The simplest kind of site is a mini-site, a small, laser-focused site, usually with only a few pages. These are a great way to advertise a niche product or service. Or to promote a special offer or event. You can manage a mini-site manually, using HTML templates. That’s because a well-designed mini-site usually has only one main page, perhaps with a few variations. Everything on the site has only one purpose, to ask the visitor to make a decision whether to take the next step in a relationship with your company. Note that this is not how most companies organize their websites.

Most companies—and most web designers—do it wrong. Because they organize the website to highlight your company, rather than organizing it around the customer. The truth is: No one cares about you. They only care about what you can do for them. And they want to know this now! That’s why the landing page is the most important page, and the customer is the most important person in an effective website design.

Remember the goal a website is supposed to accomplish? It converts visitors into customers, and customers into visitors. In order to accomplish this, a mini-site must look and feel very different than what you are used to.

Jim Edwards is the mini-site expert. And he has a free audio and e-book about mini-sites. Compare Jim Edwards’s mini-site designs to how most small business websites are designed. The difference is that his actually make money. His free audio and e-book explains the 3 purposes of any mini-site, the 4 types of mini-sites, the biggest mistake people make with mini-sites, and more. Listen to it or read it, because this information is key to making a small website work.

Anything more elaborate than a mini-site, though, and you’ll proably want more than raw HTML. You’ll want the computer to manage your content. Because what’s difficult with manual web pages is not HTML itself. The hard part is combining content with presentation and managing links between pages.

In fact, even with some mini-sites, if they’re more than a few pages, you’ll want to use an automated system. For example, let’s say you have a few dozen articles, free reports, and white papers on your product or service. This can be consistent with the purpose of a mini-site. To publish all these documents on your website, you’ll want to list them in categories, maybe even in several different indexes, on several different web pages. You’ll also want to add new articles and case studies from time to time. Managing all this data becomes so much easier when you can leverage the power of the computer to do all the grunt work.

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