Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Small Business Website Success Gallery

Small business owners, startups, makers, inventors, solopreneurs often impress me with their do-it-yourself skills and attitudes. Our small team decided that it would be cool to honor that can-do spirit this summer by creating a gallery of the best SMB websites and to give one lucky site owner a nice prize, too. Read on.

As most TechBizTalk readers know, I write for Forbes, American Express OPEN Forum, and Small Business Trends. This roundup idea is aimed at OPEN, but in every contest like this I always uncover some wonderful new company that fits at another media site. This opportunity to discover, uncover a new company is one of my favorite reasons for doing roundup type posts, galleries, and lists. There are simply too many gems out there for me to find on my own. So, I want to thank you for submitting your site and getting in touch.

Criteria for the roundup post includes:

  • Best design
  • Best fresh look
  • Easy navigation
  • Creative content
  • Good use of social media
  • Strongest calls to action
  • A few other areas that make a website fun and useful to visit.

ioSafe-Solo-front

There are no shortage of amazing tools and services to help small business owners build a website or online presence today. Some choose not to build a site at all, but build a presence within a community, or on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and successfully grow their business using these services.

In the navigation link above, we list ~15 website builders that are free or low-cost. You can read that ever-growing list. It includes Google, WordPress, Wix, DoodleKit, Moonfruit, Weebly, Webstarts, Yola, Webs, Jimdo, ezWeb123, Ruxter, and two new ones are being added this week (to this list) ? SquareSpace and Vistaprint. And there are many more.

If you have used any of these tools to build your company website, or another service that we?ve not listed, please submit your site so it can be considered for the post. Plus, we?d like to showcase it and link to it in the upcoming gallery. Don?t forget to share which tool or service you used! If we choose your site for the gallery or the roundup, we?ll send you an email asking you some more questions and possibly to provide a screenshot or two and we?ll go from there.

Giveaway ? 1 Winner will receive an ioSafe 500 Gigabyte hard drive!

HERE?S HOW TO ENTER

To enter the giveaway, enter your website URL -and- answer the following question in the Comments section below.

?What has been the most exciting part of taking your business to the web?

It doesn?t matter if you just started your company or have been in business for 20+ years. ?Also, feel to share any website building advice or tips you might have for those who are just starting out.

You do not have to answer the question to submit your site for consideration in the Small Business Website Success Gallery, but if you want a chance to win the ioSafe 500Gig hard drive, you must answer the question.?We will use Random.org to randomly select one comment as the hard drive winner using the simple True Random Number Generator based on the number of comments. ?If you do not answer the question with an appropriate comment, we?ll assume you don?t want a chance to win the prize and simply want us to consider your site for the roundup post.

We?ve reviewed ioSafe products before and love them. This unit is one that I reviewed not too long ago and it is in brand new condition (sitting on a shelf). This unit is roughly $200 in value.

Comments will stay open until Friday, July 20 until 8pm Pacific time. Contest winner will be posted on Monday, July 23rd.?

THE RULES
One entry per person, please.
No entries after 8pm (PST) on Friday, July 20.
Winner will be selected at random and announced Monday, July 23.

Contest/Prize open to USA residents only. (sorry to all my international friends on this one ? this hard drive is heavy!), but you can still submit a website.

You can email instead:?Gallery@TechBizTalk.com?with your site URL if you simply want us to consider it for the gallery/roundup post and not the contest prize.

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*Fine Print: ?We run a family-friendly website and business, so sites and businesses that promote, endorse, or sell alcohol, tobacco, firearms, weapons, adult-oriented stuff (or the photography/video that accompanies that last category) will not be accepted. ?

Source: http://www.techbiztalk.com/2012/07/small-business-website-success-gallery/

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