So should your business have a website, even if your business is small and sells products or services you don’t think can be sold online? My answer is Yes, if you have a business, you should have a website. Period. No question. Without a doubt.

Also, don’t be so quick to dismiss your product as one that can’t be sold online. Nowadays, there’s very little that can’t be sold over the internet. More than 20 million shoppers are now online, purchasing everything from books to computers to cars to real estate to jet airplanes to natural gas to you name it. If you can imagine it, someone will figure out how to sell it online.

Let me clarify one point: I’m not saying you should put all your efforts into selling your wares over the internet, though if your product lends itself to easy online sales, you should certainly be considering it. The point to be made here is that you should at the very least have a presence on the web so that customers, potential employees, business partners and perhaps even investors can quickly and easily find out more about your business and the products or services you have to offer.

That said, it’s not enough that you just have a website. You must have a professional-looking site if you want to be taken seriously. Since many consumers now search for information online prior to making a purchase at a brick-and-mortar store, your site may be the first chance you have at making a good impression on a potential buyer. If your site looks like it was designed by a barrel of colorblind monkeys, your chance at making a good first impression will be lost.

Online advertising isn’t as confusing as many small business owners think. Just like in the brick-and-mortar world, the goal is to acquire new customers as cheaply as possible. It’s the same with online businesses; only the methods are different. And just like in the offline world, knowing where to place your ads will determine the success or failure of your ad campaign.

Generally, the products you sell will dictate where you should advertise. If your ad budget allows it, advertising on Web portals — Yahoo, MSN, and the like — is an option. But this untargeted advertising is out of the reach of most cash-strapped small businesses.

How can you maximize your advertising budget and still reach the customers who would be interested in your products?

Putting your ads in front of motivated purchasers is the best way to spend your advertising dollar. Targeting your ads to these potential buyers is easy.

Keyword advertising is the easiest and cheapest way to target your ad buys. Buying keyword advertising with Google or Overture lets you target customers before the ad even displays, making it a great option for companies without extensive advertising resources.

E-newsletter advertising is another inexpensive but effective way of reaching targeted customers. There are thousands of e-newsletters published every week on almost every subject imaginable. Try to find at least five different e-newsletters that cover topics that tie in with your products.

Banner or button ads are still an option, of course, as long as you advertise on sites that your potential customers are already visiting. Continuing our example of selling digital camera supplies, we would look for sites that offer tips and advice about digital photography and approach them to see if they are willing to sell advertising space on their site.

If you are having trouble coming up with ideas on where to advertise, try browsing through some of your favorite sites and take a minute to see who their advertisers are. See where your competitors are advertising, and look for other, similar venues that your rivals haven?t thought of yet.

No business can afford waste money on ineffective advertising. Research all your options, and target your ads whenever possible. Regardless of where you advertise, targeting your ads is the key to a good return on your ad spend.

The MMOW.biz team can help you out with all of your websit advertising needs, contact one of our suporf staff today to find out more.

Do you think blogs are a passing fad? Think again. One peek on popular blog-tracking site Technorati reveals more than 112.8 million blogs in existence. Experts estimate 175,000 new blogs are created every day.

Especially in the corporate world, a blog is an easy, effective way for a business to stay in touch with current customers and reach out to new ones at the same time. It acts like an ongoing conversation, allowing you to communicate directly to your buyers and build brand loyalty and trust.

Plus, maintaining an active blog raises your company’s online visibility, driving traffic to your Web site, meaning increased sales for you.

Consistency: Whether you update once a week or once a day, sticking to a regular posting schedule is crucial. Just like any other form of marketing, the success of your blog depends on the relationship you’ve built with your audience. Developing that relationship requires frequent communication. Regularly updated blogs score higher in search engine rankings, making it easier for potential readers (and customers) to find you online.

Write for your buyers, not yourself: Save your stream-of-consciousness poetry or Grandma’s apple pie recipe for your personal blog. Your buyers don’t care. Instead, stick to the topics your customers care about. Offer solutions for their problems, or analyze news stories and market trends that impact their lives. That’s not to say you can’t show personality in your posts. But generally, readers don’t visit a company blog to find dessert recipes. They want information and interactivity. That said …

Don’t advertise: Treating your blog like another Yellow Pages ad won’t net you new readers. Instead, provide the info your reader really wants to know, like tips and tricks, checklists, DIY guides, interviews, etc. Suppose you’ve planned an upcoming promotional event. Instead of posting a schedule or price list on your blog, run a Q&A with one of your presenters or a series of posts about a topic explored at the event in more detail. Remember that a blog is a conversation with your buyers, not an advertisement.

Comments = Traffic: Keep comments turned on, even the negative ones. Healthy debate indicates a healthy blog. Comments from those who disagree with you “add credibility to your viewpoint by showing two sides of an issue, and by highlighting that your readership is passionate enough to want to contribute to a debate on your blog.”

Make it easy for your readers to find you: Give your blog prime real estate on your company Web site. Mention it in newsletters and e-mail blasts. Be sure to use tags wisely, including social media tags for aggregators like Technorati, DIGG and del.icio.us. Finally, be sure your blogging software handles RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a feature that delivers blog updates directly to subscribers. That way, it’s even easier to keep your readers posted.

No matter how attractive a site’s design, if it isn’t practical, it’s not doing its job. Design for the screen involves a new set of requirements to deal with and pitfalls to avoid.

There are many good and bad things you can do in web design, the following is a list of some of those options and how you should deal with them.

1. No page counters. Page counters do nothing except make you look like an amateur, mess with your design and tell people information about your site you probably don’t want them to know!

2. Forget blinking or flashing text. The only place you see blinking and or flashing text is on the neon signs of naked bars or websites made in the mid 90s! People don’t like them and expect to see naked people inside sites or buildings that have them … enough said.

Let’s discuss an important point about online content/text versus print. People read text off a computer screen at about 1/4th the speed that they do paper.

This important fact tells us that we should keep what we want to say on the web short and sweet. If some of my articles have been too long, I apologize for my flapping mouth and keyboard!

3. Make your titles on your web page make sense. One of the core attributes of a web page is its title. The page title is what users will see in there search engine results. People pay attention to page titles, so you should make sure that they are clear.

4. Flash intros. I am guilty of this as much as the next guy. A few years back Flash intros where all the rage, not sure if anyone knew why we needed them, but as it turns out the ‘skip intro’ button is the 2nd most clicked on the web today. Don’t waste your time on Flash intros and in my opinion Flash should be only used in special situations.

5. Under construction pages. Just forget it, if the page is not ready, don’t put it up. If you have links that are pointing to the pages, disable them until your page is ready.

There is one exception, MMOW.biz uses an Under Construction page as a placeholder for newly created site, this is to allow you the site admin to find and login to your sites backend. I recommended you don’t disable this page until you have some content in your site.

What ever you do, don’t put one of those cheesy ‘under construction’ images on the page.

6. Do keep a common layout throughout your website. Some web designers get bored with what they’re doing and decide to create different layouts for web pages within same website.

People like things consistent, so your web pages should be too. That’s why all windows programs have the same look and feel, the same goes for the Mac programs.

7. Don’t create automatic pop-up windows! JavaScript pop-up windows are probably one of the most annoying things you can do to someone visiting your website. If you want to annoy your visitors go right ahead.

Pop-ups are typically used to present ads and other ‘non-core’ material to users. If you use pop-up windows, you have to learn how to integrate those elements into your main pages and forget about pop-up windows.

8. Do create a site map page. A site map is a simple web page with text links to all the websites sub-pages organized in proper categories, a lot of people will use a site map if they can find one. MMOW.biz provides a site map plugin to help you create and manage your site map.

9. Don’t centre everything on your web pages. Centred text on pages is just hard to read, just think about having to read a book where all the text was centred! Print rules have been refined for well over a hundred years now, and they work well. When in doubt about layout, think about how they do it in print.

With that in mind, for western cultures, left justified text (text that is lined up on the left side of the page) is the way to go. You can centre major titles or something similar, but do it very sparingly.

10. 10. Don’t use too many colours in your website. Colour is a way that people identify things, that is why the Coke label dominantly red and the Pepsi label is dominantly blue. Keep the colour scheme of your website limited to a couple of colours and keep it consistent across your site unless you want to denote some major section.

11. Always try and make things as clear as possible to your visitors, what may be obvious to you may not be to your visitors!

12. Keep your site fresh. Unlike printed matter, a website is not a one-time thing it is an ongoing experience. Be prepared to update your site, at least once a month, adding new information, discarding anything out-of-date.

Repeat visitors are always desired, so give them something to come back for. Try to include a “hook”: a service or current information tied to your expertise that will bring users back to your site regularly.

13. Be backward compatible. Using cutting edge technology can exclude readers. Many if not most users will be at least one generation behind, so don’t shut them out.

14. Test your site as visitors will see it. This means viewing your site at several resolutions (640×480, 800×600, 1024×768) and color depths (256, 16-bit, 24-bit), on several browsers (Netscape 2 and later, Microsoft Internet Explorer 2 and later) and OS’s (Windows, Mac). While no site looks identical on all monitors, browsers, and computers, you can design sites that look good on all—but only if you test the site on all. will help you do this in one simple step.