Step 4.5 – Necessary Evils

Summary:
You’ve already spent a lot of time in getting all your ducks lined up so that your first website will be a real winner. Did you forget something? Maybe yes – and here are some items that are critical to making sure that your new website is a success. Critical, as in “how do I collect the money for the things I sell?” I’d call that critical, wouldn’t you? But there’s more, as well…

Point 5. Necessary Evils

Particularly if you are making a commercial website, there are a few things that you need to include to protect yourself in case of potential problems – they will not take the place of legal assistance, but they are better than nothing.

Impressum

The first of these is what’s called an “Impressum” in German, and I cannot find a single word that describes it in English, but the general idea is that you should (are required in some countries and areas) to have a statement on the website that clarifies who is responsible for the website (the owner, generally), who is responsible for its publication (the webmaster usually), and all the legal contact requirements: e-mail (it may be “cloaked” to prevent the spam machines from finding it – for example “craig point hesser located at gmail point com[merce]” ), company name (if any), complete postal address, telephone number, and maybe company information like the corporate registration number and date and your tax identification number. You may also need to list your hosting company with some contact information (this can generally be just email such as info@wxyzhosting.com (this is supposed to be ficticious; I don’t think such a company exists, although there is a radio station WXYZ in Detroit with its website wxyz.com). Check with your local contacts to see what’s required locally for you, and if you expect to do business in Germany or Iceland as a strong point (examples), make sure you conform to the German or Icelandic regulations, even if you aren’t registered there.

Disclaimers

You should also have a legal disclaimer document that can be addressed from the website. There are a number of models floating around on the Internet – some free, some paid – the free one that we sometimes use comes from PriorityDigital.com. If you’re selling something that could have repercussions (stun guns, as an extreme example), you will probably want to talk to your lawyer (or get one if you don’t have one) to suggest what should be there to CYA (you know, “Cover Your A**” ). You may also need a disclaimer about possible client results being different from the examples you showed, and also maybe even one for businesses about “forward-looking statements” and such.

Things to DO and NOT to do

This is a short list that can always be made longer, but there are solid reasons for doing these checks before you turn your site loose on the web, and most of the are obvious:

• DO make sure ALL your links work – and decide for yourself whether you want them to show in a new window (in which case your site is still on the viewer’s screen) or want the viewers to go to the other site (open in the same window).
• DO make sure your site looks good in ALL the popular browsers – if you don’t have them, get them, or use someone elses computer to take a look
• DON’T open your site before it’s finished with an “under construction” sign – if it doesn’t work, nobody’s interested!

• If you are selling one specific product, DON’T water down your pitch with Google or other advertising on the same page! Unless your product isn’t returning much margin, you’re shooting yourself in the pocketbook! Think about it – do you want to sell your product at $10 per sale income or get a Google click worth maybe $0.05 net?
• DO make sure all your images have alternate text attached to them that’s pertinent to your keywords – because the spiders that search the websites can not “see” pictures, but they do read the text, even the alternate text for images. An example is the entry for the “under construction” graphic above (this is the alt text : alt=”WEBMASTER RESOURCES INFO” ) – note that this is for WP blog entries, it can be a little different in straight html):

<a href=”http://webmaster-resources-info.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/_anim_under_construction.gif”><img class=”alignnone size-thumbnail wp-image-272” title=”_anim_under_construction” src=”http://webmaster-resources-info.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/_anim_under_construction.gif” alt=”WEBMASTER RESOURCES INFO” width=”60” height=”60” /></a>

And if your picture is not available for some reason (it happens sometimes…) it looks like this:

So, that’s about all there is to this step, stay tuned for the next step – uploading to the server in Step 5 – Uploading Your Site