Let’s say you are a small business owner with a brick and mortar business and you want your business to be known. Back in the “olden” days (mid to late 1900’s), business owners would put a listing in the Yellow Pages. If they wanted more exposure for their business, they would have a bigger listing or take out an ad in the Yellow Pages. The listing would include the business name, address and phone number as well the business owners would also list some services or list a special to entice customers to call them versus one of their competitors in the Yellow Pages.
With the advent of the internet, businesses have turned to the web for listing information about their business. It is critical for every business, brick and mortar or online based to have a website. Let me restated that and bold it here: It is critical for every business, brick and mortar or online based business to have a website. Why? Because more people take to the internet to find a business that they need. More searches are being performed on smartphones app company hong kong than on desktop computers.
FUN FACT: Did you know that there are 40,000 searches a second on Google every single day. That is over 3.5 billion searches a
How many people do you think are opening up the Yellow Page Book to look for a business? I searched the internet for that answer; let me know if you find the answer because I couldn’t.
Sure there are plenty of reviews websites and listing-type websites that will list businesses (some for free, some are paid listings). These sites will list businesses even if you don’t have a website for your business. However, to have your business appear to be more legit, you need to have your own domain name and your own website personalized and tailored to your business. Later in this book we are going to model a new website around a brick and mortar business in the plumbing industry.
I did a quick online search for “plumbers”. 3 popped up that are near me. Two have their own websites, one does not. If I was looking for a plumbing repair for my home, I would 100% of the time check out a business that has a website before even considering a business without a website. After viewing their websites, my next criteria for deciding on who I call first is the quality of the website. If plumber “A” had a website, but it didn’t look too professional and plumber “B” did have a website that was clean and professional, I would call plumber “B” first.
Later on we are going to look at two different plumbing companies that have their own websites so we can get an idea of how to model our new website. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s do some planning.
Planning Our Website
First and foremost, you must have a plan for the site. Not to sound too cliché, but “failing to plan is planning to fail”. There must be a reason why you want to have a website. One cannot just say, “I want a website” and poof, there is your website. It doesn’t take a day to plan, build, develop and publish a website. But it also doesn’t take a year. Your goal at this stage is to learn how to plan for your web design hk so that when you do start coding, you aren’t typing, “Welcome to my first website” just to turn around later and rewrite it into something more useful.
What do you want to accomplish with your website? In this book, we are using an example that we are planning on building a simple website for our plumbing business. Since we are a beginner web developer, it would be best to learn and practice with some static pages (informational, non-changing pages) vs. a dynamic (web page information changes based on visitor’s choices) web page. Our static pages will be laid out nicely and use proper techniques for color choices, fonts, images and use of whitespace. Since we aren’t doing any actual coding here, we can use this practice with any type of website, including a WordPress website.
Your Website As A Digital Brochure
Think of these static pages like a brochure for your business. The front of the brochure would have a nice image of your business or services and some general information about your business. Turn the page of the brochure and you would see more detailed information about your services and/or products that you offer. On the back page of the brochure, you may find contact information about your business. That’s what we will be planning for our website here.
We will find basic but informative details about our business along with some nice eye-catching images. Our brochure is a tangible item that you can see and touch. We need to make our website feel like a tangible item so that our visitors can learn more about our business. So think of your website almost like a brochure, something well laid out, something with nice
