No matter the size of your business, you need to have a website- especially if you are a home-based business. Your website is your best marketing tool and it is the best way that you have to show your potential clients your level of professionalism and ability to provide your product or service.A website also greatly broadens your reach as a business. No longer will you be confined to only selling to people in your surrounding areas. Now you can sell to customers worldwide.Having said all of the above, you need to make sure that you set your website up correctly or it won’t work to its full effectiveness. The purpose of this article is to share with you 5 rules that you need to follow when designing your web presence.You need to remember your audience- The internet is always full of new fads and full of people promoting get rich quick schemes that talk about getting your site to the top of the search engines. Most of these schemes are useless and can end up doing you more harm than good. You need to remember that you are producing your website for people sitting in front of a computer. You are producing content for your customers.Your website needs to look professional- You need to make sure that your website looks professional. It doesn’t need to be high tech but you do need to make sure that it looks professional. It needs to look a it better than a word document.You need to account for search engine optimization- Search engine optimization is important for home-based business owners. If you don’t have customers visiting your site you won’t be making any money. If you don’t make any money you are going to struggle to feed your family. You need to make sure that you don’t let SEO overtake the fact that you are writing for real peopleYou need to make it easy for your readers to contact you- You need to make sure that you have a contact form on your website to make it easy for potential customers to contact you. Make sure it is easy to find and prospective customers know exactly what they need to do should they require further information.You need to capture user information- Every person that visits your website is a potential customer, even if they do not buy from you that day. You should offer visitors to your site a freebie to try and entice them to give over their email address. That way you can subscribe them to your newsletter so that they do not forget about your business and may buy from you in the future.This article contains the 5 golden rules of websites for home-based business owners. Make sure you follow the advice outlined above and you should see more success from your website almost immediately.