AboutDavid Stephensen Expertise I can answer questions about all aspects of designing and producing procedures manuals for small and medium sized businesses, including managing the documentation project, the analysis that leads to the design of the manual, business writing, publishing the business manual, educating the staff about continuous improvement and using ISO 9001.
Experience I am a professional technical writer of 20 years experience, combining this with business analysis over the last 10 years. I have produced procedures manuals for businesses and software user manuals that reflect business processes. I also provide internal quality auditing services. I have created a template for small and medium business operations manuals.
Awards and Honors Merit Award in the Society for Technical Communication Australia Chapter On-line Communications Competition, 2006, for the CPA Australia Event Scheduling Application User Manual
Merit Award in the Society for Technical Communication Australia Chapter On-line Communications Competition, 2005 for the Lensworth Customer Relationship Management User Manual
Over the summer I started a small lawn mowing business and its doing well. Due to our excellent lawn care - people have recommended us to their friends and so forth.
I advertise on free sites to generate business. But am wondering if having a website of my own for lawn care educating my customers about what a neatly mowed lawn represents, how to cut grass at the right height and pictures of how neatly we do the lawn mowing - would this be helpful?
Answer Yes! Why not? You need to do research before setting up your website. Selecting a domain name is important and you need to study it before you do. The next step is to find a website host. There are many DIY website facilities these days, where you don't need to know much HTML CSS. Even your local internet service provider (ISP) or your domain name registry should have good services to help customers.
After you have your domain name (since your customers are local it should be .co.nz, in my opinion), your next learning curve is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Once again your providers may have services but you need to study it at least to find out what it is about. There is a lot of information on the web about it.
For your service, if you have little competition locally on the web, you should be able to go straight right to the top of Google search results (very hard for me to do with my business). For example if you work in Aspen Grove, then you use SEO techniques to show your site at the top when someone searches for 'lawn mowing aspen grove'. I just tried that and it yielded USA sites. You would hope that your users would then search for NZ sites only or add Queenstown to the search. For NZ sites there is no competition for that suburb and lawn mowing.
So there is your first lesson in SEO. It is a fun area.
And yes your idea about free education is good. That is a whole way to drive people to your site, too, to become a web authority on lawn care.
