By Tim Knox

What Should My Website Contain

This question can best be answered by determining the nature of your business. If you're a real estate agent you might want to feature photographs of homes you have for sale. If you are a mechanic you might want to feature before and after photographs of cars that you have repaired. If you're a writer for hire you could feature samples of your work and a list of satisfied clients. In other words, you should consider your website the electronic branch of your business. Your website should reflect what your business is all about.

As an internet consultant, I've had clients ask me to look at their website and figure out why it wasn't bringing them any business. "I put up a webpage with pictures and everything and I haven't gotten one call from it! Look, I've got flashing graphics and dancing babies and everything!"

Nine times out of ten the problem is that their website has nothing at all to do with their business! I've seen business websites with hundreds of links to the business owner's favorite websites and pictures of his family's vacation to DisneyWorld, but nothing about the business the website is supposed to represent.

If you sell shoes, put shoes on your website. If you cut hair, feature photographs showing the latest styles. If you are in the carpet cleaning or other service business, fill your site with before and after photographs of your work and client testimonials that say what great work you do.

In short, think about what best represents your business and incorporate that into the design of your site. And remember, DisneyWorld vacation photos and dancing babies are extremely out of place on a business website, unless or course, you're Disney.com.

NEXT: Will My Website Ever Change

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Tim Knox is an Internet designer, developer, author and teacher. He is the Creative Director of Digital Graphiti. In a prior life, Tim was an award-winning humor columnist and cartoonist. His current writing projects include a book on web development for SAM's Publishing.