The whole point of a website is to get your business' message across to potential clients. You have to know who to attract to your website in order for it to be effective. Are you looking mostly for technological types, grandmothers, world travelers, or school teachers?

There may be differences in the way people expect things to be, or what types of things they are seeking. Most people can tell within a few seconds if they are on a useful website or not, so if your site is not consistent with their expectations they will not be on it for very long.

Knowing your target audience tells you to make the site direct, clean, and fast to use...or to make it fun to visit, with lots of visual appeal.

I expect that small business owners across the entire technology range (from apathetic to savvy) may come to my site. They will either be interested in my services or they will take the information that I have here and use it, for instance, to build their own website.

And that, of course, is this website's purpose!

To some, this a basic concept but to others it is very foreign.

Complying with web standards is not required to make a website work. You can use all kinds of software to make your website look neat and have fun, exciting media on it without complying with anything at all!

However, if you want the site to be found by search engines, then comply with standards. If you want your site to render properly on all of the popular browsers, then comply with standards. If you want to modify the code that your software produces, make sure it complies with web standards.

This is sometimes not as easy as it sounds, though. I try to keep my sites compliant with W3C standards by putting every single page I write through their Validator service: http://validator.w3.org/.

This can be a time-consuming process, so it is actually one of the last things I do. However, W3C compliance is one of my first considerations when designing a new site or purchasing new tools.

Your target market is after something!

Give them what they are after and they will probably either stay on your site and see what else is there, or they will remember that your site was helpful and come back later. They are also very likely to recommend your site to their friends and co-workers.

There are various ways of making information available on your site. If you need to distribute forms, brochures, product specifications, or printable documents, posting a library of PDF files is often a great idea.

If you want to provide people with answers to common questions, your site can handle those easily in one place called a FAQ (frequently asked questions).

If you have a lot of information -- too much to comfortably take in as a list -- then your site ought to have some searching capabilities to bring the right information to your visitor as quickly and accurately as possible.

It's not only important to get your information, ideas, products and services out to the visitor, but also to receive communications from them as well.

Under the previous section, FAQ's were mentioned as a good way to make information accessible. This is also a form of two-way communication of sorts: a question has been asked, and you have answered it.

Visitors should be able to communicate directly with you if they wish. This can be accomplished by using a Contact Form or even a Guest Book. Contact forms often facilitate your visitor asking you questions, directly. Guest books are more public communications.

By far the most interactive, multi-way communication system widely in use today is a blog, short for "web log." Many blogs are posted by the site's creator or manager (you) and responses are posted by visitors. Also popular are "wikis," which are typically used to facilitate collaborative efforts.

(Warning: Never post any email addresses or mailto: links directly on your site!)

It is often true in the real world that the simplest solutions are the best solutions. This is just as often true on the Internet as well.

Some of the simpler technologies have been mentioned previously: blogs, wikis, PDF files, searches, and so on. But there are many others, and new ones are coming out all the time.

One place to look for simple tools is with your host. My host, SteadFast, allows me to avoid complex installations of open-source software by installing things like WordPress for me. (See my blogg page.)

I use RapidWeaver to develop all of my websites. It is fairly powerful, quite flexible, and I wouldn't say that it's simple -- but it is simplistic in its approach when compared to other web development tools. Certainly for small companies and personal websites, such a tool is as complicated as it should ever have to get. Rapidweaver is very extensible, which means the plug-ins and themes are available to extend the basic capabilities and let you be creative.

Organizational skills: Maybe you don't have to display them in your car or in your office, but your website should not suffer the same fate!

Visitors to your site will develop an idea of what your company is like by how the site is organized. Even though this may be an unfair basis, your site is commonly the very first impression that a visitor has of you or your company.

Organization simply answers the question, "what goes where?" Site organization should be logical and should make sense, particularly to your target market.

On the technical side, keep your pages and folders organized as well. Each folder should have its own "index" file, so if someone happens to remember something at your site under the /products/ page, they will at least get to something within your site rather than an error 404.

This structure also makes more sense when the results are returned to search engine users. Going to www.mysite.com/products/ makes a lot more sense than www.mysite.com/new_folder-001/.

Navigation goes hand-in-hand with Organization. If you have organized your site well, the Navigation part almost builds itself in most web development tools these days. However, it is worth paying attention to some specific areas.

Make sure your navigational aids are always available and always in the same place. Creative / artistic sites may have exceptions to this rule, but be very careful with exceptions.

Use simple-to-read navigation aids. Words like "home," "blog" and "FAQ" are generally recognizable and preferable to something like, "MySite.com Company Blog".

One thing to be careful of, particularly in large websites, is nesting. This is the tendency for pages to become buried, i.e.: menu -> submenu -> submenu -> submenu -> item. Carefully weight the costs of using submenus when they are not necessary. Also keep in mind that too many items in the home page menu can also be confusing. Sometimes pages can be combined or left out of the menu altogether, as in providing a PDF file description of an item for sale. There is no reason to include the PDF in your navigation menu!

Choose your tools carefully. There are a lot of web development tools out there and many of them are very good. However, many of them are not for you, or for me. The biggest thing to remember when choosing your tools is that they must comply with any requirements that you have already determined.

Make sure the tools you purchase lines up with how you work. I'm a technology guy, but when I work with my computer, I don't want to have to work on my computer. So I use a Mac, which is simple, reliable, and even fun to use. You don't have to use a Mac; the point is that, as the developer, you should use what works for you.

Just as in the real world, you should follow the age-old advice, "use the right tool for the right job." For my "jobs," RapidWeaver easily handles everything I need it to do. In the Windows world there is a software developer called CoffeeCup that is probably worth checking into. Unless you are already a developer on a team, there's no need for $400 software to make a nice website!

Other choices you must make include the choice of your host (I use SteadFast), your FTP client, your image manipulation software, etc.

If you make the decision to offer media (presentations, video, audio, animation, images, etc.), then your site's experience should be consistent with it. If you use animation or video, be sure that it is appropriate and can be easily bypassed. If you have audio playing, make sure it is not distracting and that your site offers controls for visitors to change the volume or stop it altogether.

Fortunately, most sites do not bother with video and audio. The most common media type to use in a website is images. Photos, drawings, digital artwork, and so forth are all images. Any site selling products will most likely have photos of the products, if possible. Most websites also use images as an integral part of the website to decorate it, proclaim the site's brand logo(s), and to give the site an overall sense of cohesiveness.

No matter which media you choose to use, you would do well to optimize the media for your site. Even with today's fast Internet connections, faster is better. Smaller files mean faster speeds. Research the media you are using and learn to optimize it for web use!

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a big business these days, but the best way to optimize your site for search engines is really to build your site correctly.

Search engines attempt to bring visitors to the sites they are looking for, accurately. The way they do this is to "crawl" your site with a data collector called a "spider." The spiders look for text, especially.

If you have well-written product descriptions and your written pieces that are scattered throughout the site include "keywords" that searchers might use to find your site, then the search engines will be more accurate.

If you use PDF files, the text inside them will be part of the spiders' collected data. If you use images, be sure to put details on the image in the "alt tag" of the image. Not only does this help the search engine identify the image, but it also helps those with accessibility needs, such as the blind, to understand your site's content.

SEO is not just about guessing the best ways to make the site more searchable in Google. It is about getting the right people to your site.

For most of the websites that I build, I use the free Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Yahoo! Site Explorer. Once they are set up, the tools start to build up cohesive information about who is going to your site, where they are coming from, what keywords they've used to find you in the search engines, and other information. How you decide to use this information is, of course, up to you.

One tool that helps to bridge the gap between your website and the search engines is a site map. This is simply a page dedicated to showing the organization of all your site's pages, and their relationship to each other. A site map can be built by hand; instead, I use Loghound's SiteMap plugin for RapidWeaver.

One nice tool is a fee-based service that analyzes your site directly and offers recommendations and solutions. One that I have been itching to try out is called FireFactor, by CoffeeCup software.