Your company website is a powerful marketing tool for positioning information about your products and services in front of customers. Working on your website can be overwhelming at times since it does require both marketing thought and technology knowledge.

Impact your marketing ability by following these technology “must knows:”

1. Not all web browsers display pages the same. You need to test how your website displays and navigates in multiple browsers. While Internet Explorer has 56%(1)  of the user share, don’t ignore other browsers such as Firefox. As of September 2007, 35%(1) of people online used FireFox as their browser. Do you want to ignore 35% of your potential users?

2. Your website is designed with a certain screen width. This may seem like a small point, but if you design your site too wide, people will need to scroll when viewing your website. This can aggravate users and cause them to leave your site. You can check your website width by changing your own display settings to different screen widths. The good news is that 800 x 600 was the previous screen width standard. However, people running at this width has decreased in 2007 (only 7.3% based on one source)(2) and wider screen resolutions (1024 or higher) is becoming the norm.

3. Search engines are a key way that people find websites. Search engines have technology called “spiders” which crawl your site looking for words which describe your content. Behind the scenes, search engines look at each page title, description and metatags. It is important to use descriptive language in each of these technical page elements to help search engines know what the page is about. You also want each to be unique, meaning different from any other page in your site.

4. Your website has the ability to tell you tons of information about who comes to your site and what they do on your site. This is called web analytics. Check with your web hosting company to determine if your website collects this information. Sometimes hosting companies do not “turn on” this functionality unless you ask.

5. Providing video and other animation on your website is increasing in popularity. Many hosting packages do not technically support the streaming of video. You may need to use a third party hosting service to include videos on your site. Here are a few options for hosting videos: www.YouTube.com, www.blip.tv, www.vimeo.com and video.yahoo.com.

1. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

2. http://www.tamingthebeast.net/blog/web-development/screen-resolution-statistics-0907.htm