Queensland’s Sunshine Coast is part of the rapidly growing South East Queensland metropolis, stretching along the coast from Coolangatta in the south to Noosa in the north. The area is renowned for its natural beauty and lifestyle options, which makes it a great place to live and work.

Looking for a website design business on the Sunshine Coast may seem overwhelming at first, due to the proliferation website designers available. Here’s a couple of tips to take into consideration:

• Look at their website design portfolio, and contact the owners of those websites and ask if they are satisfied with the service and results they received.
• Can you find those websites easily using Google?
• Do the websites all look similar, or based on a similar template?

By just following these 3 tips, you can determine if you are likely to get good service and results, if your website will be search engine optimized, and whether your website will have a unique design.

Your domain name is your home on the internet. It’s your online brand, it’s on your business cards, and it’s in your email address. You’ll be using it a lot, so it makes good sense to get the best one you can.

So what makes a good domain name? Starting with the suffix, a .com domain name is essential for a commercial business. Leave the .net and .org for networks and organisations.

If you’re doing business in Australia then a .com.au will be good to have also. You can put your website on either the .com or the .com.au, and redirect the other one, so both names will lead to your website.

www.example.com

www.example.com.au

Then comes the main part after the ‘www’s. If you can register an exact match of your business name, then that’s the way to go. If not, then you can be creative and use relevant descriptive or locality keywords. If you sell widgets, then www.examplewidgets.com could be an option. If your market is based in Maleny, then www.examplewidgetsmaleny.com would be a good choice.

Domain names can include a dash (-), however be wary of getting one in your domain name, as you will forever be reminding people to put the dash in, and if they forget then they may end up at another website instead of yours.

www.example-widgets.com

Keep it as short as possible, if your domain name is too long, there is more chance of forgetting or misspellings.

www.examplehasthebestwidgetsinmaleny.com

You can research available domain names on the Arrowsmith Websites Domains page.

There are more than 3 billion mobile phone users in the world, around 50% of the global population. This is forecast to grow to 70% by the end of 2010.

What’s that got to do with websites? The latest phones are mini computers that connect to the internet, so you can visit websites from anywhere. People use the internet to search for everything these days, and local search is the next trend, partly due to the mobility of the searchers.

Online applications such as maps and satellite navigation will retrieve data from your website and include it in search results. So if you’re in a new town a search on your phone for nearby restaurants, you not only get a list of restaurants, but locations, opening times and website links.

Trends such as this make it an imperative for most businesses to have a search engine friendly website.

People have learned where to look for certain things through their previous experiences of using websites. Over time, conventions have developed as to where people expect elements to appear on a website.

Most businesses should avoid breaking these conventions, or risk confusing the users of their website.

Some standard conventions include:

• Logo top left, linked to the home page
• Search form top right (if required at all)
• Primary navigation that stands out. It can be horizontal or vertical:
  • If horizontal, located near the top of the page
  • If vertical, usually on the left, but the right is also ok
• The home link is always located top left of the primary navigation

Radical, cutting edge designs that challenge users expectations have their place, but not on your business website.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a critical component of most websites, as just about everybody who uses the internet to search for something will use a search engine.

Search engines run software programs (called ‘bots’) that effectively download most of the websites on the internet. From there they will be classified by complex algorithms to determine what, if any, search results they will appear in.

Basic SEO simply involves making sure your website can be indexed effectively by the search bots. I often see websites built by professionals that offer nothing to the search bot, and sometimes even block its progress, ensuring no presence on the search engine results pages.

So the first step is to ensure your website is search engine friendly. After that, you can go further and target specific key words and key phrases in your website, and try to appear in the results pages for those. This is where SEO becomes and art and a science.

The website development industry is composed of many small players. Professional website design firms are rarely larger than ten people, and many are just one person.

Why are there no big website design companies? Big companies offer website services along with their phone connection and internet services, but they are too big to offer the flexibility that small business requires, so they haven’t been very successful at it. It’s not like providing a telephone or internet connection where a handful of packages will cater to the majority of customers.

Websites are different; there is no one size fits all approach. To understand the unique needs of a small business, it helps if you are also a small business, with enough flexibility to be able to adapt to your customers unique requirements.