Understanding the type of people who visit your small business website is important because you can use that information to enhance your site to suit those visitors. As a result, you will build loyalty among your visitors, which will keep them returning to your site on a more regular basis.

Ask yourself the following: What is the age level and what kind of knowledge does your audience have?

A layman might linger around a general site on gardening, but a professional botanist might turn his nose at the very same site. Similarly, a regular person will soon leave a site filled with astronomy abstracts, but a well-educated university graduate will find that site interesting.

You should also take your audience’s emotional state into consideration when building your site. If a very irritated visitor searches for a solution and comes across your site, you will want to make sure you offer the solution right up front, and only then sell or promote your product to him. In this way, the visitor will put his trust in you for offering the solution to his problems and is more likely to buy your product when you offer it to him after that.

When you design the layout for your site, you have to take into account the characteristics of your audience. Are they old or young people? Are they looking for trends or are they just looking for information served without any icing on the cake? For example, introducing a new, exciting game aimed at a younger audience with a simple, straightforward black text against white background page will definitely turn prospects away. On the other hand, such a design is eminently suitable for a website offering practical business advice. Make sure your design suits your site’s general theme.

Try to sprinkle colloquial language in your sites sparingly where you see fit and you will create a sense that your audience is on common ground with you. This in turn builds a trusting relationship between you and your audience, which will come in useful should you want to market a product to your audience.

Your website is where your business resides - it’s like the headquarters of an offline company. Hence, it’s important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion. Even though the navigation may appear obvious to you, it could be less clear to a first-time visitor who is new to browsing the Web. So keep your navigation as clear and simple as possible.

Reduce the number of images on your website. Images make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are not at all necessary. If you think any images are essential to your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have the smallest file size possible without making the image fuzzy.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large is difficult to read and will deter visitors from reading your content.

If you have a number of points you want to emphasize, use bullet points as these make the text easy to read and the content easy to follow.

Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horrible in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that. Other visitors turn off scripting languages lke javascript, so will not see certain parts of your website if they’re dependant on javascript.

Use cascading style sheets (CSS) to style your page content because CSS saves a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

When buying office furniture, we often tend to think only in terms of utility. But appearance can play a valid role, and not simply in order to impress clients.

When you look for an ergonomic chair, you’re interested in one that is comfortable, with controls to adjust the back angle and arm rest height. A desk with a keyboard shelf should be adjustable in terms of both height and angle. These features help make the furniture more usable and reduce the odds of back or wrist pain. That allows them to fulfill their primary role, the reason you buy them in the first place: to increase productivity.

But how they look also fulfills that goal, in part, though perhaps in more subtle ways.

Going to the office, especially a home office, requires motivation. For those running a small business, keeping that motivation high day after day through 14-hour, seven-days-a-week challenges can be tough. Disappointments are frequent, rewards often less so. Many entrepreneurs report that keeping their spirits up is actually the hardest part of running the business.

A fine looking piece of furniture can well help ease that burden. Even the most practical-minded persons are affected by the environment around them. It’s no accident that motivational posters, photos and prints continue to sell well. Even a child’s drawing can be a reminder of why we work so hard. An elegant desk can draw you to the computer.

Most successful business-people are so in part because they have good focus. They can really concentrate, shutting out distractions. But even the most dedicated will take a moment to look up, scan around and see the office decor. Filling it with a fine looking set of document holders or a stylish pen holder brings a smile. Having a work table that is a thing of beauty as well as function is a delight.

The objects we choose are a reminder of who we are and our unique personalities. We feel more at home when the furniture and accessories reflect our values. Since those vary from person to person, every area will be different. Even in relatively large, impersonal settings like big corporations you see cubicles adorned with personal items. But every one tells us something about who works there.

It’s not a mere indulgence to choose items that dress up the work area just the way you like. It lifts your mood, which has a direct bearing on how eager you are to work there. When you’re excited about getting down to business, you get down to business much better.

Beauty, after all is said, is a very practical value.

Don’t forget to check out the wide range of beautiful and functional office furniture in our Small Business Store.

When you first start a home business, it’s more than likely that your office furniture and equipment will consist of items you already have in your home. So, for example, that old desk that you’ve been using for doing your home admin and accounts will suffice at the beginning, as will the ageing computer that still works okay. After all, why outlay capital at this early stage when you already have equipment that will handle the job?

Certainly sensible and valid reasoning - at least when you first start out and you’re trying to cut costs and save money.

However, before long you’ll see there are equally valid reasons why money spent on office equipment is not a luxury, but an investment and necessary operating cost. Decent equipment and comfortable office furniture will make you more productive - and “more productive” will increase your chances of business success.

Central to boosting productivity is a good computer system. Once your home business reaches a certain size, an essential component will be a server, a computer that stores data, manages email and printing, and much more. Mundane, everyday products like a fax machine and a copier are common in most offices simply because the’ve proved to be indispensable. Large businesses don’t buy hundreds of these items because they enjoy spending money unneccessarily. They simply find such tools - and that’s all they are - necessary for business efficiency.

Don’t forget, though, that there’s more to productivity than just having the latest and greatest tools – as necessary as those are. Comfort is also important and that, too, is not an expensive indulgence but a practical business matter.

Most home offices are run by a single person, occasionally with help from one other person. A fairly large number in these times of economic hardship are “Mom and Pop” shops, run by a husband and wife team. Whether it’s one or two people running the business, the hours tend to be long. Working 10 to12 hours a day, seven days a week, is not unusual. It should be pretty obvious that office furniture and equipment that isn’t comfortable and easy to use soon eats into productivity.

It’s harder to be productive when your back aches, or you have a headache from eye strain, or when you develop carpal tunnel syndrome from typing for hours with a setup that isn’t right. Monitors, chairs and more all need to be chosen well in order to be ergonomic, to fit you and your way of working correctly. That minimizes eye strain, keeps the hands and back at the correct angles and generally helps you feel good when working.

Security is another important aspect of outfitting the home office correctly. After you invest the time looking and the money buying all that furniture and equipment to help you run your business you don’t want to find it missing one day.

That means a home security system could well be a valid and useful part of office equipment. Once you outfit your office it becomes even more important than it was just to protect your home valuables. Safes aren’t just for banks, either.

Outfit your home office to increase your productivity, comfort and security, and you’ll be ready to play a successful role in the business world.

Don’t forget to check out Office Products and Supplies in our Office Products Store.

The phrase in the title does not, unfortunately for most of us, refer to a butler who brings coffee to your desk in the morning. It refers to a computer in the office that has a few special tasks to perform on behalf of others. So, perhaps in a different way it’s a little like a butler.

You could store all your files, emails, photos and more on your own computer. You could use only your computer for access to the Internet, printing, faxing and more. But that setup has some potential downsides, especially when your office grows to hold multiple desktops.

If your personal machine goes south, you could be out of business (at least for a while). Even if your machine doesn’t completely crash and burn, you could still be in serious trouble just by losing one file. You could make backups locally, say on a USB flash drive. But storing and using those small devices could lead to complicated and duplicate effort if your office has multiple computers.

If your machine is directly connected to a DSL, cable or satellite modem anyone else on your office network accessing the Internet has to go through your machine to get to the web. That drags down the performance of your machine while you’re using it, and slows down Internet access for the others.

All these problems and more can be solved by investing in a single computer that performs services on behalf of others. That’s the role of an office server. It centralizes your local email system, so everyone can take advantage of it without slowing down anyone else. It gives you a place to attach a printer, network fax machine and more so that everyone can use them without slowing down or relying on anyone else. Most importantly, it gives you a central storehouse for file backups and - worst case scenario - restores, if and when they’re needed.

With the enormous hard drives available on even ordinary computers today, servers are no longer critical for housing raw space. But their role is still important. They provide a convenient place to centralize documents, images and more that is accessible by every computer on the network with the security rights to get to them.

The alternative is what’s known as a peer-to-peer system, in which all machines on the network are equal. The Internet and all the personal computers that use it are somewhat like that (although, it also uses millions of servers).

For example, you may store your email, files and more on Google, which acts like a central server for you. Or, you may just pass files back and forth with other users, each one acting as a peer to the other. That method has its benefits and drawbacks as well. But for those who maintain an office of anywhere from two to two thousand computers a central server provides numerous values. You gain reliability, security and performance benefits from having a central system that does work on behalf of others in the office.

Now if you could only train one to bring coffee in the morning…

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