When you redesign your website, often you will add, rename and remove some pages as part of the restructuring that inevitably happens at the same time.

You should take care to remove your old website before uploading your new website; this will ensure any old pages aren’t left lying around for visitors to stumble upon and become lost.

Then, make sure your web developer puts in place a “redirect” for every old page to an equivalent new page (or the home page, if there isn’t a good match.) Not only will this benefit visitors who might have bookmarked a certain page, or clicked a link from another person’s website; but the search engines will use this information to update its index and make sure it displays your new pages rather than your old pages in the search results.

You want your website to reach the widest audience, so be careful you are not alienating large segments by having a website that does not work properly in different computers, browsers and screen resolutions.

Endeavour to test your website on both Windows and Macintosh platforms, and install both Internet Explorer and Firefox on the Windows platform. Change your screen resolution and look at the website in 1024×768, 1280×1024 and 1400×800. You can go further, but this set of combinations will ensure you’re set for the vast majority of your visitors.

A common mistake made by many small business website owners is to have an order form or booking form that accepts credit card details, securing it by having an SSL certificate, but then having the form email the results to the website operator.

Unless you are using encrypted email, you have defeated the purpose of using a secure web page, because the email that contains the credit card details is far less secure than even an unencrypted web page. Security is only as secure as the weakest link!

If you need to process the credit cards yourself, the most cost-effective solution is to store an encrypted version of the credit card details in a database, and have an interface for the website operator to login and view those details, again with an SSL certificate securing that page. A procedure to delete credit card details once processed is important with this solution.

Offering your international customers a website in their native language will boost rapport, increase your potential customer base, and help your rankings in foreign search engines.

However, if your business involves customer contact (e.g. an accommodation property,) do not pay to have your website translated into a language that you do not speak within your business!

And most certainly do not insult your international visitors by using a computer translator service. Automatic translation services such as AltaVista/Yahoo!’s Babel Fish are excellent for interpreting text written in a language you are unfamiliar with, but are not designed to produce sensible prose!

If you are on a budget, one option is to create a one-page summary of your business in each of your spoken languages. Having your entire website available in each spoken language is, of course, ideal, but don’t forget you also need to keep all translated versions in sync — as you change an important piece of information on one page, you’ll need to update them all to remain consistent.

Content is the meat of your website. For most business websites, your visitors are not spending time on your website for its flashy façade — they want to learn something.

Further, content is what search engines rely upon to determine for which keywords your website should rank, and content is what will make someone appreciate what you have to say so much they will recommend your website to their associates (by email, instant message, a link from their website, or a mention on their blog.)

If your website seems to be all bun and no hotdog, start writing some meanginful content for your website today.