name is just an ID or name. You need a server (a host) where your website (software) will reside. Hosting providers have few types of packages or plans. Simple shared hosting plans do not allow you to increase RAM. It’s fixed.
How much RAM do you need? If all your website is going to do is display text and picture, you do not need much RAM. WordPress, for example, is configured to use 40 MB RAM at the front end. Some Plugins (WordPress software component) however require 512 MB when you use them after login at the backend or admin panel. How many users are going to login to use some web application software on your website? Only your developer can make an estimate of RAM requirement per user in case of such a scenario.
How much load can it take? Most low-end packages will not support 5 clicks per second. Because they put in limits on the use of Operating System and System resources like entry processes, IOPS, I/O Usage, etc. However, 5 clicks per second is a high figure. Because people do not indulge in rapid-fire clicks the moment the webpage shows up. So it could be 100 plus concurrent users plus before you get 5 clicks per second.
Should I buy the Unlimited Disk Space Plan? How much disk space do I need? In one hosting package, I installed 20 WordPress websites and it shows 6 GB used. It’s an Unlimited Disk Space Plan. Yet I can’t install anymore. It says you have used up all your Inodes (whatever that is). Other companies have told me “you have exceeded our fair use policy”. How do companies get away which such false labeling? How I wish I was Hulk or Gulliver.
Whom are you buying from? Despite all the misleading packages it can be safer to stick to well-known brands. Many small providers essentially buy from bigger providers, re-label it and put in more locks in the use of server resources. They don’t even know how to configure a server for maximum compatibility, with various applications out there on the web. When something does not work they blame the developer. It’s a common scenario. Don’t believe me, check with developers.
Here is a typical package explanation. They vary from company to company though. It’s oversimplified so that you can spot the critical differences.
Hosting Providers often partition a high-end server into about 15 VPSes and load up to 50 websites in a VPS. Where did I get this figure? This is what a hosting provider was telling me about “what competitors do”. In hosting companies the database servers are usually separate machines. We will discuss a little about Server Speed in Part III.
How much did you pay for your domain name? Many new fancy domain names cost you very little in the first year. They cost 2x plus in subsequent years. Check out!
… to be continued in Part II.
You will find Part II and III here. Small Business Owners Website Design Checklist
