It set me thinking about the challenge of helping you, my reader, to understand all this technology that I talk about in small business website design. I try to position all my writing at the non-technical person, but even so, I get a fair number of people who find that my explanations are pitched at the wrong level.

Some people want it more technical and complain if I’m not quoting HTML syntax or talking about the latest super-tweak on SEO.

Others find any kind of technology completely confusing and if I start to talk about anything involving a website source file or a link or a cookie then they start panicking and get confused.

This is a fun challenge! The trick with explaining any kind of technology is that you need to start from a basic level of understanding and build on top of that. If you don’t have the basic level nailed down then this is where things start to get a bit difficult.

It’s fine if you’re talking to one person because you can have a chat first and find out which level to start from. It gets harder if you’re talking to a group of people. You can still discuss their knowledge level but the levels may be different so you’ve then got to help all of them together to understand your techie talk. It gets harder again if you’re writing for readers who you can’t engage with directly.

The good news is that by choosing a target audience who is non-technical, I’ve narrowed down my niche so that I stand a better chance of writing stuff that you’ll be able to use. I’m making the assumption that small business owners are a clever bunch, but that they probably don’t speak native CSS or PHP. I always make the promise that I’ll leave the white coat by the door! That’s far easier than trying to write techie stuff that works for everyone.

I encourage you to contact me by leaving a blog comment, or chatting on Facebook or Twitter, to let me know if you find that my stuff is hitting the right level for you.

PS. I’m about to start a 4 week road trip so apologies in advance if it seems like I’m ignoring your nice feedback

• Do you have to talk to a web designer before you can add a new page?
• Even if you can write code yourself, have you made it easy to create a new page, using templates and a separate CSS file, or even better, some kind of content management system?

The best websites grow over time and gradually get more and more useful content on them.

This keeps your readers (and the search engines) coming back regularly for more – a good thing.

One of the best decisions you can make for your site is to make this as easy as possible. If it’s a pain, you won’t update it and this is definitely not a good thing.

On one hand you need to create a website that’s unique, highlights your key business differences, includes all those functions and pages that you need and hopefully provides an interesting experience for your readers.

On the other hand you probably don’t have the resources to do everything:

• code your own HTML
• create and adjust the CSS style
• add nice multimedia such as videos and audio tracks
• incorporate e-commerce features such as a shopping cart

Even if you’re a technical wiz at web design, you may not want to spend your valuable business working hours tweaking code (*)

This means that you need to make use of standard templates and frameworks as much as possible.

The problem here is that you could easily end up with a ‘me too’ site that looks the same as many others out there on the web. So much for your individuality!

My advice is to use templates and frameworks as far as you can, but to add your own customization and special tricks to make your website individual and memorable. If you choose a template system, do make sure you can customize it.

Think of your website like your business card – it’s better to design and print up something special and high quality than to buy one of those cheap ‘print your own’ cards. You don’t have to design your own fonts or make your own paper though (now there’s an idea)

(*) Personally, I do like to spend my valuable business hours tweaking code because (a) I’m a geek and I enjoy it, (b) it helps me to learn the nuts and bolts of building sites so that I can write about it and (c) I find it works better for me in making sites that work reliably and successfully