Small Business Owners Revamp their Websites
Websites are extremely vital for small businesses, since they’re a cost-effective way to get a message out to consumers. Most small businesses feel that the return on investment in Web marketing is quite high. Since the cost of hiring personnel from Web design firms continues to skyrocket, more and more people are working on their own pages. Several top industry publications have noticed a trend toward small business owners actually redesigning and updating their own cyberspace addresses as a result.
Tools Small Business Use to Make their Own Web Content
There are a few ways that small business owners can make some great Web design on their own with tools that are easily accessible to them. Those who feel adventurous and want to code their own HTML or CSS pages can probably just pick up any text editor that they have and hand code their pages. This usually takes plenty of trial and error, but those who are experienced can create expert pages this way.
Word processors can often save text as HTML, and they’re increasingly able to save XHTML and CSS documents. That means that if someone writes a document that they want to publish to the Web instantly, they can simply save it from inside of the word processor that they used to write it. Updates are constantly released for both the Open Office and Microsoft Word platforms to provide adherence to the latest Web publishing standards.
Unfortunately Microsoft has stopped providing any support for the FrontPage Web site administration tool, which many people used for small business web design projects. The free FrontPage Express tool can still be found from many shareware sites, but unfortunately more and more small business owners are finding that it’s woefully out of date. It’s still an industry standard tool, however, and many people continue to use it.
Some people have instead turned to sites that allow online marketers to build their own pages around templates. Sites like web.com offer templates that people can use to instantly build a site, which might be time savers for many making e-commerce pages.
Considerations for Web Marketers
More people are paying attention to mobile sites, which is great considering the number of mobile devices in use continues to grow. However, some business owners have forgotten about updating their original pages, which might cost them sales amongst users of traditional desktop and laptop computers. Industry analysts say that regardless of what tools business owners use to work on their sites, it’s important to maintain both a full and mobile version of a site to enjoy the benefits of marketing toward both groups of consumers.
Moving Toward the Future
The sheer number of free tools available to amateur Web masters is expected to grow in the next few years, but analysts have also stated that users of these tools shouldn’t have to feel overwhelmed. Rather than designing something with all the bells and whistles possible, it’s best to keep Web design on par with what’s expected from the professional community. Small business owners would do best to stick to a great professional look without too much clutter.