Content is the king on web. No one is going to spend more than a couple of seconds on a website if the content is not useful to them. According to a research, people don’t read pages they scan them when browsing the web and usually they make up their mind whether to stay or not with in few seconds. So you have just a few seconds to grab visitor’s attention and tell them that your page is useful for them. Placing the right content on right spots makes it easy for visitors to find the information quickly. So in this post we will discuss the content that most web surfers look for and where to place this content on your website.

• Introduce yourself. The importance of adding information about you and your business.
• Offer useful content. Detailed Information about your products and services.
• Stay in touch. Allow visitors to interact with you and the website easily.
• Keep it fresh. Content on the web is like vegetables in a grocery store. If its not fresh no one’s going to buy it.

Introduce Yourself

People are not stupid, they don’t just click on a link and order the product. People who buy things on the web are actually a lot smarter than people who visit your shop/store/or offices. They will look for who you are and how good you are. So why not you just tell them all this, and then a little more. Add an about us page to your website and tell your visitors who you are, what you do and how good you are at it. For example

“Bashir’s petshop is a small store located in thesmalltown, smallstate. We sell and supply pet food, accesories, clothing and jewelry. We can take care of your pets when you are on vacations or away for business. We are in the business since last 15 years and have a very good reputation among the residents of thesmalltown ask your neighbours if you don’t believe us. We have a very friendly staff and we love to meet new people. Come visit us at the store, join our mailing list or drop us an email.”

Offer Useful Content

In an earlier post for this series we made a plan to create our website where we tried to define goals for our website. For example our main goal was to sell our products/ services. So the products and the services go directly to your main page. Yes it is a good idea to create a section for product listings with separate page for each product. But since our main goal is to sell these products we are looking for visitors who come to our site looking for these products. And if they don’t find it quickly on main page they might move away without digging product catalogs. (Click on the image below to see a sample layout)

A sample site layout for a small business website

Now there should be a page for your products and services. Make sure it is easy to navigate. Prices are visible easily. Then each product should have its separate page. Provide as much detail as possible and don’t forget to add images of the product. If you already have a happily satisfied customer base ask them to write reviews for your products or services on your website. Also make sure that your potential customers can compare your product/services to your competitor’s.

All these things make your content useful for your site’s visitors. Tell them more and more about your offerings because thats what they came looking for. Keep your content focused on your goals, keep it information driven, keep it fresh and you have yourself a website with useful informative content.

Stay in Touch

This is a common mistake that most small businesses make. They do not provide enough ways for their site’s visitor to interact with the website, the business and the people behind it. If people don’t interact with the website then they are not good for your business. So please add a contact page. Your contact page should have a feedback form, email address, address of your locations, telephone and fax numbers.

You will also see that many popular websites which sell products or services have a comment form at the end of each product listing. Use it to allow your visitors to ask questions on the product page directly, to submit their user reviews and or offer some advise to other visitors. You can also get in touch with your site’s visitors by adding a company blog, a wiki, forum, mailinglist, etc.

Keep it Fresh

The difficult part is not to create the perfect website. The difficult part if to keep improving it. You can keep improving your website doing two things:

Update your site with new content as frequently as possible.

Many small businesses fail to do well on the web because they don’t realize the importance of the content. For example a small home appliances shop has a website with the images of an old television set that every one has already bought and after an year there is nothing attractive about it. The same shop could have done better if they kept updating their website with images of new items in their stocks. Like showing a picture of giant LCD screen for home theatre.So if you keep posting new items to your website it remains fresh and attractive to visitors. Post new offers, special discounts, or links to other webpages with interesting articles about your products.

Experiment with the layout of your website. Web design is a complex field. Sometimes a layout and design that works best for a pet store wouldn’t work for a music store. So you should continuously make changes to your site’s design and see what works best for you. Use different layouts, color schemes, fonts. Change the position of your content. Install a stat counter on your website and see what your visitors are looking for and then add the links to this information on your main page and link to your main page on your most visited pages. You will learn this skill on your way. It is actually fun and very addictive once you realize that the last change you made increased page visitors, you seek more ways to bring more visitors.

This post is part of a series. To read more posts from this series go to “Creating a Small Business Website“.

What is Mind Mapping?
There is a wonderful article on Mind Mapping on Wikipedia. But I liked this definition:

“A knowledge organization tool used to elicit ideas from one or more users by placing a topic in the center of a black space and branching out with related ideas.”

Who can use Mind Mapping?
Any one can use mind mapping technique for their own purposes. For example I am using this technique to come up with post ideas for my blogs and for my other writings. Teachers, students, businesses, professionals, software developers, writers, soccer moms and even grand mothers can benefit from mind mapping techniques.

How to do Mind Mapping?
It is very simple. Take a peice of paper write down something in the center like the goal and purpose of the mind map. Now start branching out new points from the central location. Mind mapping is a tool to use both parts of your brain during the thinking process. Mind map allows you to let your mind do the thinking instead of you forcing yourself to think. With a mind map you draw a diagram of ideas coming to your mind and building on these ideas you add new ones. Click on the mind map below to see a mind map drawn by Danny Stevens illustrating the idea of mind maps:

Danny Stevens' Mind Mapping Guidelines

Many people use many different techniques to do create mind maps. I personally feel that it is totally up to the person to decide how he wants to draw his mind map. Some people use software to create mind maps, some people prefer a plain sheet of paper and pencil. Some use colors and pictures, some use curved branches and some use straight lines. Since the idea is to think freely so it is totally understandable that why there are no strictly define approaches to draw a mind map.

Sample Mind Maps:

The web is full of example mind maps. A good place to look for sample mind maps is “NovaMind’s mind mapping examples“. Below is a sample mind map I draw for a story I am working on:

The Mind Map I created for my story

Mind Mapping Software:
I would strongly suggest that first you try mind mapping on a peice of paper with pencil, pen whatever is available and handy. Once you realised the potential you might feel the need of using a software to draw your mind maps and organize your ideas in more effecient ways. Wikipedia has a list of list of mind mapping software, there are some great free mind mapping software available such as Freemind and VUE. I have used Freemind and I liked it a lot.

There are also lots of proprietory software available. Tony Buzan’s iMindmap is probably the most well known commercial tool for mind mapping. It claims to be officially endoresed and approved by Tony Buzan who claims to have invented the mind mapping technique.

Some people who have used Mind Mapping:
Ava Vampira, a medical student who uses mind maps to take notes.
Raj Dash a freelancer who uses Mind Mapping tells why freelancers should use mind mapping.

Books:

• The Mind Map Book by Tony Buzan and Barry Buzan.
• Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter.
• Idea Mapping: How to Access Your Hidden Brain Power, Learn Faster, Remember More, and Achieve Success in Business by Jamie Nas.
• Visual Thinking: Tools for Mapping Your Ideas by Nancy Margulies; Christine Valenza.

This is really a tough question. Some bloggers, even the experienced ones, spend so much time looking around for the perfect theme to beautify their blog. There are themes with lots of images in header and every where they look amazingly beautiful. There are themes that are simple and elegant. Themes, with functionality to improve certain aspects of your blogging experience. Themes designed for SEO and themes designed to be used with advertising programs such as Google Adsense. There are three columns, two column and single column themes. How do you know what is right for your blog?

Here is how I do it. First of all I try to think what I want to achieve with my new blog. Like this particular blog that you are currently reading is a place to share tips. So I needed a theme that was easy on reader’s eyes so that they can read the content, apply it somewhere, and then leave a comment if they want. This approach to design is called Usability and it helps a lot in the long run. This blog is new, so I also needed a theme that is easy to modify for my future needs.

I wasn’t sure about sidebar and layout. But then I thought that I don’t have enough content at the moment to fill the two sidebars with interesting items. So I decided to go with a single sidebar theme such themes are also called two column themes sometimes. Right sidebar or left sidebar? I remembered reading somewhere (probably here) that people read left to right so if you put your content on right and relevant links and navigation on the left then it is easy for them to quickly find what they need.

So this the first step of choosing the right theme. You need to think what you want to do with your blog and think of a layout that fit both your’s and your readership’s needs.

The Next step is design, color, and layout. There are so many colors in this beautiful world and please remember that we all love colors. So even if you are into simple looking web pages make sure that it has some colors too. While browsing the theme directories you will see many themes and I would suggest that you bookmark the themes that you like on your way. Once you think you have browsed enough themes then look into your bookmarked themes. And select a few that you like most.

In my opinion themes with large image headers containing pictures of irrelevant things are not very good. because these images provide no benefit to your reader. Still if you prefer images in your header then make sure that they are not too big.

Optimizing your blog for search engines and advertising programs is no more a hassle. But it could be if you pick a theme that is not easy to modify or relies on some plugins that you don’t really need. You don’t really need to pick up a search engine friendly theme, because it could easily be done later on with either plugins or manually. You also don’t need to pick up a theme that has room for lots of advertisements. Because such themes are used widely by bad websites and if your visitor has seen such websites already he would think that your blog looks like those trash sites so it would be useless as well.Choose a theme that is easy to modify and you can always add your advertisement code in it.

Widgets or No Widgets?

Depends on how easy you want it to be, I personally feel easier working with themes in my text editor. But lots of people like the comfort of Widgets. So if you want to make adding items to your sidebar simpler then you go for widgets ready themes.

While picking up a theme don’t just think about the attractiveness. Look for a theme that is easy for your readers so that they can easily navigate your website or blog. Also make sure that the same theme is easy for you too, so that you can work with it in future and add features to it if the need arises.

How do you know that the theme you want is easy to modify or not? I particularly check the theme in theme-editor. Since I feel that most editing goes on in sidebars so I look at the sidebar template. Themes that use complex div structure in sidebars are difficult to use. I prefer themes that have simpler sidebar code so that I could add my own items easily.

Another quick tip, don’t just go for the popular themes. If you browse the theme directories deep down you would find some really amazing themes that are not already used by hundreds and thousands of blogs. Also make sure that you add your own branding to the theme. Like your own image in header, or your customize it so that it looks uniquely yours.

Caution: Please remember to look at the theme carefully. There are some dirty minded people who add links to adware and spyware sites in wordpress themes. Some people even add their own Google Adsense code in themes. So if you see any such thing you can either remove the code or simply choose someother theme. The best place to look for themes is the theme directory at official WordPress site.