Creating A Website For A Service Business

October 24, 2007
When creating a website for a service business it's very important to think of your website as more than just an advertising method. While there is no doubt that an online presence can help your business grow and should be part of any good advertising campaign, a website is beyond mere advertising.

A proper service business website should contain useful information and entice your customers to take action immediately by contacting you or making an appointment. Your website should showcase your unique skills and highlight the differences between your business and that of your competitors. There are several essential elements which should be considered when creating a website.

1. Start by choosing a good, reliable hosting provider. Determine what your needs are and then choose an appropriate provider. Your needs may be a simple hosting company that will host html pages. Or you may have special needs such as the need to run MYSQL database or run PHP or other programming languages. A simple approach if you're a novice to website building might be to use a hosting company that provides a user-interface to let you build a website without any programming or database knowledge such as Create Sites. If you're looking for simple webhosting without any database or programming support then a cheap and reliable option is Yahoo. It's important to not pay for what you don't need! Many services offer 20GB of traffic, 5 GB storage, support for FrontPage, PHP, etc. Don't pay for a plan which you won't need. For most sites 2GB or less of data transer per month is sufficient.
2. Choose a well designed template or create your own template. There is an abundance of free templates available on the web. A simple Google or Yahoo search will return dozens of sites which offer free templates and images. The look of your site has to be esthetically pleasing or you'll be putting off potential customers. Remember to keep it simple!
3. Share some free knowledge about your industry with visitors to your website. In this way your customers will think of you as being knowledgeable and get hooked to find out more information. For instance, if you're an accountant then provide some useful tax saving tips on your website, but don't give away any hard-to-learn tips or strategies. Keep your key knowledge to yourself to force the customer to pay for your services. If you're a divorce lawyer then provide some general state laws on divorce and at the end of your article ask the customer to contact you for an appointment to discuss their particular case.
4. Distinguish your business from your competitors. Give your customers a reason to choose you over your competitors. This can be done in various ways. If your business has received awards or your staff has won awards then mention this on your website. If you have good customer testimonials then mention them on your website. You may even wish to create a webpage devoted to customer testimonials. On the internet many customers will never have heard of your business. Reading customer testimonials will reassure them about the quality of your service.
5. Don't risk losing any customer interested in your service. It's key to have proper contact information including an address and telephone number. Better yet, use an online contact form or online appointment system. Don't let your customer leave your website without contacting you. Give them a reason to contact you right away for more information or setup an appointment to discuss how your service can help them.
6. Most visitors will only visit 2 to 3 business websites before making their decision. If your website isn't on the first page of major search engines then it's unlikely you'll get any sales. Customers who browse through listings further down on search engines past page 1 are usually the kind that are bargain-hunting or trying to get information for free. Pay special importance to search engine optimization ( seo ). If you can't manage to rank high on search engines by yourelf then either research the topic on the internet and learn or hire a professional SEO expert to help. Another way to get on page 1 of search engines is through sponsored search. You can pay Google or Yahoo to list your website on a pay-per-click basis.

By Kyle Ware

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