Let’s assume your business is set to fly and almost all the proposed plans at its initiation stage are nearing complete implementation. It is now time to announce to the world where you are, doing your great stuff. Then suddenly a thought came into your mind: Wait o!, I think I need a good website to sell my brand. Without much hullabaloo, you need a website, custom website with all the basic features of your business professionally and aesthetically scripted into it .

Please take note of the aforementioned adjectives (custom, professionally and aesthetically) as they will form the basis in your next level of decision But where do you turn to create this custom, professional and aesthetic website. Do you go for a cheap template site considering a tight budget coupled with tight schedule or do you spend a little more to get an experienced webmaster and get a branded nice website?
At this level of decision making, the basics come in, the fundamentals needed to decide what is best for your business online presence.
Getting a professional website either custom hard coded or built from CMS platforms (Content Management System) like wordpress, joomla or drupal enables an entity to set its brand different from other competitors. Your website is your office opened “24/7” to the world, so effort should be made that this ever opened office commands respect and confidence to your visitors.

Apart from having images , medias and contents properly tagged with html and rightly position using the style sheet, here are other basic features that a site owner should ensure are integral part of his website

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic" search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search,[1] news search and industry-specific vertical search engines (from Wikipedia).
What Wikipedia is saying is that your website must be designed in such way that search engines like google, yahoo or bing must find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. Your discussion with your webmaster kicks off from here because it either makes or mars your website. Drill anybody who you proposed to design for you on his knowledge of search engine optimization

2. Optimization of your website for social sharing
Apart from search engine like google directing traffic to your site, another means of attracting traffic to your website is through social sharing button. When your website is shared and linked in major social platform like nairaland, facebook, twitter etc, the natural backlinks created out of sharing gives your website an edge in page ranking which leads to more traffic to your site. There are many social sharing options online but some required a more technical expertise to embed them into your web. Your webmaster must have this expertise…..

3. Website user friendliness: User friendly website uses a lot of strategies to achieve a good user experience (UX). Your web pages have to be sleek and sizeable for faster loading meaning that images and media must be properly optimized for this. Slow loading website put off visitors because nobody has time to wait for a sluggish site when there are others to read from.

Your stylesheet file needed to present your web pages and some scripts necessary at page loading need to be linked at the head of your page while other scripts have to linked at the end of the page, the same method is applicable even when using twitter bootstrap for your site. This measure makes your pages load faster. Your webmaster should avoid unnecessary inline styling and scripting.
Your menu navigation and links, phone number and email must be on the home page so also customer request and feedback form. All these packages your website for good user interaction and experience and should be an integral part of its design

4. Finally let your website go mobile: Every modern website must “I repeat must”, be optimized for mobile users. Responsive and Fluid websites have come to stay and webmasters have to embrace that reality. There are many people holding internet ready phones, tablets and other hand hold devices today than in the past. Mobile users need information in quick and concise bites; they are impulse buyers and spend more money on purchase than their counterparts on desktops. If your webmaster did not optimize your site for mobile users, your website is likely on a “long thing”, lol ; and will be missing a whole lot of traffics.

In summary, beyond the basic html and css needed as a core framework of any website, a lot of other expert knowledge and dynamics are needed in getting a sleek, aesthetic and professional branded website. How a site owner achieves this depends on his budget and choice of a webmaster.

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