I recently helped a friend of mine set up a business website for her condo rental business on Kauai. The website is pretty simple, needing just a single main page to describe her property, provide her contact information, and display a calendar for it's availability.
It worked out pretty well, but took quite a bit longer than you'd think. Here's the basic task list:
Whew. That's a lot, which explains why this took about 20 hours to complete. With many different applications and tools required, it's no wonder that "ordinary people" don't often have much success in a do-it-yourself project like this (which is a shame, if we hope to make the Internet the great equalizer).
Impatient to get started? Here's a quick summary of links to all the tools used in this guide:
The primary way people are going to find your business is through search. So, it's really important to put yourself into the head of your customer and figure out how they will be searching for your product or service. Rather than buy a domain first, and then figure out the keywords you want, your site will perform better if you can get the keywords you want in your domain name itself.
For this site, we knew we wanted keywords like "kauai", "vacation", "condo", "hawaii", "Waipouli", "resort", "beach", "ocean view", etc.
In our case, we registered 4 domains (the first one being the primary one and the others redirecting to the primary):
There are so many domains purchased now, it can be difficult to find one that suits you. Domains with hyphens are not the norm, but I think they are perfectly fine for a low-traffic site like this business (although I do strongly feel that a .com domain is essential - we did not even look at .org, .net, or .us domain names). Tools we used:
I find that the easiest to use (and free) hosted email is Google Apps (otherwise known as Google for Domains). Google will provide your email with an interface identical to Gmail accounts (@gmail.com), except that they will use your own domain name (e.g., btaylor@kauai-condo-vacation.com). You can also easily set up incoming email lists that will forward mail to multiple users (e.g., sales@kauai-condo-vacation.com, support@kauai-condo-vacation.com). You can have Google forward all of your mail to another email address if you don't want to have to log in to a new email account to read your business email.
Google will walk you through the steps of creating DNS entries in your GoDaddy account that will link your domain name to Google's email and web servers (you basically have to create MX records that point to Google's mail services, and CNAME records for sub-domains like mail.kauai-condo-vacation.com and www.kauai-condo-vacation.com).
We were also able to use Google's Calendar features to create a scheduling calendar for the condo and display it as a widget in the website so potential customers can see the dates the condo is available without having to call the owner.
Keep in mind the information that your users will want to know about your product and service. Be mindful of the keywords they may be using to search for your business and use those in your web page. Make sure important keywords appear in heading tags (e.g., <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc.).
One of the applications included in Google Apps, is Google Page Creator (or "GPC" - called "Web Pages" in your Google Apps control panel). There are some simple templates to choose from, and Google lets you edit HTML in your page directly (which we had to do to get the formatting we desired for images). The online page editor is simple enough for most users to be able to edit and update the copy on their website themselves - so it's a good solution for ongoing site maintenance and upkeep (even if you need the help of someone experienced with HTML to get started).
Note: Your web address has to use www.your-domain-name.com - you won't be able to use simply your-domain-name.com with GPC on it's own. I created another site at kauai-condo-vacation.com specifically to redirect (301) to www.kauai-condo-vacation.com.
Warning: As of this writing, Google has a bug in their GPC Settings page that does NOT allow you to change the default "home page" for your site. There is a workaround if you need to fix this - but Google has been very slow (over 2 months!) to address this major flaw. Be careful not to delete your default home page.
You'll want to create a link to your site so the search engines will know about it. You can either go to Google page submission tool or add a link to an existing blog (I used my Social Bookmarking account at Faves.com).
Since our primary page will be very focused on getting future customers to make a booking of the condo, we wanted to have another set of pages where we could add extra information like customer testimonials, or activity information about the island of Kauai. These are designed to bring in additional search engine traffic, and also provide meaningful background information for potential customers.
An easy (and free) blogging platform is also available from Google - Blogger.com. You can associate this with your own domain as well (e.g., blog.kauai-condo-vacation.com). Both sites are linked to each other so users (and search engines) can get to both pages.
If your business is in retail, or associated with a physical location, I'd recommend that you create a Local Business listing on Google Maps. After verifying your phone or physical address, Google will put your listing into Google Maps when people are searching for local or regional businesses.
Until your site is the most popular on the internet for your desired keywords, you're going to have to buy search engine advertising to bring people to your site. Depending on your product or service, you may have to spend anywhere from $0.05 to $5 just to get people to click on your Ad and visit your web page. The best place to advertise is on Google. The secret to a successful advertising campaign is targetting; you want only the people who are ready to buy your product to be the ones that click on your ad.
Google's AdWords advertising program lets anyone bid on keywords for their ad to be shown on Google's search pages. It's really amazingly simple to setup, create a text ad, bid on keywords, and be up and running in a matter of minutes. Google will even help you identify keywords by scanning the text of your landing page and suggesting the best keywords to use (this is one reason you want to have your web page complete before purchasing advertising).
Some recommendations:
In the event that your website begins to get a high amount of organic search traffic (un-paid searches), you can start dropping some of your paid advertising for those keywords. How will you know? That bring us to Analytics.
Note: The best way to run an ad campaign is to understand your return on investment (ROI). To do that, you need to know how much a click to your website is worth. This usually means understanding how well visitors convert to paying customers. If you have an e-commerce site, you can report the value of actual sales back to Google AdWords and they will automatically calculate your ROI for each keyword and ad! In our case, potential renters will call the owner on the phone to make a booking. But it's still important to try to understand how to close the loop - ask your customers how they found out about your product. You should be able to calculate the value of all the sales being generated by your advertising campaign and adjust your budget according to the returns you're getting.
Since you can't physically see when people are visiting your website, its effectiveness will be unknown to you. Google offers another tool, Google Analytics, that will show you lots of detailed information about every visit.
Once you create a Google Analytics account, you will get a small snippet of JavaScript code to place in your web page(s). You should add this to the footer of your GPC page (use the Edit HTML feature to paste the code in). You can include the code in an HTML widget in your blogger template. You can either use the same code, or create a unique profile in Google Analytics for your blog if you don't want page views for both the blog and the main website counted together.
Note: Once you have your Analytics account setup, log in to your Google AdWords account, and link it to your Analytics account by clicking on the Analytics tab and following the instructions. Your Analytics reports will now have detailed information from your AdWords campaign integrated into them.
The reporting in Google Analytics is extensive. The primary things of concern are:
You can have Google email you a report once per week, so you are reminded to check the status of your new website.
Google's Webmaster Tools are a great way to get a summary of how your website is being indexed and linked to. The most relevant reports are: