Yahoo Small Business-Minimizing Flaws in Your Website

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BY PHIL GRIER | SMALL BUSINESS

The day your site goes live is certainly cause for celebration. It’s also the day the real work begins. You’ll need to monitor it on an ongoing basis for security vulnerabilities, usability issues and content errors. Fortunately though, minimizing the flaws in your website before you launch can be accomplished more easily when you use a good small business website builder.

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Enlist the assistance of the most fastidious people you can find. You want relentlessly ruthless reviewers who will revel in revealing every flaw—no matter how small. These should be people you’d avoid in every other social situation, because you can’t stand the criticism that oozes freely from their lips. And, while you’d probably avoid them in every other circumstance, they are the most perfectly suited for this one.

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Here are the key things to have them look for.

Content Errors Sometimes information will become outdated the moment you post it. Unleashing those impartial eyes on your site to look for content errors will be a huge help before you launch. If the site is vast, have each of them focus on a specific section of the site—ideally one in which they have some expertise. Avoid having the people who wrote your content look over their own work. They will miss slip-ups they made. The brain has a way of tricking writers into overlooking their own missteps.

Dead Links Here’s a fatal flaw that is often overlooked, broken hyperlinks. Dead links detract from the user experience and diminish your SEO (search engine optimization). The good news is there are a number of tools available to help you accomplish this. However, it’s a good idea to enlist real human beings to go through and check them as well.

Accurate Meta Tags As the reviewers go through your site, charge them with ensuring each page has accurate titles, relevant keywords, the proper description and good image tags. While your users might not care one way or another about these things, search engines do—big time. What’s the point of having a thoroughly scoured website if it can’t be indexed properly?

Security Features Advanced security features might require someone with a bit more expertise to review. But novice users can probe functions such as user name requirements, password protections and secondary authorizations. When it comes to security, you should always try it before you rely on it.

The concerns listed above will need to be reviewed to make sure everything is correct. Meanwhile, the best small website builders will take care of design and navigation issues, as long as you plug the right information into the right fields. Yahoo Small Business has the perfect templates you need to get your website idea off the ground in no time. Choose yours today!

Phil Grier is an ecommerce veteran who has spent more than 10 years advising sellers how to build successful online stores, as well as having experience running his own online retail store. He’s been a panelist at PROSPER and other industry events, and has been quoted in numerous articles about site optimization and steps to take to increase sales.