Saturday, June 13, 2009

Gain Credibility With Custom Web Design

Why not make a cheaper plan for my Web-based business?

It's easy to understand why small business owners are attracted by the idea of a simple website based on a generic model. Many business owners feel pressured to have at least some sort of Web presence, and often look for a cheap and simple alternative to a professionally designed website.

However, if we take seriously the development of a credible and cost effective web presence is needed on:

1) The visual impact of your website potential customers:

Several large studies conducted by the Web Credibility Research Stanford have the following:

We found that a wide range of design decisions - ranging from the visual elements of information architecture with the use of ads - can powerfully influence whether visitors can find a credible site. Like the human community, the Web sites are benefiting (or suffering) on the basis of their appearance. . . We find that people quickly evaluate a site by visual design alone. When designing your site, pay attention to layout, typography, images, consistency issues, and more.

The bottom line: quality custom web design dramatically increases their credibility on the Web. It's really that simple.

2) The advantage of hiring a professional to design your site:

If you have any training or experience in HTML, you should hire a professional web if:

1. You do not want to learn the many Web Design and Usability Guidelines for good web design.

2. You are very familiar with the rules of the site, or the different needs of different browsers.

3. You do not understand search engine optimization.

4. You do not want to spend much of their valuable time working on your site.

3) The need to pick the right professional for your needs:

The web services industry is highly competitive. With so many companies and independent professionals to choose from, selecting the right professional for your web project can become a daunting task. Here are three suggestions to consider when looking for a web designer:

1. Skill. Make sure your professional future of the Web has the right skills for your project. Ask questions. Doing a little research. Take a look at your portfolio.

2. Communication. Web professionals are people, not computers. To develop a Web site that meets the expectations of your customers and yourself, you need to find a site for which you can communicate easily and comfortably. Communication = Shared Success Expectations.

3. Be objective and use their critical thinking skills when interviewing prospective web professionals. Choosing a professional web is much like choosing a doctor. Temperament and their needs must be combined with the skills, knowledge and temperament of the professionals you chose.

Because I am a professional web myself, I am confident that after comparing my service to my competition you chose me for their web design needs. Whoever you choose, you can feel comfortable that you are making the right decision to develop a brand, custom website that will help you gain credibility and trust on the Web.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Website Design Made Easy

How many times have you. . . asked the question! If it's possible to create websites using only free web design software. .

The problem we solve in this article, is to show that you can use Free website design software to achieve your goals. Free software can be the only option, since not every one affords to buy High-end web design software. Because off that, did i compile this list with 4 free website design software that any one can try.

1. 1st Page 2000 by EverysoftThis. software has been on the market for years, and won many awards. It's flexible and very easy to use. This one has many advanced features for those that are more experienced. It has a built in spell checker and thesaurus, 3 different modes, easy and expert or hardcore. It even feature customizable toolbar buttons and keyboard short cuts. For those that are more advanced even gets 450 javascript and VB scripts, full support for SSI, CGI, Perl, Colf Fusion, ASP, Flash, Shockwave.

It is a very flexible and powerful program that has enough features for any project in website design, all in all, it`s still easy to use for most beginners.

2. WebPlus SE from FreeSerifSoftware. WebPlus SE, and WebPlus 10, (the big brother)have been around for years, this two are full-featured web design software products. The free version WebPlus SE. WebPlus 10 is currently being sold for less than $US20. If you only need a simple website design, WebPlus SE gets you started. It comes with a range of templates, control wizard that are easy to use. Automatic navigation and smart object bars which will get you going.

If you need more advanced features in your website design like eCommerce, Flash animations, etc, then WebPlus 10 is the one that suites you better.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Critical Facts Website Owners Must Know!

The Top 100 eCommerce companies were recently surveyed on their conversion ratios and the results were nothing short of discouraging - 22% reported conversion rates between 1% and 1.9%, 20% reported conversion rates between 2% and 2.9%.

This is probably exactly what your online business is generating, in terms of visitor to buyer ratio. So where are the other 99% of your visitors running away to?

If we are to imagine 500 shoppers visiting your website and only 5 of them placing an order, your conversion ratio is only 1%. And of the 100 companies that are already at the TOP, only 20 have surpassed the 5% conversion ratio.

The highly competitive nature of electronic commerce is very apparent with the hundreds of other companies that offer the same products. Customers have a lot to choose from, and can easily defect to cheaper merchandise. But lowering you own price isn't the answer. Success in selling online comes from knowing the three B's of improving your entrepreneurial pursuits - website branding, browsing, and buying.

Branding

Branding is anything that relates your company and products to the consumer. In the world of ecommerce, this specifically means your website. Designing the logo is just the beginning. Content must also be compelling to put your company on the map and drive customers to bring out their credit or debit cards. Putting certain keywords for search engine optimizations and knowing what keywords to write for can go a long way in dealings. Trust is also important. Having a website security seal tells buyers the website they are looking at was certified as a secured and legal site by a third party. A good example of this service can be seen at eBuyershield.com. These seals are incredibly cheap for the easy 10% minimum conversion rate boost they provide.

Browsing

The next deciding element in producing better sales, after the visitor is impressed with your content and softened up for some purchasing, is to guide them to the eCommerce section of your website as quickly as possible. This prevents them from losing any of that short-lived interest before being compelled to buy. Complementary products are also a good idea to offer along the pages they visit to increase dollar earnings.

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Practice On-Going Website Maintenance For Positive Impact

Getting started with a brand new website is an easy task and anyone can go about it. But keep it going and well-maintained is matter of concern for most of the website owners. In other words website maintenance is for the quality assurance of a site which serves as strong base and backbone for every site. It ensures serving of better quality of information to the visitors and provides professional look. There are certain guidelines that determine quality website maintenance and keeps different elements of a site in place. This is an on-going and continuous process that needs to be revived after certain time period.

Carry out plausibility checks of the website parts in order to make certain its smooth working. Its important to evaluate the creditability of all website parts and their functionality after regular time interval so that you keep only useful features on your site. The website has to be informative and practical enough to meet the target customers demands and requirements. Here you would get help in eliminating or deleting elements that are no longer of any use to your business.

As a part of website maintenance you can go for user tests that are important in providing useful data about usability factor of your website. In the long run it always helps in establishing strong customer business relationship.

Content management is one of the most important part of any website maintenance plan. Apart from being checked before making the content online, it has to be re-checked at regular course of time to keep it updated. Sometimes there are broken links or information that needs to be revived or edited, and this content management fulfills such tasks successfully.

Do repetitive proofreading of the online content or text so that it is free from grammatical and any spelling errors. Perfect quality content is a great online crowd puller and makes your website reliable and authentic source of information.

Keep your website updated by maintaining intact links. Broken links create a very bad impression on the user and makes them quit your site leading to lower business returns. Therefore maintain proper links by regular checking.

Check on the loading time of your website, as speed is an essential part of every site. If it takes more time than necessary for loading visitors might go to another website. It is not important to stuff a site with decorative elements for greater web traffic. Keep it simple yet attractive and ensure speedy loading of the site.

Those were basic traits of a good website maintenance plan that can be procured through a reliable company. Usually these companies offer maintenance plan for a fixed time duration by charging nominal amount of fees.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Website Creation

Website creation is a daunting task. It is not a one size fits all kind of tasks. Different business and different products will need different kinds of website design. Website creation will depend on the thrust that your company has. It should echo the objectives of your business. Your website should conform to the nature of the website and also follow the requirements of the industry your business is in.

Furthermore, website creation is not just about the aesthetics of the website but also is greatly about the plan and the strategy that you will employ to attain the goals and objectives of your website. Actually, the success of your website is a product of the marriage of design and a very effective marketing strategy. Therefore, a corporate website needs to look professional and also has the correct offline advertising backup. However, in website creation there are important things that you need to remember.

First is the typography. There are many developers who say that content is the king of website development. Therefore, how you illustrate the content is very important. The fonts that you use will give the look and feel of the website. Fancy curly fonts will make the website look playful and unprofessional. Straight fonts, with or without serif, will give a clean and level look to the website and will work best for corporate websites. Using the proper fonts will give a good positive first impression on the visitors of the site and will give a good image to your company and product.

Color is also important. The color theme of the website will affect the mood of the visitors and can even stimulate them to respond. Also, color is also a good way to get visual identity for your company and business. Colors have meanings, but remember that the website visitors do not really know them. So instead of choosing a color for its meaning, choose color for the mood it gives to the viewer. Warm colors also provide a warm and welcoming effect to your business. The color should also provide the ideals and the philosophies of the business or the company. If you are going to use different colors, make sure that they are complimentary and will not distract the visitors from reading the content of your page.

You also need to put a good logo onto the webpage. The logo will serve as the company's identification. It serves as immediate recognition for the product or the services that you sell. Sometimes, a logo is all you need for website visitors to know that they are visiting your company. In the corporate world, logos are so important that you do not have to attach the name of the company onto it for the people to recognize it.

Lastly, you have to consider quality. The website should have good quality design. Meaning it should have no broken links or an overload of graphics. The design aspects of the website should be in the right places, where it can get the user attention that it needs.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Some Tips For Designing Your Website

Most businesses and business people have a website these days. It's a necessity in these days when people are more likely to look up a business on the internet than to get out a phone book. But designing a website has to be carefully done; if people can't find the information you're offering, they won't stay, and both their time and yours will have been wasted.

Here are some tips for designing and evaluating your website.

  • Few images, carefully used. Pictures can be an important part of your site, especially if people want to see your products before they buy them. But keep your images simple and clean so that they load quickly and are easy to focus on once they have loaded.
  • Lots of white space. This is especially true in text. Long paragraphs are very difficult to read on the computer, and people will generally click away if they experience that much frustration. Keep your text short, and use bold-faced headings, numbers, and bullet points. The more white space you have, the easier it is for your viewers to find their place and keep it.
  • Good fonts. This includes both size and style. Headlines can be a bigger font than paragraphs, but even paragraphs should be big enough for a reader to skim them. A unique font can give your website style, but if it's too unique, it will be too much work to read.
  • Keep your content up to date. Your images, prices, articles, and news links should be up-to-date, within a day. Your customers and viewers should have something new to look at every time they visit.

Friday, January 30, 2009

How to Make a Website

There should be no trouble in creating a site from scratch if you've gone through this process before. For those of you who do not yet know how to make a website, it may prove to be a tough job at first. But by using some time to make plans, you'll be able to respond to the question of how to make a website in practically no time.

Take the time to plan your website before you start building and the process will go more smoothly. You don't really need to know a programming language to build a website because now there are programs designed to build the website to your specifications. The most basic ones only take your content and put it into a generic template, but you can improve on those if you have the time.

Think about what you want your internet site to accomplish. This will give you a better notion as to how to start. For a commercial site, you obviously don't want to use personal site templates. It's more expensive to do a more elaborate website rather than a generic one, but the former will also provide greater advantages and more choices. Figure out how many pages you require and what sort of written material and images you plan to put in. Well planned and implemented site creation will help both you and your customers.

After you have learned how to make a website, its time to learn how to use it to make money. Affiliate Marketing is the number one way to make money with your website. There are countless affiliate programs to choose from so you can find one that suits you and your website perfectly. These Affiliate programs provide money to you for getting customers and sales for others through on-line ads. Through website creation and affiliate programs, you can make money every month, long after your work on the project is finished.

Space selling - Space selling gets you more money. For the most productive website creation, you must popularize your site and get people advertising on your site too. Space selling to other companies for their service and product advertising will gain you a great deal of money.

Link - Build the links to gain more people. Reciprocal link building helps you in a number of ways. It enhances your search engine rating and will thus obtain more visitors for you via that search engine. It also gets clients for your services and products from other sites where you've got your links listed. Productive site creation must take this factor under consideration when designing a site.

Traffic building: Website will help you build up more traffic all the time. Productive site creation is decided by how much traffic it receives. Traffic building is made easy with a site. When you've got a site, you will get people coming to you.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Web Server And Web Hosting Services

Web hosting providers provide the following basic services for web servers - anything else can be considered complementary to the roles of theory, but in practice are essential to run a successful business or Internet website business.

A Web hosting provider should provide the following functionality to the Web server:

1. Hard disk space.

This is what they really are hiring, for all practical purposes. You need hard disk space on a web server to host your site. A website is actually composed of a large number of files, such as MSWord documents or Excel spreadsheets. These files take up space on your hard disk. The web hosting provider gives you space for people around the world with Internet access can access the files on that web server.

The price or the hard drives have dropped dramatically in the last year or so, and it is not unknown for a hosting provider to provide packages of up to 2,000 megabytes 250Megabytes and more.

How much do you need?
The average website that uses only HTML pages require about 5 MB to 10 MB of space. If you use a dynamic web site, where some of their data are stored in a MySQL database, the database requires the use of a space. These types of sites require more space and anything between 100 MB and 250 MB should be sufficient.

If you are going to store e-mails on your server, you have to add in these calculations. E-mail messages can take up a lot of web space very quickly if the people you send large files. You will have to monitor the space taken by e-mail very carefully and I've seen mailboxes go to 50 or 60 MBs very quickly.

If you want to host video or audio files on your server, which will provide much more disk space. An audio file can easily take up 30 to 40MB.

2. Bandwidth

Bandwidth depends on the traffic. All users who visit its site to consume bandwidth and what they are going to use when opening the pages of your site. Again, if you have video and audio files on your site that require more bandwidth. A good rule is to have an allocation of around 100 KB (kilobytes) for each visitor. This means that more than 500 visitors per month consumed about 50 MB of bandwidth - though this is only true for half page with most text and some pictures. If you have large image galleries, audio and / or video files and should not work at 150KB per visitor, or even more. Spiders search engines also consume bandwidth! You must control your bandwidth usage through your control panel CPanel or statistics from your website and be sure to communicate well in advance with your hosting provider if you need to buy more bandwidth to avoid penalties and / or lockout.

3. Access to your site

Under this you can have access to a control panel like cPanel, Plesk and Helm, who will help you create emails, subdomains, software installations and MySQL database if you are running the dynamic functionality shopping carts, forums, etc. Content Management Systems

You also will need FTP access to upload files to your Web server. Without being able to use FTP will not be able to keep the contents of your site (unless you make use of a Content Management System). FTP access is still needed, even then, as it would certainly have the opportunity of having to upload files such as images, audio, video and other files to your server.