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Developing a Great Website

Posted by Administrator on Saturday, 31 December 2011 in Web Design and Development

The Secret to success starts with a Great Website!

But, most business owners have little time to build and maintain their own website. And if they have the time, we recommend hiring a company instead of doing it yourself. Because, running the business and ensuring profits is any business owners priority!

Maintaining a website properly takes anywhere between 5-30 hours a week. This is not cost effective if you are the manager in your company. The formula for success here is, the more you invest into your website and online marketing, the more profits you will get out of it! But if you have the basic skills to do it yourself, and you want to learn a foundation start here!

Steps to Developing a Great Website!

Step 1: Your Website Colours

If you don't have business colours already we recommend that you make a decision of the colours you would like to represent your business. Ex: White background, Orange Border and other colours. These colours represent the colours used in your logo, media, etc. and you want them to match your website in order to promote brand awareness.

Once you have you basic website colours and you have have an idea of how the colors should be laid out across your website, you're ready to lay it out!

Step 2: Your Website Layout

article web layout

Now it's time to decide how many page you will need, and how you want your site to interact with you're visitors!

Minimum Pages for a Business Website: index,services,about,contact and policies*

Step 3: Choosing Your CMS

Now is the time to decide on what CMS (Content Management System) you will be using, the most popular are Wordpress and Joomla (Webtradenow for example is a Joomla CMS site)

The Best of The Best!

Webtradenow recommends Joomla as your platform CMS. I guess we are biased as we use Joomla for our own website. But we assure you that Joomla as a CMS is suitable for most small to mid size businesses. If you need more industrial strength shopping carts with more robust features (taxes, tracking, memberships variables) we recommend these shopping cart systems.

These are the best shopping cart systems and CMS on the market and dependent on you technical know how, we recommend that you start with Joomla or Wordpress (Shopping cart components needed) as they have the smallest learning curve and extensive video tutorial to help you along!

Demo Video on Installation

Putting it all Together in a hosting account!

Now come the tricky part of putting all your ideas and concepts together and create a website that will boost your company's profits. For novices we recommend getting a hosting account with a company that has Cpanel dashboard to manage your hosting account. This will cut down on the time you need to install as all Cpanel come with one click install of the majority of the above shopping carts! Montreal Web Design can help you get your project rolling!