The key, or cornerstone, to your online presence for your Main Street business is your website.

Consider designing your website as a hub and not a destination. This might contradict every traditional marketing principle but it is true.

If someone wants to know everything about your company, good, bad, or ugly, they should feel that your website is the best starting point for them. Design your website as a hub versus a destination and your web site will immediately become more valuable to your customers. Even though this means that you will be opening additional windows that point to external sites, your customers will always treat your site as a starting point in the future.

Anyone who has developed a website knows there is more to think about than just content.

Design, color, navigation, and appropriate technology are all aspects of a good website.

Let's start with your domain name. Owning your own domain name is the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to increase the professionalism of you and your business, virtually overnight. Understand that in any business, you are selling yourself as a leader and the tops in your field. Having a great domain name is essentially for branding, tracking your advertising results, and ensuring your leads and customers make it to your site instead of someone else's site.

The key to selecting the most appropriate domain name is based on the following 3 criteria. Select a domain name that: 1)protects your brand and differentiates you and your business from your competition; 2) pulls in maximum traffic from advertising; and 3) gets listed in the top of the search engine results.

Next items to think about are design, color, navigation, and appropriate technology; these are all essential aspects of a good website.

Now that some of these basics have been introduced, it is important to think about how to convert eyeballs to sales; essentially convert browsers to buyers. One of the key ways to doing this is based on the usability factor of your site.

As you develop your site, follow these website usability guidelines.

Get Organized. Most Internet users appreciate a familiar website layout and can become confused when presented with non traditional formats. Give them what they want. Visitors typically start scanning a web page at the top left corner and move diagonally down to the bottom right, so it makes sense to place your logo and navigation at the top of the page. The main content and teasers to deeper information should be in the center of the page.

Easier = Better. Visitors should be able to find any content on your site within a few clicks. Arrange your navigation in descending order of popularity with concise and obvious labels. Be wary of fancy drop-down or pop-out menus, as they can be cumbersome and annoying to use (but effective if executed properly).

All the News that Fits. The age-old newspaper term "above the fold" is also applicable to website content. Most visitors should never have to scroll horizontally. If it is not possible to fit the contents of your homepage in one screen (requiring no scrolling whatsoever) be sure to make the most important content the most visible.

Ask for the Sale. The call to action is one of the most vital and often over-looked components in small-business websites. Don’t forget why you have a website in the first place. Your new potential customer visited your beautifully designed, highly usable website and read your well-crafted marketing literature … but then what? You should have a line of copy at the end of every page with a brief but convincing sales pitch that includes your contact information. Better yet, include a lead form on every page that utilizes a hook to get users to submit their information. Free consultations and whitepapers are good resources and provide incentives to visitors to submit their contact information.

Failure to deliver the expected user experience and you may lose your customer. Here are several factors to consider as you build your website.

Now that you have developed your site, it is good to do the following two things.

First, review your site using the following usability factors. After this has been done, consider using the following tools or remote testing services to collect feedback from hundreds of users to your site by performing online website usability tests.

These usability factors include:

Messaging – does your website effectively convey who you are? how are you different? what do you do? and why are you better?

Navigation - how easy is it to navigate your site to perform simple and complex tasks? Can you reduce the number of steps needed to perform each call to action?

Effectiveness of Calls to Action - are users doing the things you expect? How long do they take, and how accessible are your most important offers?

Response time and performance – from the end user’s perspective, does the site hum like a well-oiled machine or does it rattle and puff like an old clunker?

Accessibility for users with disabilities – how accessible is the information on our website to users with disabilities? If you promote your organization as being an equal opportunity employer, how compliant is your website?

Content and readability – from formatting to grammar, how accurate and descriptive is your content? Does it compel your visitors to act?

There are several tools that can be used to obtain feedback as to whether, based on a usability factor, you are providing the user the experience they expected.

Loop11 (loop11 dot com) – creates user tests, invites participants, and collects and analyzes meaningful usability data.

Usabilla (usabilla dot com) – a fast and simple way to collect visual feedback on web pages at any stage of development or deployment.

Userfly (userfly dot com) – sign up, install the provided code, and watch what happens; you will be amazed.

UserTesting (usertesting dot com) – after you sign up, this company shoot a webcam video of your customers while they use your site; the insight is eye opening.

UserZoom (userzoom dot com) – this company conducts task based studies with hundreds of users to measure efficiency and effectiveness.

These development guidelines, review criteria, and test tools are all key actions necessary to positioning your website in the mind or your leads and customers, as the hub they desire to go to first.

I Hope You Enjoyed the Posts and I Trust You Will Find Them Insightful! Let me Know What You Think.

This article, and subsequent articles, will provide a blueprint to the entrepreneur and Small Business owner on Main Street for making money online with Internet Marketing. And, you will find step-by-step road maps for various parts of the Internet Marketing process.

Happy Reading and Here's to Your Success!