Happy Chinese New Year
Sun Nin Faai Lock (Cantonese)
Xin Nian Kuai Le (Mandarin)

Happy Year of the Goat!

October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month. This year the theme is “Expect. Employ. Empower.” The goal is to bring awareness to issues that keep people with disabilities from working. This includes barrier removal. Many people with disabilities want to work but there are different physical and attitudinal barriers in their way.

Learn more at http://www.dol.gov/odep/topics/ndeam/index-2014.htm

The old saying, “Don’t mix business with pleasure” has certainly changed in 2014. When starting or joining a business, many are choosing a business that is their pleasure. The buzz word, passion, is constantly being used whether it is on cooking shows on TV or the business news. Many people are trying to turn their passion into a business and looking for ways to do what they love.

This is at the heart of the entrepreneur as well. Besides having a good idea, funding and other resources, the desire to work hard doing what you love is central to being a successful enterpreneur.

One very important small business resource is the SBA, the Small Business Administration. The SBA is tasked with helping small businesses. The SBA does more than help with loans it provides information to help businesses get started and keep running.

Their website is located at http://www.sba.gov

402webpage welcomes guest bloggers on a variety of subjects including business, tax, Internet, IT, cultural topics  and more topics of interest to small businesses, organizations and the International business community.

If you are interested in becoming a guest blogger, please contact us at info@402webpage.com for details, questions and to submit a topic.

402webpage will take a vacation this month from our blog posts. To learn more about websites, our philosophy as a company or ask us a question please go to http://www.littlemountainwebdesign.com. The blog posts will resume next month.

All rights reserved. This article, all articles, images, etc., are copyright Little Mountain Web Design.

PART II: WEB DESIGN

Web design should give cohesion to all your thoughts and ideas for presenting your information to the Internet public in the form of a website. This next chapter will be broken into many parts. Today we will explore some basic factors to be used for creating a website, some goals and types of audiences.

1. What Factors Should One Consider In Designing a Website?

When you are considering your design, it is important to consider the following factors and strategies:

• Purpose/Goal of your website
• Audience for your website
• Company/Organization name
• Functions/action verbs associated with your company/organization
• Branding strategy
• Colors
• Themes
• Text

Choosing the right design and content for your website is very important and depends upon two major factors, your goals and your audience.

Here are some questions to help you get started.

What Are the Goals/Purposes of Your Website?

Websites can have many purposes as stated earlier. They can introduce/sell a new idea, product, service, business, or organization. They can be used to communicate with, connect with and provide functions to clients. They can also be used to help your team, business, organization, Internet community work or engage more effectively.

The type of goals, whether they are internal, for your employees, or organization members, affects how the website can be designed. For example your goal could be to increase the level of collaboration among your team, explain new products or services to existing customers, or introduce your business to new customers.

For websites whose purpose is more common, that of reaching the unknown Internet user, different strategies are employed including more explanatory text and search engine optimization (seo).

When you begin to create your website, you should start with your specific goals in mind and any other factors that may be important to you and create your own special list of goals. As time passes, you may change this list to better reflect your needs and direction. It is best to set up a time frame to periodically reevaluate your website, its goals and audience as one does your business plan to make sure your website is working hard for you to do what is needed.

For more details on goals and purposes please see our earlier article dated 17 January 2011. You can do that by clicking this link, http://402webpage.com/?p=25.

Who Is the Audience for Your Website?

There are many ways to look at your audience. One is to break it up into three categories: general, intended, and robots.

General refers to anyone that ends up finding your website. This person may or may not have an interest in finding your particular website, but they have located it. It is important when designing the website and creating your text to realize that not everyone may know as much about your area of interest or specialty, so some broad explanations are needed to help fill in some of the gaps, even if your website is only geared towards professionals in your area.

Intended is the specific group of people that you hope to attract. These may be customers, buyers for department stores, government entities, suppliers, volunteers for a non-profit, or just people with a common interest in your field.

The last type of audience you have are robots, programs that collect information from the web. This is important if you want others to find your website when using a search engine.

We will explain more of this in our next installment, “Search Engines and Search Engine Optimization”.

Please return later or read on for the continuation of this series and more on web design where we will cover an overview of search engine optimization.

All rights reserved. This article and all articles are copyright Little Mountain Web Design.