Information

You're having a website developed for your company. Perhaps you've been studying up on web design and you intend to do it yourself, or you've hired another company to design the interface for you. Regardless, what is the most important thing to put on your website? Information! If your business sells African music CDs, your customers aren't going to get much out of your website if all it contains are photos and fun anecdotes. Use this guide to website information when you're planning what information about your company to include on your website.

The first (and probably most important) thing to remember is that you need to keep it simple. Many novice website designers overload their pages with so much information that visiting customers wanting to learn about Toronto investment real estate quickly find themselves developing headaches. In the website design business, less is more, at least as far as information (especially text) is concerned. Don't let this lead you to make a single page site, though. Then you're creating the impression that you're lazy or unprofessional.

So how do you decide what information to include on your website? You start with the most basic information and proceed from there. As a business, your goal is to make money. Whether you do it through providing landscaping to Waterloo hotels or by selling t-shirts, you need to give your customers the information they need to buy your product or service. This means product/service information, hours, prices, ordering instructions, and contact information. The barest bones business website consists of a single page identifying the business, what services it provides, and who to contact to obtain them.

After that, you can go deeper into product catalogues, test results, biographies of employees, company history, and so on. Remember though, this information is largely irrelevant to people buying your products, though it will help prospective employees find out which staff members to address the cover letter to when they're doing their professional resume writing. In the long run, having information about yourself and your business practices will build trust between you and the customer, so including it is a good idea.

So how do you keep all this information from overwhelming your readers? It all comes down to good website design. If you must have long blocks of text, make sure it all pertains to a single topic and include some photos to make it easier on the eye. For instance, if you're outlining the history of Sutton Reality, include a photo of the staff at the office or of a house that you've sold. Anything not directly related to the topic should be on a separate page, though you can include a link to it from any pages that are peripherally related.