Creating a website isn’t difficult, what’s difficult is knowing where to start, what tools to use, and the steps needed to design and maintain your website.

A website is a powerful marketing tool that can help boost your online tutoring service business. It can help you to communicate useful information to both parents and potential students. Businesses, parents and students who want to search for the services of a professional consultant or private tutor will either do their searches through the Yellow Pages or through the internet. The Yellow Pages can useful information, a website can provide more detailed information – information about a particular company, it’s services, tutoring rates or the details and experiences of its staff members. Providing this level of detailed information to a customer – whether they live in your neighborhood or in another part of the world – can make a big difference to the survival of your tutoring business. A carefully planned and fully optimized website can provide your business with repeat visitors, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Simplifying Website Design

Having some knowledge of HTML or knowing how to use a website authoring tool such as Dreamweaver MX 2004 or MS Frontpage can help you to create a professional website – however they are not essential for building a high quality, good-looking website. The good news is that there are now many free or low cost, quality website design tools and web hosting services for people on a low budget. Many of the web design software discussed on this site are user-friendly, some are low cost, while most are free software. Nearly all the tools mentioned can help you to easily put up your own online tutoring website without needing to have any special knowledge of computer programming.

Seven Website Design Tips

Before we go into the nuts and bolts of website design, we need to be aware of some common design pitfalls. These pitfalls can either make or break the design and usability of your own online tutoring service website.

1. Put Up Easy to Read Articles
2. Use A Simple Navigation Menu
3. Optimize Your Pages For Quick Downloading
4. Avoid Dead Links
5. Keep Site Contents Fresh and Relevant
6. Browser Compatible Websites
7. Color Compatibility

Search Engine Submission

Once you publish your website, the next step is to perform a manual search engine submission. A search engine submission is important for new websites because there’s no way for a web-crawler to know that your pages exist unless you tell it of your website’s where-about. However, it’s important to know that a search engine submission does not guarantee a listing, or ranking on search engine results. Here are some popular places to manually submit your website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of tweaking your web pages in such a way as to improve it’s overall ranking in the major search engines. For online tutors, learning search engine optimization is a major step in making your pages stand out from among the two billion web pages on the internet (and thousands more that are been created daily). Below are a few simple techniques that you can use to help you improve your overall ranking. If you have a website that is non-pornographic, non-gambling or not illegal in anyway, applying these simple suggestions can help you to greatly improve you website ranking.

Maintaining and Improving Your Website

Maintaining your website is an on-going process. This section looks at some things that you will need to do to maintain your website. As your experience and skills improve, you may want to improve your sites appearance and usability. The second part of this guide offers some details on how to improve your site.

Remember when you needed a product or service, and you pulled the bulky phone book off the shelf to find it? While that may still be your first impulse, there are hundreds of different, and often better, ways to find what you’re looking for. Many online business directories offer more than simple addresses and phone numbers. For free or for a subscription fee, many directories also offer detailed company information that’s designed to help you grow your business.

Online business directories can do even more for small businesses. Listing your business in online directories can be an ideal way to reach other businesses that need your products or services. Use online business directories to:

1. Find new customers.
2. Find suppliers.
3. Build mailing lists.
4. Find key contacts within corporations.
5. Check credit ratings and financial status.
6. List your company and thus, attract new business.