Posts Tagged ‘website design’
Has Your Web Site Changed Your Business?
November 30th, 2009 | 
Author:
Yes, you should ask yourself this question. Has my Web site changed my business? Does your Web site help your business differentiate your business from your competition? You can’t expect to differentiate your business from you business by using clichй statements such as “We provide superior customer service”, or that, “We have the experience to get the job done right.” Such statements are ineffective because they have been used over-and-over by every one in business. People are simply tuning out such claims. How do you feel when you see a business make such claims? Does it convince you that you are dealing with a better business? If you fail to differentiate your business, you can only compete on price. There are no winners in price wars. Without differentiating your business from the competition, your product or service can be quickly commoditized. You have to remember that your customer doesn’t care about your company. Your customer is only concerned, and rightfully so, about how they can benefit from hiring your company or buying from you. Your Web site should not be so much about you, but about your customers. You should be able to honestly examine your Web site and consider if it’s better than your competitor’s site. Focus on your target market. Are you speaking to your specific market? Is your message too generic? If you have a dental practice that specializes in dental implants, you should speak to the demographic that is most likely be interested in your specific specialty. For example, who is going to stand out more? ·The local dental office, or ·The local dental office that specializes in dental implants. Whatever is your specialty should be part of your message you include on your Web site. Concentrate on the problems your service or products solve. When you focus on a specific concern that your customers deal with, you can position yourself as the real solution provider. Focus On Results. Show that you can deliver on a specific result that makes a measurable difference for your customers. Always focus on differentiation when it comes to your Web site.
Related posts
Importance Of Linking Building For SEO
The easiest way of improving your ranking in the search engines is to let them know that your site is important. How do you do that? Well, the best way is through the process of link building. Link building is the practice of encouraging other websites to link to your own website. If other websites are linking to your website, your “link popularity” will increase, search engines will deem your website important, and in turn, you should receive more traffic. Link building is a time consuming task, and it is for this reason that most all websites rank so poorly in the search engines. Many website owners are unaware that link popularity can have such an effect on their search engine rankings. This is good new for you. Start building your links now and establish your “web cred”. Importance of Page Rank Google, the Internet’s most popular search engine, measures a website’s link popularity through the use of Page Rank. To view a website’s Page Rank, just download the Google Toolbar. The toolbar will display the Page Rank of every website you visit, measured as a little green bar. A website’s Page Rank can vary from a low of zero to a high of 10. Don’t worry if your website has a low, or no Page Rank. Many websites only have a Page Rank of 1 or 2, but the Internet’s most popular websites possess a Page Rank of 8 or 9. Quality Counts Search engines are not just looking for the number of links that point to a website. The most important aspect of the process is obtaining quality links. Quality links are links from website that possess a high Page Rank. Obtaining a link from a website with a high Page Rank is best, although any site with 1 or above is beneficial. Search engines also consider the theme of a website which links to you. It is best to get links from websites that are associated with the industry in which you do business. For example, my trade is website design; therefore, I work to obtain the majority of my links from other web design related websites. Getting Links One of the best ways to advance your link popularity is to offer quality and informative content to your visitors and hope for natural links. If they find the information interesting enough, they will naturally link their website to your own. Directory submissions are probably the fastest and easiest way to obtain some inbound links. But, because Internet directories link to thousands of other websites, the value that they can add to your Page Rank gets diluted by all the other links. The one must-submit-to directory is The Open Project Directory (http://www.dmoz.org). After this, it is best to search for smaller niche or local directories. Submitting your website to Canadian, Ontario, and even Windsor web directories will help let the search engines know which region(s) you are servicing. Then, you should submit to industry related directories to indicate to the search engines your line of business. A Google search can help you find these types of directories. If you feel that you have a knack for writing, a good way to generate inbound links to your website is to write articles. These articles can then be submitted to article syndication websites, where other webmasters are free to use your article on their website. But, there’s a catch – they must provide a link back to your website in return for using the article. If you don’t have the time or drive to write an article, but you participate in an industry related discussion forum, you’re in luck. Just remember to include a link to your website in your signature. The last way to generate quality inbound links is through reciprocal linking. This type of strategy involves contacting other webmasters and proposing a link exchange. Find some non-competitive, but related websites and simply e-mail them to see if they are interested. It’s best to already have their link on a page in your website before the proposition. Linking Text Is Important When employing any of the above linking approaches, it is imperative that you try to use targeted key words as part your link. The search engines read this text to determine what your website is all about. If your website involves “Red Widgets”, try to use this as part of your link text. Conclusion Link popularity is very important when attempting to rank well in the search engines. Link analysis is only going to get more important to search engines, not less. This type of strategy is resistant to manipulation and justifiable way to measure a website’s importance. Therefore, the link building process must be given high priority in your Internet marketing efforts, and since it takes time, the sooner you begin the better.
Related posts
Posted in About Internet | 
Tags: internet marketing, search engine optimization, SEO, website design, website promotion | 
No Comments »
How to Make Visitors Add You to Their Favorites
If you want your visitors to come back again and again, you’ve got to get them to add your website to their favorites (also known as bookmarks in some browsers). That’s the menu where they can save websites that they want to use again, clicking them easily to get to them. Being added to a user’s favorites is like getting an ad for your website right there in their browser’s menu, for nothing. But how can you do it? Make it Easy The option to add a website to the favorites menu is quite hidden, and people don’t often think about it. You’ll get far more people adding you to their favorites if you offer them a quick and easy ‘Add this Site to my Favorites’ link somewhere towards the top of the page. Even if they don’t actually use the link, it still draws attention to the browser’s favorites function and makes the user think about it, increasing the likelihood of them adding the site to their favorites sooner or later. Pay Attention to the Title Once your site is in people’s favorites, of course, it’s not going to do you much good if they can’t find it again later. You need to make sure that the name and purpose of your site is clearly stated in its title, as that’s all they’ll have to go on when they’re looking through their favorites. Make it long enough to be specific, but not so long that it looks self-important or information gets lost off the end. Tracking Who’s Done It It can be difficult to know who’s coming in to your site using a favorite they saved. Usually, you would look at the referrer to see where they came from but if they type the web address or use a favorite the referrer will be blank. There’s no way of telling which of those two things they did unless you send people who use your bookmark link to a special address for example www.example.com/bookmark. However, this method is not foolproof because not everyone who adds your site to their favorites will use your link to do it. Promise Updates If you want people to add your site to their favorites then you need to give them a reason to come back. The best way to do this is to make it clear exactly how often your website is updated. You might write at the top of your website ‘updated weekly’ or you might simply write the date when you last updated the website. The second way only works if you update your website often. Could You Be Their Homepage? Of course, if you want to go even further than just getting people to add your website to their favorites then you should consider trying to get people to make your website their homepage. That is, the website that loads automatically when they first open their web browser and that they get back to when they click on their home button. If you can get your website as someone’s homepage even for a relatively short length of time then they are likely to see your website dozens of times in a day. So how can you get people to set your website as their homepage? It’s a little more difficult than just getting them to add your site to their favorites as it works differently in different web browsers. In Internet Explorer you can give people a link that makes your website their homepage automatically. For other web browsers, however, you will need to give the visitor a set of instructions. This will require some research on your part but will generally be instructions on how to open the web browsers options or preferences menu and use the section that allows the homepage to be set manually. Before people will make you their homepage, though, you need to offer them the kinds of things that they might want on a homepage. You can’t just expect your own content to be enough, you need to give them other things too, such as local weather or a box that they can type searches into to search the whole web using a popular search engine.
Related posts
CMS – Joomla!
A web CMS is a content management system software used for managing content for the web. The software manages content (text, graphics, links, etc.) for distribution on a web server. Usually the software provides tools where users with little or no knowledge of programming languages and markup languages (such as HTML) can create and manage content with relative ease of use. Most systems use a database to hold content, and a presentation layer displays the content to regular website visitors based on a set of templates. Management of the software is typically done through a web browser, but some systems may be modified in other ways. A Content Management System (CMS) differs from website builders like Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver in that a CMS allows non-technical users to make changes to an existing website with little or no training. Website building tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver require more technical knowledge and training on average. A CMS is an easy-to-use tool that gives authorized users the ability to manage a website. A CMS is a website maintenance tool rather than a website creation tool. Let’s talk about Joomla! Content Management System now. Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable. One of the ways people use Joomla! CMS: * Corporate websites or portals * Online commerce * Small business websites * Non-profit and organizational websites * Government applications * Corporate intranets and extranets * School and church websites * Personal or family homepages * Community-based portals * Magazines and newspapers * the possibilities are limitless… Joomla! can be used to easily manage every aspect of your website, from adding content and images to updating a product catalog or taking online reservations. Advanced use of Joomla! Out of the box, Joomla! does a great job of managing the content needed to make your website sing. But for many people, the true power of Joomla! lies in the application framework that makes it possible for thousands of developers around the world to create powerful add-ons and extensions. Here are just some examples of the hundreds of available extensions: * Dynamic form builders * Business or organizational directories * Document management * image and multimedia galleries * E-commerce and shopping cart engines * Forums and chat software * Calendars * Blogging software * Directory services * Email newsletters * Data collection and reporting tools * Banner advertising systems * Subscription services * and many, many more… You will probably ask yourself what’s the catch? There is no catch. Joomla! is free, open, and available to all under the GPL license.
Related posts
Posted in web design |
Tags: fp digitall, free web development tools, web design, web development, website design, website development |
No Comments »
How To Design A Website For Your Online Business
Whether you choose to design a website from scratch or use a free Web template to design a website for your online business, there are many things to ask yourself before you get started: 1. Do you plan on selling products on your website? Will you need a shopping cart to collect payments? 2. Do you plan on displaying articles or having a blog? 3. Do you plan on having advertising on your website? 4. Does the website design need to be interactive for site visitors? 5. Do you want to run your website through a content management system (CMS)? 6. Does the website need to include an audio or video player? 7. Would your target market appreciate a flashy design, or something simple? Once you’ve answered those questions, it’s time to design a website for your online business. There are a few general options to consider when deciding how to design a website: 1. Hire a professional Web designer and/or Web programmer to create a custom Web design and backend system or e-commerce solution, including any necessary tools. You can find great programmers and designers at websites such as http://Elance.com and http://RentACoder.com. When you post a project on either of these services be sure not to choose a bidder just because they are the cheapest. Choose someone with a very long history of positive feedback. 2. Design a website yourself if you already have the Web design and coding skills (or take the time to learn HMTL/XHTML/CSS/PHP etc.). I only recommend this option if you are very technical and very quick. Your time is best spent on building your business not learning the details of web design — unless, of course, you want to get into the business of web design. 3. Use a pre-designed Web template from free Web template providers, or purchase a Website template. You can use Web templates as-is, or customize them to fit your needs. A great source for templates is http://TemplateMonster.com. 4. If you don’t have any experience with creating websites and you do not want to hire a designer then there is still an option for you. I like to refer to this option as a Website-In-A-Box or a Store-In-A-Box. Basically the service gives you everything you need to get your website online quickly and easily. Yes, you have to pay a little more for these services and some of them even take a percentage of every sale but your website design will not stand between you and your ultimate goal — making money online. Some examples of these services are Yahoo Small Business (http://store.yahoo.com), http://SiteBuilder.com, and http://Web.com. No matter how you decide to design a website for your online business, make sure that the website design serves the needs of both your online business and its customers or target visitors.
Related posts
The Importance Of Tracking
As many of you know, I only set up this blog recently. Four years of success, failure and testing. This allows me to offer some advice to anyone starting out that I wish I had when I was starting out in the online business world. Today, I am going to discuss one of the MAJOR things I wish I had have paid attention to sooner. Site tracking and analysis. When you set up a website for the first time, it’s always one of the last things you bother to take care of or put in place. Visitor tracking, no matter what your business is EXTREMELY important. It’s always forgotten in the flood of excitement of finishing your site and launching it. You have worked hard on your site, your content, your design and your features. It’s your baby and you want to let it fly. That’s great. If, like me, you experiment, you just want to test the waters and see if you get any revenue from adsense, or make a sale (Or affiliate sale). So now, here you are 2 (Or more) months later and your site is starting to take off. You are starting to generate a few dollars from your website. Great! Now it’s time to improve the flow, usability and find out what your visitors are actually looking for. But wait. How do you find this out? You can first look into your hosts Webalizer or awstats statistics, but in fairness, while they are great for checking referrers and traffic stats, they don’t drill down to the nitty gritty. You realize now that you should have put something in place when you first started. Enter Google Analytics (Formerly Urchin). Google Analytics is an advanced and FREE visitor tracking service. Most of you have probably heard of it already. Google Analytics allows you to track your visitors and their behavior down to the most detailed level. Covering the features of Google Analytics is far beyond the scope of this document, but sign up and play around for yourself. Google Analytics is also SUPER easy to set up. All you need to do is past a few lines of JavaScript into your sites HTML. Once you have Google Analytics set up, the rest is taken care of by Google. You don’t have to worry about a thing. Now, assuming you have taken my advice (Which I assure you in this case is 100% good) you have two (Or more) months of tracking information available to you. Are you visitors coming and searching for something on your site? If so, should it be made available on the main page? Why make them search? Are your visitors coming to your site looking for content that you do not actually have? Maybe you should create it? The list goes on…. You will be surprised at some of the search terms your site is found under. Some will make you laugh and some are even pretty upsetting terms that you DO NOT want to be found under! So there you have it. If you set up your analytics and tracking early on, it makes it ten times easier to improve your site and grow your business earlier and start making more money earlier. I have used many different tracking services and it all boiled down to me using my default server stats programs and Google analytics. Experiment a little and find out what works for you. I hope this article has given you enough reason to invest an additional five minutes setting up some sort of tracking for your website before you go “live”. Your five minute investment can make the world of difference months down the line.
Related posts
Posted in Site Development |
Tags: web design, web development, web site design, website design |
No Comments »
Choose The Right E-commerce Solution For Your Website
More and more businesses these days are beginning to sell and distribute their products and services via the Internet. It’s a win-win situation – consumers get the best selection at the lowest prices, and retailers get access to markets outside their geographic location. But depending on the type of e-commerce website the business is pursuing, the cost to implement the project could range from a couple hundred to a few thousand dollars. There are some less professional but more cost efficient solutions, as well as some high-end solutions that will have your website rivaling the best e-commerce sites around. In this article I’ll discuss the different options available to website owners as well as the costs associated with those options. E-commerce on the Cheap It’s a common misconception that in order to conduct business over the Internet you have to have an expensive merchant account that will allow your customers to pay you by credit card. This used to be the case, but today there are a number of services available that make e-commerce a very affordable option. These services come in the form of third party credit card processors. A third party credit card processor acts as an intermediary between the customer and your website. Generally, a customer will click on a link to purchase a product and be taken to the third party’s website to process the credit card information in a secure environment. The payment for the purchase is deposited in your account, and the order information is forwarded to you. The only cost to the e-commerce retailer is usually a small fixed fee and / or a small percentage of the sale. This is a good beginner option for any business looking to make the e-commerce leap because the upfront costs are very low. 2CheckOut (www.2checkout.com) is a good choice for a third party credit card processor – they only require a $49 setup fee, and then $0.45 per transaction and 5.5% of the sale amount. An even cheaper route would be to use PayPal (www.PayPal.com) to receive payment over the Internet. The only downside with PayPal is that the consumer must have a PayPal account in order to use this payment method. The upside of both these products is the fact that they will provide the shopping cart system and associated codes to that are necessary to integrate into your website. Although using a third party credit card processor can be cheap, it does have its disadvantages. The shopping cart system may not seamlessly integrate with your website because it’s not easily customizable. Also, it looks a little less professional when the purchaser must leave your website in order to enter their credit card information. But, when weighing these disadvantages with the costs associated with building a professional e-commerce website they really don’t seem like a big deal. Really Taking the Plunge Opening a fully functional online store with the ability to process credit cards on-site can be a pretty costly production. Here is a list of elements that all need to be integrated: a shopping cart system, secure web server, payment gateway, and a merchant account. There are some shopping cart systems that are available for free, and many web hosts offer the ability to integrate a shopping cart system into your website. But, if you’d like your system to be fully featured, easy to use, seamlessly integrate with your website, and include advanced functions such as automatically calculating tax and shipping charges, the cost could run several hundred dollars. The most expensive and difficult part of the process is obtaining a merchant account to process credit card numbers. These accounts usually have monthly and transaction fees associated with them. Fortunately, most businesses already have merchant accounts, and these can be used to process credit cards over the Internet as well. But, in order for the shopping cart system to communicate with a merchant account, they need to be interfaced with a payment gateway. Payment gateways usually require a setup fee of a few hundred dollars and a percentage of each transaction. Lastly, all the communication needs to take place over a secure server. This means that your website hosting package will need to be upgraded to include Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption. An SSL certificate is billed on either a yearly or monthly basis, and the cost can total in the hundreds of dollars. In addition to the extra costs associated with processing transactions right on your website, there is also a significant difference in the price your webmaster will charge to setup the different solutions. Using a third party to process transactions usually just involves inserting a few lines of code into the website which shouldn’t cost very much. On the other hand, implementing a fully functional e-commerce website can easily add another thousand or two dollars on top of all the other costs. As with any project, it’s probably best to start small before shelling out big bucks for a professional e-commerce solution. And don’t forget, even after you’ve spent thousands of dollars getting your e-commerce website launched, you’re probably going to have to spend thousands more marketing your website in order to recover your investment. E-commerce is not cheap!
Related posts
Posted in web |
Tags: e-commerce, ecommerce, internet marketing, online sales, website design, website promotion |
No Comments »