How to Incorporate Ecommerce Solutions into Your Website

Online stores are the shopping malls of the 21st century. Technological advancements are making ecommerce solutions more simple and secure. For instance, payment gateways allow customers the convenience of paying for their purchase online with their credit cards. Secured servers guarantee that your customer 's personal information is protected from hackers and identity thieves.

The first step towards entering the world of ecommerce is implementing a solid, user-friendly website design. Focus on providing your visitors with an enjoyable, hassle-free experience. Also, and this is very important, utilize a website design that 's suitable for search engine optimization.

The rapid growth of ecommerce is due in part to the fact that broadband and high-speed Internet connections are becoming more common and affordable. A word of caution, however. Speedier Internet connections aren't a free pass for website designers to start loading down pages with huge graphics and large amounts of streaming media. There are still approximately 40 million Americans using dial-up, and you want your website to be accessible to them as well. You do have the option of creating two separate areas of your website, one catering to dial-up and the other featuring advanced media for those with high-speed connections.

Every page of your website deserves equal attention. Build a separate page for each product you sell. One option for presenting product information is to use a catalog format. List each product, followed by a brief description. Then, include a link to the page with the full description and color photographs of that product.

Help clients find what they need by organizing products according to category and use. Pair your well-organized catalog with a site map and navigation links so customers will have no trouble locating the information they want.

Once you've got a website design in place, it 's time to take your website to the next level. Ecommerce is about making money, and in order to make money you need to be able to accept payments through your website. You can implement your ecommerce solutions by hiring one of the many merchant services that operate through banks and other reputable financial institutions. Outsourcing your ecommerce solutions means that your website is connected to an established business, which increases your clients' confidence in the security of your website. In addition to financial transactions, you can also outsource ecommerce solutions such as shopping carts.

If you want to accept payments via credit cards and echecks as an independent company, you need a "payment gateway." Various merchant services provide payment gateways, for a fee of course. Costs vary according to the packages you select, so research a variety of companies offering ecommerce solutions to find the best bang for your buck.

The next step in accepting payments as an independent company is to secure an area of your site for conducting your payment transactions. Areas are secured through use of a secured socket layer, commonly referred to as an SSL. An SSL is what makes it safe for you and your customers to engage in online transactions where personal and financial information is being exchanged.

An SSL is a layer of encryption made up of two separate elements, one private and one public. The information submitted by a customer is encrypted by the public component. The private component then deciphers this information. Without an SSL, the information submitted by your customers would essentially be available for all the world to see. The SSL hides the information, keeping it safe and private so no unauthorized parties can view it.

Now that your site is secure and you've got your ecommerce solutions in place, it 's time to start promoting your website. The good news is that website promotion is cheaper and easier than marketing a brick-and-mortar store. A simple way to get started is to add your website 's URL to your business cards, letterhead and other promotional materials. An "about us" section detailing your company 's history and a set of customer testimonials boost your credibility.

For starters, marketing your website online is far less expensive than advertising through traditional mediums such as newspapers, television, radio and magazines. Some online website promotion is even free, such as writing articles and submitting them to ezines and directories.

Search engine marketing is another popular method of website promotion. You pay a rather small amount of money on a "per click" or "per impression" basis for your listing to show up in search engine result pages. It 's cost effective because you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

New and improved ecommerce solutions are being developed all the time. By keeping up with ecommerce trends, website owners can take full advantage of the public 's love of shopping online. No more renting out an office or running a store. You can work from the comfort of your own home while attracting customers from all over the globe.

About the Author

Chris Coleman is a Business Analyst at Capita Technologies. Capita Technologies provides eCommerce services for a wide variety of clients.

Article Source: Content for Reprint

Website Content For Busy Webmasters

The easiest way to make money online by working for only a few hours per week is to build a big website full of informative, interesting and original website content. A good plan is to have so much website content that any visitor interested in your websites theme has to come back over and over to check it all out! On the Internet, content is king!

So where can you get lots of quality website content without paying a lot of money? Well there are many options to choose from. Many article submission directories have tons of quality original articles written by other webmasters which you can use on your website or newsletter as long as you keep the authors resource box intact. It you are new to affiliate marketing this may be a great way to save time and effort in building your business.

Free resources like these free articles are easy to find content for a website and will help you make money much more quickly than if you were having to write everything on your own. Coming up with original website content every once a week or so is a good idea though, and this will boost your website rankings and word of mouth ratings.

Another way you can have unique content for your website is by buying Private Label Content also known as PLC. PLC content means any articles, ebooks or manuals that are allowed for free use by subscribers to use however they want. However, there are some things you cannot do with PLC content.

You cannot claim the PLC content as your own or use it for article submissions unless you rewrite the content so its a brand new article. Also, unlike free website content directories, you will have to pay a subscription fee.

Using PLC articles also have a very strong advantage of not having to add an author bio box, which always links to some other webmasters website and can steal your website traffic and customers.

With a PLC subscription, you will have around 10 to 40 new articles per month, depending a lot on the niche market you are promoting. These articles can really help you get off to a good start and earn serious cash with the affiliate program you choose to promote.

How can you get more out of PLC content you pay for? One way is to use the articles in a 6 month weekly email course where you fill it with only PLC content. Then just place ads for your products and services and let the thing run on autopilot.

One more way to make pure profit in the Internet marketing world is to use free website templates! Use these website templates to get the design out of the way and focus on your search engine optimization and adding quality website content every week. This will help you build your website traffic fast from search engines and other websites and gain you more sales and commissions.

Free stuff is easy to find on the web and with a few of your own ideas, you can have a brand new website up much faster than if you took the time to design your own or paid someone else to do so.

You will find there are tons of free website templates and website content out there and many affiliate programs and providing them to you free if you promote their products. Just be creative, use free resources and build your affiliate marketing empire one day at a time!

About the Author

George Watson is a successful Affiliate marketer and author. Read more articles to discover more ways to find unique website content at his How To Make Cash Online Blog and his Niche Affiliate Marketing website.

Article Source: Content for Reprint

What You Must Do Before You Hire a Web Designer

If you're planning on hiring a Web design firm or freelancer to build you a new business website, then you ought to read this article before you make the hire. One key concept that many would-be entrepreneurs and business people miss is understanding market needs in advance. In other words, many people make the mistake of developing a product or service before they know if there is a need for it in the marketplace. This can be extended to websites as well.

Since a website is an extension of your business, and in many cases the only representation of your business, be sure you know there is a need for your business before you invest time and money building one. If you're re-vamping an existing site, be sure you understand in advance what the new site ought to have to better serve your market. Don't build a website before you nail down exactly what you want it to do for you in advance. What is its purpose and how is it going to help you achieve your business goals?

There are four main questions you need to answer before you begin your search for a Web designer to do website creation for you. If you're not armed with the answers to these questions in advance, you're going to waste your time and money, experience unneeded grief and possibly risk creating a complete dud.

I recommend that you create a document that has the answers to these questions in it, along with a rough outline of the features you want to include in your website. I'll call this your Website Plan Document.

By having your Website Plan Document in hand at the onset of your search, you'll be able to narrow down the field of possible Web designers to hire and you'll have something to give your prospective vendors to help them come up with an accurate proposal and an itemized price quote. This way, you'll be able to compare their price quotes better since they'll all be bidding on the same specifications.

Another reason this is important to do is that without it you may end up having to pay the Web vendor you choose to create this document as part of the proposal, so you'll save money by doing it yourself.

Here are the first two questions I ask any potential client when they seek out my business to help them build a website:

- What will be the site 's goals and purpose?
- Who will be your website 's audience?

These are the two most important questions you need to answer before you do anything else. The last two questions are also important to determine in advance:

- What is your budget?
- What is your timeframe?

Record your answers to these four questions in your Website Plan Document. Now let 's look more closely at these questions.

Question 1: What will be the site 's goals and main purpose?

The first item to write down in your Website Plan Document is your site 's goals and purpose. If you're hiring a Web vendor (a freelancer or firm) to build your own new website or if you've been tasked by a superior to hire someone to build one or revamp an existing one, here are the questions you need to answer:

1. Why do we need a website?
2. What are the ways in which this website is going to make us more money?
3. How will it make our business run better, faster and/or more cheaply?
4. What are the results we expect to get out of it?

Question 2: Who will be the website 's audience?

The second vital question to answer and record in your new Website Plan Document helps you focus on your primary market. It may seem like an obvious step, but you'd be surprised how many people miss it. The Web is the greatest marketing medium ever invented and is far more than just another marketing medium.

Marketing is all about your audience and message. Your audience is made up of people who will be most likely to visit your website, prospective buyers and people who you want to visit your site. If you mistakenly market to the wrong audience, then your message will be ineffective.

However, if you know exactly who will be visiting your website, then you can have a site made that fits your audience perfectly. You accomplish this by offering features, functionality, navigation, look-and-feel and messaging that is ideal for your specific audience.

Question 3: What is your budget?

Know the upper ceiling that you or your organization is willing to pay before you hire a Web design firm. This is the top amount you will pay to have the site completed, functional and live on the internet. Pricing in the Web design industry is all over the map, so you're going to have to do your homework on this one. I suggest you go to some forums and ask what others have paid for a comparable website. Or ask people you know who own sites.

Bear in mind, many different things make up a website, and each feature can be priced differently. Here are the main things you will pay for in a website:

- The graphic design, or the creation of the look-and-feel
- Graphics creation or digital photo manipulation
- Existing clip art or photograph licensing
- The copy writing and proofreading
- The programming of functionality, i.e. forms, ecommerce, forum software, databases, content management software, etc.
- Domain name
- Hosting
- Navigation code
- Information architecture (the organization of the site 's information)
- Putting it all together
- Posting it live in the Web

Anyone giving you pricing ought to itemize it so you can compare specific services across vendors.
Here are the typical ways in which Web designers charge:

- By the project
- By the hour
- By the page and or feature
- Any combination of the above

Question 4: What is your Timeline/Deadline?

The reason you want to have a firm budget and deadline in place before you hire anyone is because this will weed out vendors who can't comply and will help stop you from getting overcharged or strung along. Your goal is to agree in advance what they will charge you and how long it will take, so at the end they don't surprise you with a larger bill or tell you it 's going to take another two months to finish. Determine in advance when you need it done by. Be flexible, but state your absolute deadline in advance and make sure it is in the contract.

If you are going to hire a Web design firm or freelancer to build you a new business website, you must think through things in advance. For instance, ask yourself what you want your future website to do for you, how it 's going to improve your bottom line, how you want it to look and feel, what functionality you want, and how much time and money you want to spend on its creation. And you should do this all before you even start your search. By doing this, you will save yourself a lot of time, money and grief.

About the Author

Jason OConnor recently wrote a new book that teaches you How To Hire A Web Designer

Learn more at http://www.oakwebworks.com/ebook/buy-now.htm and http://www.oakwebworks.com/

Article Source: Content for Reprint

5 Massive But Simple Steps to a Profitable Website - Exposed!

There are many individuals across the nation that dream about creating a profitable website in order to add an additional income stream to their household or so that they can use the website to work from home on their own terms for their own business. The funny thing is that creating a profitable web business is already a reality for thousands of individuals across the nation and millions of individuals around the world.

So what is it that they know that you do not know? Creating a profitable website takes a great deal of time, effort, and innovation for the website to succeed and create an income for the individual that created it. A great deal of time if you intend to pay all your bills with it that is!

There are 5 steps that you must follow in order to create a profitable website that has the ability to provide a decent income for the creator. The first thing that you must do, like any entrepreneur, is come up with an idea for what type of website you would like to create. With the fluidity of the internet, the possibilities are virtually endless when it comes to what type of website to create and how to design the website to be appealing to the individuals you are trying to attract.

The next thing that you will need to determine is how you would like to make this website profitable. There are a number of different ways that you can use to make a website into a profitable enterprise, including selling a product, selling a service, becoming an affiliate marketer, or create some type of membership community. Websites that are unique and innovative are generally the ones that are mostly the best received and tend to generate their creators the largest incomes.

After the type of website has been determined, it is time to design the website and create the content of the website. The content of the website should be concise and well thought out as well as free of any grammatical or spelling errors. The intent of the content of a profitable web business is to keep the visitors attention long enough for you to sell them your product, your service, or persuade them to travel on to another companies website as a referral.

The next step to take in creating a profitable website is to determine how you are going to market your website. Individuals that create websites that are intended to be used for affiliate marketing will still need to market their website in order to attract individuals that they can use as referrals to the other companies website. There are nearly a dozen different marketing techniques that can be used on the internet and, in some cases - multiple marketing methods can be used in order to expand the number of individuals who see the website, helping it to become a profitable website much more quickly.

The last step in creating a profitable web business is continuing to review, revamp, and revise your website so that the information remains current and relevant to the needs of the visitors to your website. By following these 5 steps for creating a profitable website, you should be able create a profitable web business that you can eventually make your full time job if that is what you are going after.

About the Author

A Profitable Website is one of the opportunities any savy rising entrepreneur can benefit by stamping there name and immediatly start by considering downloading a Profitable Web Business

Article Source: Content for Reprint

Using A Free Personal Wedding Website

Trying to decide whether or not you want a site for your nuptials? Setting up a free personal wedding website is a great way to try the service and find out whether a web page is one of the modern nuptial traditions you want to enjoy. Web pages are one of the most exciting new nuptial trends, and you do not want to miss out on this technology when planning your ceremony. They make planning easier and more streamlined, and also improve communications with guests, family, and bridal/groom party members.

With a web page for your event, you can manage all of your details in one convenient place. You can ensure that your guests have access to your ceremony information at any hour of the day. This access eliminates late-night phone calls from your distant relatives, who are looking for information about hotels in the area. You can put that information on your page. You may choose to post maps, hotel information, and request RSVPs directly from your page.

A free personal wedding website is also a great way to involve the “man of the hour” in the bridal plans. Most grooms have little opinion about bridal colors, flowers, and dress styles, but they do enjoy technology. You will find that your husband-to-be will enjoy helping you plan and design a web page for your big day. This process is a great way to spend some time as a couple in the hectic days that lead up to a well-planned ceremony.

Another benefit of having a web page for your nuptial plans is that you will be able to keep it for years to come. You want to find a web page design company that allows you to burn your memories onto a CD. This allows you to keep the comments, well wishes, pictures, and videos on the site for a precious memory of your special event.

To find a good company to work with to design your web page, look for one that offers a free personal wedding website trial. This trial will allow you to see the services the company offers before you pay for the site. You will also want to find a web page that allows your guests to RSVP and leave comments for you. Another good feature for your web page is online polling. This allows you to survey your guests and find out their ideas for your special event, giving your guests the feeling that they are helping you plan without the need for you to listen to endless pieces of advice.

Finally, look for a company that allows you to change the site at will. This feature is important, because nuptial plans change. You do not want to build your ceremony details around your site, but rather to build your site around your ceremony.

WedShare has all of these features and so much more. They offer a generous free personal wedding website trial period for clients to see what their service has to offer. WedShare allows new brides and grooms to have unlimited web pages on their site, allowing them to have a page for any information they wish to share with their guests. Visit their website at http://www.wedshare.com to find out more about this service.

About the Author

http://www.wedShare.com was founded in 2004, and is steadily becoming a leading online wedding planning resource and a top free personal wedding website.

Article Source: Content for Reprint

Advertising Online with Your Own Website

The best promotional venture for any home or home-based business is to invest time and effort into a website. Even if you aren't interested in reaching a global audience, a website can be the deciding factor with new clients. Is your company online? Do you have a good, professional website that offers company history and available products or services?

A website isn't just for those seeking to work in the global economy. It 's also for those who want to draw in regional traffic. Offering a web address, or URL, in your signs and advertisements shows clients you are eager to provide history, any necessary product details and a positive statement on your company.

Every business should maintain their own website. This will often save you thousands of dollars in set-up fees, design fees and monthly maintenance costs. Running your company 's site gives you the maximum freedom and flexibility with both costs and information. There 's no middle company to depend on. All updating and news can be added directly to the site without waiting 24-48 hours or more for a web design company to update what is basically your domain.

You can also look forward to direct communication with your visitors and clientel through your website. You can add features such as guest books, counters and interactive features as you wish. Instead of being charged for each feature plus extra for their upkeep, you can maintain all the extras for yourself. The only exception to the self-sufficient webmaster is if you plan on operating a very technically advanced operation as an online blog or web service corporation. Such ventures will require IT staffing with advanced web knowledge and capabilities.

The primary reason that managing your own site is so effective is the cost involved. Most professional design companies will start your business out with the maximum of everything, even though it will likely be years before you actually need the same amount of space as a major corporation, if you ever need that amount. This justifies the expense involved. Many more dubious companies will also imply that you are less of a professional because you are opting to take care of your own website. Don't allow these pressure tactics to sway you. Website maintenance is a simple process, and you will reduce a good amount of overhead by simply doing it yourself.

Your first step when designing your own website is to purchase a good program called an HTML editor. This editor should allow you to edit raw code and feature an item called a "WYSIWYG" (pronounced wizzy-wig) editor. This seemingly strange editor is really a simple acronym for "what you see is what you get." This editor allows you to simply click and drag your web page elements without advanced knowledge of HTML or other design languages.

Your HTML editor should also come with a spell checker. Better programs come with validating features to ensure your web page is completely accessible. Free programs are available online and are excellent for beginning webmasters to experiment with. You will want to use a good quality HTML editor when you design your actual business site. While you don't need to shell out hundreds of dollars for such a program, do intend on investing $50 or $60. Sometimes you can find a good deal on HTML editors. If that 's your situation, by all means save what money you can.

Cheaper HTML editors have a tendency to place much excess code into your web pages, and that can result in a low search engine ranking and little traffic. While you are getting into the field of web page design, you should visit any of the thousands of resources online to learn more about web page code.

Once you have found your ideal program, you can move on to the more technical aspects. Your next concern will be finding a domain name. Be forewarned that countless websites are currently completely unused, but are under the thumb of what we'll call a "domain developer." These companies buy up as many domains as possible and hope to make a profit by selling them at a much higher price to someone who just wants the name.

With the number of extensions available for your website (i.e., .com, .org, .biz, .net), you should never feel forced into purchasing a domain at a higher price. Domains generally run both consumers and businesses around $10 to $15 dollars a year. Anything more than this is unreasonable.

Your next venture will be to purchase server space with a hosting company. Hosting companies provide you with the structure, or home, in which to store your web page files. You will design your web pages on your computer and publish, or upload, them to the server provided by your hosting company. You should never pay more than $7 per month for hosting services starting out.

If you can avoid being overwhelmed by the process, you can make owning and operating your own website both rewarding and fascinating. Unless you intend on operating some venture that provides online services, it 's better to be your own webmaster. If you do it right, your website will bring you more customers for your home business.

About the Author

John Cantu provides expert analysis of home based business opportunities and invites you to visit his site that shows reviews and comments on the current Top 10 Work at Home Opportunities.

Visit: www.wahometop10.com for more information.

Article Source: Content for Reprint

New Futures to Website Design - Development - Hosting - SEO

Now a day’s website development is going easier. Looking on the new futures like xhtml and css layouts website design is most popular ongoing factors. Now people know the value of a web site and how its support their business marketing and promotion.

In 1990’s search engine are not much popular after 2000 search engine like Google and Yahoo plays major part the website promotion. So now making a website is not important but how to promote your website and get good ranking in search engine is most important. Here I like to explain some major factors like web site design, web site development, web hosting, search engine optimization (online and offline), internet promotion and marketing etc.

Website Design - To develop a website in html design layout is now a common but search engines are more supporting to xhtml design and Cascading Style Sheets layout (css design). One of the biggest advantages to using xhtml css layout design is time consumers in website development. Styles sheets define how to display html elements in your website. All major browsers Netscape and Internet explorer support cascading style sheets and solve common problems in html/htm. You ca use lot of extra methods in a single html pages like external style, internal style sheet, inline styles, multiple style sheets.

Website Development - AJAX Asynchronous JavaScript has the power to make your site more compelling and more dynamic Ajax used for creating interactive web development applications. Most advantages of Ajax is real-time form data validation, auto completion,load on demand, sophisticated user interface controls and effects, refreshing data and server push, partial submit, obtain data using a server-side proxy, create single-page marshalled applications,low bandwidth usage and also support search engine.

Image optimization - Image search engine optimization is also now most popular most of the search engines provide vertical image search option. Now a day’s photo sharing sites and social image sharing sites are most popular. Image optimization is web designer need best knowledge and take care of entire image shapes, image sizes, and tag text knowledge levels. For seo optimization attribute specified width and height declaration, alt attribute and title attribute is must for an image.

Content optimization - Your website should start with your business content. Now website content is important for all the major search engines. Using duplicate content the search engines punish your website very badly. So your must take care about your web content seriously. In Search Engine Optimization the content is also most important, content spam lost your website ranking.

Meta content optimization -

Meta tags are a great way for webmasters to provide search engines with information about their sites. Meta tags can be used to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes only the meta tags they understand and ignores the rest. Meta tags are added to the section of your HTML page.

Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn't very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results.

Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it 's also a great place to include structured data about the page.

Programmatically generate descriptions. For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description.

Use quality descriptions. Finally, make sure your descriptions are truly descriptive.

Major points remind to Design and optimization content:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.

Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.

Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

Check for broken links and correct HTML.

If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Web hosting – Shared hosting is very popular and the most common type of hosting, having a unique domain IP not a dedicated web hosting will prevent you from being accused as a internet spammer. SERPs ranking in favour of dedicated C Class IP. Using dedicated IP address with a best hosting provider for your website going to be more beneficial in the long run for getting good rankings in search engines.

About the Author

Hello, I am Suresh Nair. A freelance writer, SEO Executive, website developer and programmer in charge. I have written on web site hosting and cheap internet web hosting.

Article Source: Content for Reprint