Been made redundant or struggling to find your first job? Market yourself by setting up your own Google-friendly website
It's shaping up to be a bleak new year for thousands of public sector workers about to lose their jobs, and for graduates who have not yet found a job to lose. Recession-hit victims have, however, an advantage over their predecessors in the early 1990s. The internet can give wings to private ambition and, if manipulated well, could help replace lost livelihoods. Should you be inspired, you can start building a career from your fireside.
The tool is an appealing website that will market you and your enterprise to the wider world. You can ask a professional to do the technical part, or experiment with online DIY kits but, once you have mastered the mysteries of html, CMS and wysiwyg, you need to fine-tune the design and content so surfers are drawn to your site and stay long enough to spend money.
"Ask yourself why you go back to sites that you like," says Paula Wynne, online entrepreneur and author of Create a Successful Website. "It is usually because it solves a problem or fulfils a need, it entertains you or is offering the advice and support you need."
• Gratify Google. Your main aim is to get yourself noticed. Search engines favour descriptive, key-rich domain names in their rankings for searches based on the same words, advises Wynne. Geektools.com will help you find an available domain and if you can't get the one you want you can always use the key words in the url. SEO (search engine optimisation) is about finding the right keywords and putting them in the right places on your site so that search engines pick up on you. Description and keyword meta tags describing the content of each web page are also essential as search engines index every page on a website with metadata.
• Speed matters. Surfers will quickly lose interest if your site is cumbersome and slow. "The main page of your site should load in eight seconds or less with a 56K modem," says Shelley Lowery, US author of web-design course Web Design Mastery. "Try to keep the number of clicks required to get from your main page to any other page down to four. Always have good navigational links on every page and place your company logo on each page."
Customers also require swift contact so always include your contact information on each page and try to reply to all messages within 48 hours.
• Keep it simple. Crowded sites with a multitude of fonts, colours and gizmos can look unprofessional. "The best-looking sites are often clean and simple with a light, airy feel and a spacious lay-out," says Wynne. "Avoid dark designs and overuse of flashy objects which get on people's nerves and take longer to load." A web search of colour meanings will throw up numerous sites explaining the psychology of colour to help you pick a scheme to suit your business. Stick to your choice across the site to reinforce your brand.
• Keep it coming. "The way to engage visitors, and keep them, is to have constant updates, which can include blogs, articles, news, feeds, podcasts or any other content pages," says Wynne. "Google loves this too and keeps coming back to the site and indexing the new pages, increasing traffic."
• Study your rivals. Amazon has one of the most admired websites in cyberspace and it's worth imitating some of its best features. These include: an "add-to-cart" button on every page; a "tell-a-friend" facility for emailing a page on; a facility to store your address and financial information securely to save you re-entering them with each order; customer reviews; and intuitive customer relationship management (CRM) that remembers your previous purchases, then automatically offers recommendations for similar items.
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