Now that I’ve covered the basics you should do before starting your home business, let’s talk starting up your website. Before you even start worrying about the search engines and marketing, there are some basics you should add to your website.

1. Unique page titles

Don’t use the same title on each and every page. The page title should be relevant to what’s on the page. Don’t limit yourself to using your business name on your home page either. People don’t care as much about your business name as much as they care about what you have to offer.

2. Test your design

This doesn’t have to be as hard as it sounds. Yes, if you have access to multiple machines with different operating systems and different browsers, test on as many combinations as possible. I like to use BrowserShots.org to get screenshots on 7 different browser/system combinations in a relatively short time. How long depends on how busy their server is.

browser

3. Spell check and grammar check

Read your site out loud. This is a huge help in spotting problem areas both in spelling and grammar. This is most useful if you do not do it the day that you write the site. You want some time to get away from the original thought processes.

4. Test navigation

Are all pages linked? No orphan pages? Is it all logical?

The bigger the site, the harder it can be to have clean, logical navigation that makes all pages as easy as possible to find. If you can’t find them easily, search engines and visitors will have trouble too.

Try to avoid the assumption that because you understand it, visitors will too. They aren’t subject to your thought processes. You need to think like a customer, not like a person who knows everything about your business.

5. See what others think

Ask someone you trust what they think of your site. Is it easy to navigate? How are the colors and images? Promise not to take it personally, and keep that promise.

6. Add the pages that make people feel comfortable

You should always include a privacy policy, and an About Me/About Us page is always a good idea. It can make your website more personal or more professional, depending on how you use it. A Contact Us page is also a good idea. Include any information for ways you are willing to be contacted. A form is best for email contacts, to limit your exposure to spam.

7. Know how to find your stats.

Most website hosting includes statistics. Some are better than others. If you can’t find them or don’t like them, you can get free statistics for your site through Google Analytics if you have an AdWords account, or through services such as 103 Bees or StatCounter.

8. Have a way for people to subscribe

If you’re blogging, make sure your RSS feeds are easy to subscribe to. If it’s a regular site, have a newsletter, ecourse or something for people to subscribe to. This will increase the chances you have to make a sale to each user.

At the very least you should have an idea as to how many subscribers you have. If you’re using an RSS feed, Feedburner offers statistics. As a matter of fact, since their recent acquisition by Google, they offer some pretty good stats for free. You can even make your feeds appear to be coming from your site, rather than FeedBurner.

9. Ensuring consistency in your website address

People can argue about www or no www, but what really matters is that you are consistent. However, since you don’t always have control, you should make sure to redirect any links not formatted your way still go how you want them to.

Your .htaccess file is designed for this. You should always check first to see if your site has one. If one is already present, edit it with a permanent redirect from non-www to www or vice versa. The basic code for this is:

RewriteEngine On
rewritecond %{http_host} ^yoursite\.com$ [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Changing yoursite to your site’s name, of course.

Similarly, you should be sure that you do not refer to your homepage as index.html or similar in your links. I always recommend linking directly to the plain domain name for your homepage. This means that you don’t have to worry about redirects if you later change extensions for any reason for your homepage.

10. Customize your 404 error page

404s happen. They aren’t ideal, but you should have something in place right from the start to deal with them. The easiest way to do this is to design a custom 404 page. Create a page as usual, designed for people who have been sent to a page that does not exist on your site. If you have an .htaccess file, include:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.htm

to redirect 404 errors to the page of your choice.

11. Test all links

Dead links happen, but you shouldn’t have them right from the start.

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