A notable topic is the subject of how to brand your website and internet presence. From most of my design and development experience, one thing I’ve learned is that a lot of time and money is wasted because the client typically is not sure on how to go about branding themselves. Of course, such branding efforts usually do take some experience to see how the business works out online and what should be changed over time, but some things can be prevented.
1) Domain. Probably one of the most important is the domain you’re going to establish your business at. Choosing the domain comes down to the ultimate goal of your internet presence. If you’re looking for SEO then you should probably have keywords in your domain. If you’re looking for branding, then you should probably have something creative and memorable. Perhaps you’re looking for both, try then to fit a keyword or two into one short, memorable domain. The reason a domain is so important is because you’ll be investing a lot of time and work into either telling clients about the domain or optimizing it for ranking in Google. In either case, changing the domain later on will be a mess!
2) Social Networking. Some people get too overwhelmed with the idea of running MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. accounts. Figure out what your clients are interested in/sign-up on and use one, maybe two of these. That way you’re not spreading yourself to thin. If you’re on every network and not updating each as much, no one will care to read what you have to say. If you stick to one or two, you’ll be able to update your profile more often and keep people interested in coming to visit you.
3) Blogging. Think serious about this, don’t just start a blog because you can. You’ll need to stick with it. What’s the purpose of your blog? Do you have enough time to invest into your blog to keep it fresh (like the social network thing)? How often will you update? Try writing a couple articles first to see if it’s as easy as you think. Also, if you’re looking into blogging just to help people stay updated on your company, consider news releases instead. You can even use the same Wordpress (or other) software, just brand your blog as a new release platform. That way, you’re not expected to write so much or so often.
4) Multi-Websites. It’s fine to have more than one website, but each website should serve its own purpose. Don’t lose sight of each site’s purpose, keep clear goals for each site and measure them to make sure each site is working its end. Many clients will want to have multiple sites because they got a couple great different domains. Just because you have two domains doesn’t mean you need two websites! A domain is about $7/year. Hold on to the domain until you find something useful to do with it (as opposed to hiring a website developer to create a whole other site you don’t need, confusing yourself to what really is the purpose). Also, don’t put up a mirror copy of one site on another domain! If you desperately need to use another domain, you can use it for memorability/ease of typing and have it forward to main website, but no mirroring! This can destroy your online rankings as I’ve seen it dozens of times with clients.
