While I could riddle off the pros and cons of different architectures, content management systems or other technical solutions, I strive for function over form in making a Website useful and attractive for visitors. I’ve decided to share a number of tips and resources that I’ve learned over the years to help entrepreneurs with their Web sites.

As a Webmaster, I have to agree that being online is a huge opportunity for most companies, but there are always a few things to consider before beginning starting (or updating) a website. Here are questions to ask yourself when planning to launch (or re-launch) your Web site:

1. What’s the purpose of your site? Many people just think they need a Web site just to have one.  It’s not that beneficial unless you plan on spending time, money, and effort to use it as a marketing or business tool. Discover your purpose and make it known on the Web site.
2. Are you ready to put in the effort and time to get a decent site? Every small business owner wears many hats and has limited time to focus on any one task. Building a website is a time-consuming process and requires considerable focus and attention to detail. Your visitors will be able to tell the difference between a site slapped together and one that your company invested in.
3. Who is your audience? Make sure your site will appeal to them in look, feel and tone. Understanding who your prospects and customers are, as well as their needs comes into play when making a functional and attractive Web site.
4. What’s the personality of your company? Personality in this context means the tone, style and proprietary features your Web site offers. Similar to the previous tip, make sure your personality connects to your audience. Most companies don’t want to be perceived as a “used car salesman” type of company. Make sure that your Web site doesn’t come across that way. 

Being an entrepreneur myself, I understand that starting out with a site that perfectly represents your business is not always possible. Sometimes you must start out with the idea that’s “better than nothing.” If you must go that route, keep the above questions in mind to get the best and most accurate message across to your prospects and clients in the most efficient manner.

So, now that we’ve gotten the basics of building a Web site out of the way, I’d like to share some of the tools and resources that I use throughout my day, which people are often interested in. Because of the diverse audience of small businesses and entrepreneurs, I broke it into two categories: tech savvy and non tech-savvy.

16 Website Building Resources for Small Business

Non Tech Savvy:

• Weebly – A drag-and-drop simple Web site creation tool.  They’ll even host it for you for free (or a nominal cost). For most people, this is the fastest way to get a Web site together online.
• Wix – Another free Web site service. This one creates a more animated Web site. It’s pretty cool and easy to get started.
• Nvu – A Dreamweaver-like HTML editor (WYSIWYG) for those who have a have a limited knowledge of html. Once again, it’s free, though you’ll need your own hosting account though to put your pages up, and an FTP client to get them online.
• GIMP – A free Photoshop-like program.  If you’ve ever used Adobe Photoshop, you know that it isn’t the easiest program to use, but it will allow you get design ideas put together. GIMP is free and supports saving to a wide variety of formats. (We actually use it for lightweight modifications for photos featured on the Infusionsoft blog.)
• Squarespace – Squarespace is another hosted service that will help you get a site up without a lot of technical knowledge.  It’s not free, but it’s affordable for most small businesses.

This is an example of how I use Firebug. It's nifty to test and tweak your Website.

Tech Savvy:

• Komodo Edit – A very powerful text editor sporting auto-complete, simple project management, and customizable snippets for many languages.  Some huge time savers. And it’s free!
• Adobe Photoshop — Photoshop is the standard in image editing and processing. It does come at a pretty penny, but it’s very powerful for slicing and dicing your design into a great site.
• FileZilla – FileZilla is a free FTP application that can help you get your website files uploaded to your server. Supports encrypted (SSL) transfers and multiple sites.
• Web Hosting – Lunarpages, Bluehost, Firehost and Dreamhost are great Web-hosting providers to store your Website on. When using a paid Web host, you have complete control over your Website, support from the company and freedom to do virtually anything with your Web site. If you need a domain, GoDaddy is a decent registrar, but you can also get domains from any hosting company as well. (Some even include free domains, so check around!)
• Drupal —  A complete content management system that supports multiple users, blogging and article publishing. It’s very powerful and can be customized but requires a deeper techie understanding of HTML and CSS to get going. It’s free, too.
• Joomla – Similar to Drupal, Joomla doesn’t require you to be super tech-savvy to use it, but it does require some basic knowledge to get them up and running. Joomla has many, many plug-ins available to help make Web site management a snap. It’s free, but some plugins are commercial.
• WordPress – Unlike Drupal and Joomla, WordPress is the ideal blogging platform for small businesses to use. It is customizable and acts flexibly as a CMS. This is likely the easiest CMS-like software. It’s free as well.
• Sequel Pro, SQL Yog – These applications are helpful to manage your SQL statements (e.g. database language). Sequel Pro is for Mac and SQL Yog is for Windows.
• Firebug – Firebug is a toolbox for Web developers. It’s easy to monitor and edit your Web site for on-the-fly testing and tweaking. It’s a free add-on for Firefox.
• Web Developer – Similar to Firebug, Web Developer gives you greater control and technical information on your Web site. Everything is tucked into menus so it’s pretty intuitive.
• PageTest – This free service made by AOL’s Web Optimization team is helpful at identifying any bottlenecks and provides suggestions to improve the performance of your Web site. It’s very easy to use, but is intended for tech-savvy folks.

I hope you find some of these tips and resources helpful! You most likely won’t use all these tools during your Web site creation, but I suggest giving them a try and see how they will benefit you. The best thing about being an entrepreneur is that you can cherry pick the right resources to fit your needs.

If you have any suggested Web tools that I’m not using, let me know in the comments.

[Photo credit: schoschie on Flickr]