world wide web 101: getting your feet wet
a series on the care and feeding of your website
by julie parker, web goddess

Most of my web design clients start our interaction with a confession: "I'm new to all this Web stuff. I don't understand much about it yet."
It's not surprising—there is no reason you should know all the ins and outs of a field that is new to you, and is hardly a decade old itself. Here is a true/false quiz to help your learning curve in preparation for your first website.

"Build it and they will come." All you have to do is put your website out there and people will be lined up at your door: TRUE OR FALSE?

FALSE! Your website must be crafted with search engines in mind, designing the pages to be search-engine friendly. The thing is, the search engines are pretty much constantly changing the rules. According to Planet Ocean's Search Engine optimization newsletter, Google—the standard bearer in the search engine world—has recently changed its rules so drastically that sites that had been optimized for it are now penalized for "following the rules". Dang.

I always recommend hiring someone with purple hair and piercings to do your search engines stuff—they tend to get off on following the almost daily (it seems) fluctuation of what the search engines are doing. Maybe it's a guy thing.

Well, then, all I really have to do is be sure my site can be found in the search engines and I'll be set.

SORRY, THIS ONE IS FALSE TOO. There may be a gazillion sites like yours on the Web. (If you are selling Viagra, for example, there are 17,600,000 other websites doing the same thing.) Let's suppose there were only 500 other websites doing the same thing...likely at least 200 of them know what they are doing in the search engine department...that means 200 sites all primed to get on the first couple of pages. Let's say you are really clever and you knock 100 search-engine savvy sites out of the running....you are still there with 100 other websites competing for the first couple of pages. What's a girl to do?

There are no easy answers.

It is a common misunderstanding that all you need to do is get on the search engines, and it is a misunderstanding that will bite you in the butt if you cannot move past it. Search engines are just one part of the deal. You must put your website on your printed materials; you need a sign in your place of business that clearly shows your website; ALL OF YOUR EMPLOYEES MUST KNOW WHAT YOUR WEBSITE IS! You would not believe how many business owners fail to tell their employees they even have a website, much less what it is.

Think about putting your website on your voice mail! ("Sorry we cannot answer your call at this time...please leave a message and check out our website at womeninbiz.com.") Put it on your business cards, make pens to hand out with your website on it, whatever you can think of, even if your visitors are as much non-local as local. Word gets around!

If you are a restaurant, for heavens sake put your menu online and put a little display card on each table to tell people about the restaurant's website. Imagine, if you will, how many conversations go like this: "Wanna go eat at The Bungalow tonight?" "Gee I dunno. What is their food like?" "Go look at their website~it's thebungalow.com." Then you can go and see they have everything from conch fritters to fried pickles (your favorite) so you reply "I'm there!" Furthermore, you see that your favorite Blues group is playing there tonight, so you are certain that's where you want to go. In fact, a restaurant is an ideal business to have a website as it can literally make potential customers salivate. And if you get your act together, you can even include the nightly specials.

You'd be amazed how many conversations go: "Product/service WNC BLAH BLAH is so fabulous!" "Oh yeah? Do they have a website?" "Yes! It is blippityblop.com." People tell other people about your site. When people look for technological solutions rather than human solutions, they can really miss the boat.

All I need to do is find someone who is "into computers" to do my website for me.
Being "into computers" is no more useful to creating an excellent website than being "into printers" is to writing the Great American Novel. Again, a website is not so much about technology as it is about human beings and how they process and organize information, respond to color, how they feel about what they are reading, etc. Creating a website is an art form as much or more than a left brain activity.
Sorry to get started with a couple of, uh, falsies, (forgive me, I could not resist), but it's good to get them out of the way. See next month's column for some TRUEs.

Julie Parker has been doing Web design since the dawn of time. Well, the dawn of Web time, anyway....when all the text was black and one size and all the backgrounds were grey and all the pictures were on the left. Sheesh! Read about her web design business at handwovenwebs.com. (Or go to Google and type in Asheville web design and see the first listing. She is also editor and co-publisher of WNC WOMAN.

[ 828.689.2988; julie@handwovenwebs.com ]