Ever created a website for a small business? Well there are some things you probably did or needed to do to make the site a success.
This is more of an internal list but I figured I’d make it into a blog post because this might help other designers/developers who do work for small businesses as well.
This list covers the final checklist for a small business site; if you have any ideas to add, please leave those in the comments. We would love to add more ideas to help out not only our future, but our current clients as well.
1. XML Sitemaps
Every site, large or small, should have a sitemap. If you’re using WordPress, there is a great plugin that will create a sitemap for you called Google XML Sitemaps. If you are not using WordPress, even though you should be, you can use the XML Sitemap Generator.
2. Google Webmaster Tools
Adding a site to the Google Webmaster Tools seems like a minor detail, but it can provide a vast amount of information and details about your site. A few features of Google’s webmaster tools include: Malware diagnostics, Crawl errors, Crawl stats, search queries, and links to your site.
3. Analytics
Even if your client doesn’t want the statistics for their website, you should install analytics to give you the ability to track the site and set goals. Personally, I think Google Analytics is top notch but some other good ones are Mint and GoSquared.
4. Google Local Business Center
To allow your client to get the most bang for their buck, you should make sure they are listed in the Google Local Business Center so that they will appear in Google Maps and related search results. If you can’t do this for them, then consider shooting them an email with a link to the local business center, so they can do it themselves.
5. SEO Checkup
This seems minor, I know, but I often overlook setting the page titles and descriptions. The key to the SEO checkup is making sure none of the pages have the same title, tags, or descriptions, as this could have a negative effect on your rankings. Some prefer to do this while building the pages and some prefer to do it all at the end. It is all based on personal preference; no right or wrong way to do it as long as it gets done.
6. Social Security
Not the program run by the United States, but take the opportunity to lock up names on social media sites for your clients such as twitter, facebook and more. This will not only allow them future room to move into social media but prevent someone else from taking the names.
Wrap Up
Some might think this list is common sense, but you would be surprised how often I forget to do one, if not more, of the above before we launch a site. Most of these take only a few minutes, but it is time no less. We budget in an extra hour into each project to make sure we can accomplish all of the above for our clients.
At the least, we send the client an email with instructions on how to do this themselves. I have found little tips like this really help build trust with your clients and it shows that you care about their business and that you want their business to succeed on the web.
Many thanks to Meredith Marsh of FLX Creative for proof reading this post!
About the author
Michael is the president and founder of Red Metal Box and has been the lead developer since he founded the company in 2006. Michael has been designing web sites since 2003.Tags: checklist, customer, small business
