(Watch the 3:40 minute video below) One of the most difficult things in building a website or re-designing a website for your business is the design. You can go looney tunes (official description) with design decisions and spend yourself silly in the process. I can't tell you how many times a design firm has created what they thought was a masterpiece of design only to have it shot down by the client, and have to start from scratch.

You can go about design a few different ways:

Get a free template (freecsstemplates.org, WordPress, Drupal, etc)

Buy a template (MonsterTemplate.com)

Customize an above template

Design from scratch

They are all valid ways to go depending on budget, but if it's a business you are promoting your entire budget might be $2000 - $5000... and spending $1000 - $2000 on design is pretty easy to do.

Remember you also have to spend some money on things like search engine optimization, email news, content creation, call to action items, etc.

Go with the value proposition (#3 above): customize a premade template. If you hire a pro to work with an existing design they will brand it and make it yours. Watch the video below that illustrates how our company transforms a template into a finished website design that looks custom (and please feel free to leave a comment!):

Listen to the audio track:

(Watch the 5 min video below) The problem with many websites is that navigation buttons, images and animation are invisible to Google from a linking standpoint. In other words, if you don't have real text links in your navigation buttons, Google will have trouble finding your subpages. The image links won't work for Google. This means your potential customers can't find your website. Watch the following video to learn how to check to see if your website is blocking Google.

Audio only:

Audio transcript:

Is your website blocking Google? Or, to be more specific, if your website has so many images or animations on it, that they are getting in the way of Google's ability to crawl through the text on your website? Now, here is the problem. Google needs real text, real text links to crawl through to the next page.

So, for instance, on this website, in this paragraph, it's all plain text, but there are no links in here. The typical blue underlined links that you would see that would link down to a sub-page. And that's a problem for Google, especially on this website. Google does need the link text.

Now, buttons that are linked, images and photos that are linked, animation that is linked to sub-pages, they do not work. Google cannot crawl through those images to get to the rest of your site. Thereby, making the rest of your site, technically invisible to Google. So, when someone searches for a product or a service that might exist on a sub-page of your website, Google doesn't even have that page in its database.

So, it will never show up in a search and you just won't get found. And that's the problem. Now, how does this work? Let's just give you an example of button text. Here is a button that says kiosks. And here is a button and a link that says compact power. Now, one of the ways you can figure out whether your website is blocking Google is to actually try to highlight the text.

Click down and hold, and then drag your mouse cursor across the text and see if you can highlight it. And if you can't, it is probably a button, as this is right here. Now if you right click, trick number two, and you get a little pop-up. If you see something that says flash, that means it is a movie. It's actually a piece of animation. And Google can't read animation. It doesn't know what to do with it.

And it doesn't crawl through it. Now, another way to do it is, let's take a look at another image that's linked here, contact image. If we right click again, that is using the right button on your mouse, you get another pop-up. And if you see something that says, "Save image as," that tells you that that's an image.

And even though it is linked, Google can't crawl through it. Now, in this particular site, this text here, if you really went fancy and you did a source view, you could go to view source up in your browser, and search for the words that are in this text right here, and you won't find them, because this text was actually animation generated by flash. And it is invisible to Google.

So, to sum it up, if you are not getting found in Google, it could be that you have a heavy dose of imagery or animation on your website. And it's literally blocking Google's ability to get through your text and also to get through to the sub pages on your website, which makes them invisible.

It makes the text invisible; it makes the pages invisible to Google. And today, with the technology available, you can accomplish beautiful, graphic-rich sites, that are transparent to Google, that are loaded with link text so Google can easily crawl through and get all of your pages into it's database.

And that is the first and one of the most important steps to getting your website found in Google. And today, Google is the primary search mechanism in the world to find a business like yours.

And if your website is important to you, you might want to consider biting the bullet, and rebuilding it, so that it's friendly to Google. Use these op

Your home page on your website is critical to the success of your website and your best stuff needs to be there. So how you build a great home page? Listen to the audio podcast to find out how to go about brainstorming and prioritizing the elements that need to be promoted 1st.

Audio transcript:

In today's podcast we're going to help you determine what to put on your home page. The problem is, is that the home page is the most important page in your website.

It is the one that gives the first impression to new visitors and the official amount of time that people browse your page is 10 seconds.

That means you only have 10 seconds, maybe less to grab someone's attention about your products or services and get them to click into a sub page for more information. Otherwise, they are going to bounce from your home page and go look at a competitor's site.

Now yesterday I had an interesting meeting with a client who was in frenzy. He had printed out every page of his website, spread it out on his conference table and was busily crossing out photo's and buttons and rearranging pages and marking additions and truly having a stressful time out of trying to arrange his new home page.

He was taking the spilt bucket approach. Basically he spilt all the parts of his business out on the conference room table and was trying to rearrange it like a jigsaw puzzle so it all made sense. This is very inefficient and is really not a very good way to go about trying to figure out what is going to be on your home page.

So, how do we craft a successful and compelling home page? You have to start with a clean slate. You have to forget what you have on your website now. Turn off your computer; shut your laptop down because what you have probably isn't working.

The approach to take is to review the parts of your business first. That is, the services and products that you sell, the bits and pieces of promotional items; you want to go through the foundation of what your business is about in order to trigger priorities that will float up to the home page.

Once you review how each product or service is doing for your business, how important it is for your business, you will naturally get a sense for whether or not it belongs on the first page of your website.

Now, our client sells kiosks. He sells them to universities and hospitals, churches and they get sold for different applications. So we had a conversation about all his kiosks, all his promotions and how he goes about selling to a new customer. That started triggering ideas that would eventually make them sales into the home page.

Now, I'm going to give you a plan on how to get the right information to your home page. The first thing you want to do is get out a blank piece of paper and just write home page on the top of it. Just put it down.

The second thing you want to do is you want to go wrangle a friend or hire some marketing person to be a sounding board. What's going to happen here is you are going to have a conversation with this person about your business. You can do it over the phone or you can do it face to face. But you want to find somebody who is good at asking questions and digging deeper into your business.

So I'm going to give you seven questions that this person that you bring in will ask you so you can sit back and answer, to think about your business and answer them as best as you can. So here we go.

Question number one-- Let's talk about the history of your business. How did you get started? What was the motivation to start? What are some of the interesting things that happen along the way?

You want to start writing this down on paper. Have the person you hired or your friend write this down. If there is something particularly interesting that would be interesting to one of your customers and it jumps out. Write that thing down on that blank piece of paper called home page.

Number two--Talk about the services and products that you sell. Wri

The problem is that most visitors are a little nervous about contacting your business from your website. Find out how to make people comfortable and boost your contact rate by over 50% with a simple addition to your website.

Audio Transcript:

Today we are going to talk about one simple way but very powerful way to get visitors to contact you on your website.

Now here's a problem: when a visitor comes to your website, they are generally scared to connect with your business. On some level, some might be quite nervous and some might not be that scared but on some levels there's resistance to contacting a business.

Now, a visitor might come in and check out, two, three, four, even 10 pages but when they get to your contact page and they have some choices to make to pick up the phone, or to click a link to email you, that's where you run in to trouble.

Picking up the phone to call somebody you don't know is naturally a little terrifying, unless, you are a professional telemarketer. That's something that's not going to be on the high point list for a visitor.

Even clicking an email address can be a little intimidating because if you think about it, once you click a link to email a company, you have to type in something into the subject field and you also have to type in something into the body of the message.

And you don't really get any head start it's just making it up on the fly and that might be a little tough for some people. Now, what's the secret? How do you do it?

The way you have to do it, you have to have a contact form on your contact page. Contact forms are safe havens. They give people a step by step process to contact your company.

And here's a simple and yet very powerful contact form. You ask for a name, you have a name field, you ask for the email address with an email address field, you ask for the phone number with a phone field and then, you ask for the message with the message field.

And what happens is...those are easy questions for people to answer and they are given in a structure that makes them feel comfortable. So they'll type their name in and they'll say, "OK, that's done." And they'll type their email address in. OK, that was an easy one and then phone number, they may or may not want to give you. So make sure that the phone number field is optional.

And then once they've typed in a couple of things, when they get to the message box, they've warmed up. Their brain has warmed up to the concept of connecting with your business and they are ready to start typing. And they will fill that message box with whatever's on their mind. And then hit the "send" button and send that message as an email to you.

Now as a trick here that's something else that works well, you get the opportunity here to ask the person a question or two. I would try to think of one question real easy question that will help warm them up when they're connecting with you but also might give you a good piece of information.

So, if you were an executive coach and you are in a coaching business you might ask what your current position is at your job. That might be an easy question to ask somebody and help you get started in your conversation with them.

You can also add a little check box to have visitors subscribe to your newsletter if you publish an email newsletter. That's another good thing to do. But what I would also recommend to do is to put your telephone number and your email address link on every page of your website.

So usually it could be on a side bar, it could be on the top up in the mast head so that on every page it's easy to pick up the phone and call you if that's what somebody is looking for. They don't want to dig through for this information. People are in a hurry.

Now here's how this plays out, on our website, in our client's site that we watch, easily 90% of all sales increase come through our contact form. Maybe 5% of leads come in through an email, in fact I haven't seen an

Here's the problem: Most websites don't work simply because there is no compelling information for visitors to act on. Getting visitors to your website is half the battle. Once they get there what are they going to do? Put your sales hat on and think about how to publish timely information on your website to turn cold visitors into warm prospects. If you can't update your website yourself make sure you check out the article on gaining publishing control of your website. And as always, please feel free to comment :)

Audio transcript:

Today we're going to talk about how to compel your website visitors to contact you, and we're going to do this through a restaurant example.

Now the number one goal of all websites is when the visitor comes to them, to get the visitor to act on something to pick up the phone and call your company, to email you, to buy something, perhaps to download an article or brochure, or giving up an email address, to possibly subscribe to your newsletter or fill out a request for quote form, something like that.

Before I get into the restaurant example, I want to talk a little bit about the mindset that you need to be in. I want you to think a little bit about your business and what products or services you provide, and what things change in your business. Specifically, things that change on a regular basis that you'd like for your customers to know about. These are the kinds of things that should be brought forward on your website, and focused on.

Now you might have new products and services that you can offer informational downloads about. You might be hosting events that require sign-ups online, improvements to products or services to discuss. Maybe you're an information producer and you want subscribers to sign up for your articles. Or perhaps you're retail and you carry limited quantities of things if you're a gift shop or florist.

Ultimately, the best motivator for someone to connect with you online is a deadline for something. Let's say it's a limited quantity of a product, or perhaps a service you're only going to do up to a certain point in time, or beta test for something. I apologize for that beta test word, that's pretty geeky, but I think you get what I mean.

Now let's take a look at the restaurant example. You might ask, "What can a restaurant do with a website? That seems to be an odd combination." But I'll tell you, we have a local restaurant here, who's also a client. Their website does fabulously for them. They have live music on the weekends. What do they do? They post their event schedule on their website, so you can go to their site and see who's playing and on what dates.

The other thing that's interesting is that their slowest night, around here, is a Wednesday night. So what they do is they do a two-for-one special. You can come in and have two entrees, a glass of wine, a salad and dessert for the price of one. Thirty-five bucks I think is what is what they charge. It's very popular.

Why did it become popular? Well, they've been collecting email addresses for a long time. They have comment cards on their tables, where people can leave a comment and leave their email address. And they also have a sign up box on their website for people to subscribe to their email newsletter.

So once a week they push out an email that tells their subscribers what musicians are coming and when and what the Wednesday night diner special is, because the entrees change every Wednesday night.

They have collected over a thousand email addresses. I was in there last Wednesday and the place was packed.

So think about your own business. Maybe you're not a restaurant. Maybe you're a service business. But think about the things that change in you're business and you would like your customers to know about. If you can create deadlines, these are the thinks that should go on your website.

Your business is being talked about online, and often the information is flat out wrong. Find out how to be alerted when your business, name, or industry subject is mentioned anywhere on the web with Google Alerts.

Let me know what you think by leaving a comment!

To listen via audio podcast:

Transcript:

How do you find out what others are saying about you online? How do you know when your business is being mentioned on websites and blogs? And more importantly, what if people are saying things that are flat-out wrong about your business?

How do you keep tabs on that? I just got out of a meeting with our local residential community association. The marketing manager mentioned that she gets an alert in her email box everyday regarding what people are saying about the association.

She tracks websites that post inaccurate address information, phone information, and today, she mentioned that a website had published some landmarks near the community that were just flat-out wrong. They were actually in other towns. So, she was able to go to that website, email back the webmaster and give them some suggestions of landmarks that were more appropriate. Now, how do you do this?

Well, the secret here is to go to "Google alerts." Google alerts is a place that will notify you of any mention that you have in your business or your person, or perhaps a topic of interest for your business.

It's really easy. The first thing you do is you go to google.com/alerts. And then, you will be presented with the search box. You have your search terms, the type of search that you want, how often you want to be notified, and what email address to send it to.

So, all you do is type in your search term and in our case, I'll search for web-knowledge.com. I want a comprehensive search that means I want Google to scan news, blogs, the web, video, and discussion groups. And I want a daily digest and you can choose to have it sent immediately as Google finds a mention of your business or if you have a lot of mentions you might want to put it on a digest that is emailed to you once a week.

Fill out your email address and create the alert. Now if you don't have a Google account, my recommendation would be to create one. And the sign up page would look a little bit different when you go to it. And there will be a link down here that would allow you to go and create a Google account.

So, let's create this alert here. This alert has been added to my list of alerts and this is where you can go and manage your alerts. Now, let me make a little mention here. If you noticed, here's my name, Peter Ericson, I track social media, I track my business, and I track the blog. Here are my businesses, a website address, and here again is the blog address.

Notice that some of these addresses have quotes around them and some don't. If you put quotes around your search, what you are telling Google is you want those words presented right next to each other. So, in other words, "the complete website" those three words need to be in order, "the complete website" for Google to actually post an alert.

Otherwise, it will look for a document that has a word "the" the word "complete, " and the word "website" randomly streamed throughout it. And that's not helpful to me.

So, just remember that little quotes trick. And you can add, edit and delete an alert as you like. Also note that I follow social media, it's interesting for me to read what's going on in "Facebook" and "My Space", and "You Tube" and the social media sites out there. And Google presents quite a lot of returns on this.

But if you are in a different business and you want to say follow things in a real estate business, well, you might want to search for local real estate mentions. By town, by property type, commercial, residential, etc, to start the information flow and you can always go back and edit the alerts anytime.

Google Alerts lets you stay on top of what people are sayin