What is a web site, and what should it do for your business? For many small businesses there is a feeling that a web site is important, but not much of an idea as to why, or what it should do.

The most important consideration for the small business is what the web site will do for them. For many this is purely informational – an online shop window so that potential customers can find them and find out a little about them before picking up the phone or making a visit. For others it’s about relationship – regular communication about what the business is doing. For many larger businesses the web site acts as a point of sale where purchases may be made. The type of site depends very much on the type of business: often a business requires the personal touch, a face to face meeting before the sale of a product or service; for others with low value, large quantity sales this is not an issue, it’s all about making the purchase easy.

Before considering your web site it is worth asking the question for your business: What do I want this to do for us? If you don’t know this, then you will never be sure it’s achieving the end result.

Following a change in the choice of images for the Dune Prints web site I thought it could do with a bit of a makeover. I wanted to give more prominence to some of my favourite images, so I created a simple slideshow on the home page, and moved the galleries to separate pages. The lighter colour gives a much brighter background to the images than the previous black theme.

In order to allow the Southport Gideons to communicate more effectively with this local community Datawise Computing designed a Wordpress based local web site that will allow for multiple branch members to contribute their own specific local news. The site was designed by modifying the default Wordpress template – this allows the maximum flexibility for customisation, and also for use by other branches.

The aim was to create a clean, uncluttered design that would draw viewers to the content. The Gideons logo has been converted to a single colour, and the heading type is a thin sans serif font. The result is visible branding without intruding on the content.

In keeping with the business redesign I thought I’d do another clean design. I’ve been mocking something up in Fireworks. Here’s a crop from the header bar with a simple logo design.

This is the first concept that I’ve come up with…

Let me know what you think.

Datawise Computing works with businesses in the North West of England (and sometimes beyond) to provide the information technology tools that they need to run their businesses effectively. Clients include multi-nationals through SMEs to micro businesses.

Datawise Computing works hard to advise and implement the best technology solutions for your business, from simple ’shop window’ web sites to database database driven solutions.