Welcome to part 2 of Elements of a Great Business Website. Here are five more factors that help comprise a great business website:

1. Images that have been Optimized for the web

Have you every been to a website that had a nice big picture on their homepage, but it loaded painfully slow, one sliver of the image at a time? That's what happens when you through up a large image on your website without optimizing it. You can often keep the quality and size of an image but reduce the actual size of it drastically. It's important to optimize all of your images, because if you don't it could result in a poor experience for users (i.e. waiting for pictures to load) which could ultimately result in visitors leaving before your site has a chance to make an impression. I know you might be thinking, "But I don't know how to optimize images for the web." No problem, there is an online tool that will help you do it, and best of all it's free. You can find it here. That handy tool will compress your image and give you options of quality from 10% compression up to 90% compression and allow you to pick the best compromise between file size and image quality.

2. Solid Code Behind the Scenes

While the untrained eye may have trouble determining what type of code technology is behind the scenes of any given site, it still has subtle but important effects on the user experience. It is important that your site be built with tabless CSS and HTML as opposed to the old style of tables which some developers are still stuck using. CSS greatly reduces the amount of images, and code required to put the page together. This makes your site load faster and is more "future-proof" than tables since it's a newer technology, it is less likely to be completely broken by a new version of one of the popular browsers.

3. Content Management

Having a website with completely up to date information about your company is invaluable, and if your website frequently has new content related to your products or services then you are giving your customers and potential customers a reason to return to your site. The old style of static website which must be updated by your web developer makes keeping your site fresh with content more or less impossible as it's usually not financially viable to pay a web developer for constant updates. However with a Content Management System (or CMS) you'll be able to edit , add and remove both pages and content from your site yourself. When considering purchasing a CMS driven website, be sure to get a live demo of the CMS product before signing the contract to ensure the CMS is user friendly enough for your organization.

4. Search Engine Optimization

SEO for short, this is basically adding code and links to your site that will get your website ranked for search engine results that are related to your business (Click here to learn more about SEO). Every year that passes more and more consumers and business purchasers turn to the web as their initial research tool when looking for a product or service they need locally. The sooner you establish rankings for local terms related to your business, the more better off you will be moving forward. Once you've achieved a ranking it's much easier to stay ranked rather than wait for a term to become competitive and then try and out-rank everyone. Very few people have jumped on the local SEO bandwagon, so most terms have very little competition and can be ranked for quite easily... at the end of the day, this results in more traffic for your website and more business.

5. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a traffic statistics service provided freely by Google. It allows you to track all sorts of useful information from your visitors. You can look at stuff like what geographical locations your visitors are from or how they are finding your site, from a search engine, another website or elsewhere? This will also help you gauge the effectiveness of different sections of your web site. If your business' most important page is getting very little traffic, that means it's time to take a look at that page and try to fix it up to make it more appealing to users. Another use for Google Analytics is to track how your site is growing over the long term. You can compare traffic data month over month to see how quickly your site is growing or if it has lost traffic since the previous time period. I've really only scratched the surface of what can be done with Google Analytics and it's a free service, so there is really no excuse not to have it on your site.

And that brings us to the end of Part 2. Don't worry we haven't run out of elements quite yet, so you can anxiously await part 3 as it's on it's way!