Turn Your Website Into A Web Presence

If you see your website as an extension of your business, simply online, then you're on the right track. Otherwise, you are probably throwing money away each month to host a website which only a drains your financial resources.

Many companies in early 2000 rushed to develop an online presence. Basically, companies reproduced their printed brochure with content and placed it in an online format. For most companies, their brochures and direct mailers was the number one marketing tool used to solicit new business and maintain current relationships, so it made sense to create their online presence out of this material. Webmasters and agencies across the country launched websites for their respective companies and clients and waited to see the results ... many are still waiting to see them.

Most companies launched an official website, but didn't create an official web presence. A website contains information about your company. It has information that may or may not be current and is somewhat stagnate related to content. You and your close associates know about your website, no one else does. A web presence is a living entity, a marketing tool, which interacts with your potential and current clients 24/7, 365.

What turns a website into a web presence?

Effective Search Engine Optimization
Potential clients can't find your website unless you tell them. The best way to get the message out that you exist and can fulfill their need for a particular product or service is to get ranked on the search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Ranking on the major (and minor) search engines is strategic process which can take anywhere from 12 weeks to eight months. There are a lot of factors involved. If anyone tries to tell you they can get your site ranked at the top of Google in six weeks, it 's a scam.

Search Engine Marketing
Take your product or service directly to the top of the search engines, in the form of sponsored links. This is by far the easiest way to rank high on the search engines, but there is a "cost per click" for each potential customer. Google, Yahoo, MSN and many other search engines offer a paid listing on their engines. Although it is easy to sign-up for the paid listings, there is a strategy behind the development of the actual text or image ad, how much to pay for each click and which keywords and key phrases to use. You also need to have a marketing budget in mind.

Now that your audience knows you exist and where to find you, you can begin utilizing the full potential of your website.

Add Ecommerce
Now that you have reached a new market; sell them your product or service. Selling online has not only become commonplace, but quite inexpensive. If you take credit cards at your physical location, you can easily accept them online through your website.

Collect Information
Offer your audience a free report or some other small gift in return for their email address and contact information. This data will come in handy when you want to reach a large audience with an announcement about a new product or service available at your website.

Get Feedback
Want to know what your audience thinks about your product or service? Collect the information online. This data can be valuable in several ways. Number one, you can use this information to contact potential customers at a later date. Number two, you can use this to create a testimonials section for your website. Potential clients always want to know what other customers thought about your product or service and will use this information in their decision process.

Add Interactive Elements: Flash Video
Create an experience for your customers by providing an introduction to your company or demonstrate a product or service.

Update your Content
If your content doesn't change on a routine basis, you won't receive return visits to your website. Search engines also keep an eye on content and rank sites accordingly.

Use a Reliable Host
Don't waste money on "fly-by-night" hosting companies. Most cheap hosting companies who offer 99% uptime with their hosting package know you don't check and you wouldn't know if your website was down. Use a company that provides uptime reports or a company that you can trust to monitor your site. If your audience can't find your site because it is "down", you have wasted marketing dollars.

The Next Step

There are literally hundreds of ways you can interact with your customers online and the few above should help you get other ideas rolling your way. The next logical step is to review your own website. Is it providing a source of revenue, or is your site simply a bill you pay every month? If the latter is true, you may want to rethink your current online marketing strategy.

About the Author

Mosaic Interactive provides web design in Allentown, web design in the Lehigh Valley and web design in Pennsylvania.

Article Source: Content for Reprint

Website Redesign Frisco - When Is Website Redesigning Needed?

Redesigning a website is a stressful undertaking. However, effective website redesign can have a positive impact on a business. While there are certainly advantages, change for the sake of change is pointless.

So often, websites grow over time, and they need to be redesigned because the information within them needs to be condensed or reorganized. Many business owners go through this same process. There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to redesigning your site. Depending on how it was set up originally, converting a lot of pages may take weeks, and that 's after the new design is finished and approved. People who come back to your site that haven't visited it in awhile will be greeted by a look that is unfamiliar to them.

Ask yourself the following questions to see whether it 's time for a website redesign:

1. Has your business changed or grown?

If your business is no longer the same as it was when you designed your site, chances are, it needs to be redesigned to reflect the change.

2. Has the size of the site grown substantially?

If your site continues to grow, like most business sites, you need to evaluate whether it 's still meeting your objectives. As you add new products and services you need to re-organize your information. In addition, you should consider adding multimedia information (audio, video) to sharpen your message.

3. Is some of the content outdated or unnecessary?

Does your website have up-to-date content? Someone should be revising spec sheets, changing promotion dates and adding new material weekly. If your website appears static, it looks like you're not a serious business.

4. Is the information on your site user-friendly?

If you cringe when you read your site text, or if you regularly get questions on your site text from visitors, re-structuring your copy or rewriting it can help fix these problems. If you've been adding to your site over time and the navigation has become unwieldy or confusing, this could be another pressing reason to redesign your site.

5. Is the most important content buried below?

Here 's where you need to do an "easy to buy" audit. By that I mean you need to evaluate how easy it is to find information and actually buy your products. This sounds like common sense, but we've all purchased online and know that it can sometimes be frustrating.

6. Are you using the latest technology, instead of hard-coding?

If you created your website more than 18 months ago, you are probably due for a technology update. This is also true if you started with a very basic site and "hard-coded" everything. Ask your webmaster whether he has some suggestions. You can be sure he will.

7. Are you getting good results in the Search Engines?

Poor rankings in the Search Engines can be a result of not optimizing your site well. Poor search engine ranking can also be a result of bad design choices or coding on your site. Make sure that your site isn't designed using frames and that the text is coded in HTML. Flash sites are also more difficult to optimize for Search Engines.

8. Does the home page design suit your current business objectives?

Does your website communicate the depth and breadth of your current business? If you have changed the focus of your services, added new products or want to communicate a different face to your visitors, consider an overall redesign for your website.

As with every other avenue in life, things become outdated and old-fashioned. It doesn't matter how well your last website design was, you will have to replace it in time. While the above might not be exhaustive, it should provide good guidelines to decide if its time for a website redesign.

About the Author

Magic Logix is a professional graphic design and website redesign in Frisco. We also provide web development services in addition to Network support and IT consulting. Visit us today for your web designing consultation.

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Getting Motivated When Designing a Website

Whatever your skills, whatever your interests, everyone has the ability to be creative in their work. However, we can often lose our motivation and drive to create, making it difficult to stay focused on a particular work plan or project, especially in web design. So what is the best method for staying motivated?

The key to maintaining your own motivation to be creative is actually a long term effort. Starting out can be tough, and in most cases the most difficult part. But with the right methods and consistency you will be able to reach a point where staying motivated is easy. It is a simple case of knowing when to make the right choices at the right times.

Obviously everyone is unique and each of you will have your own methods and actions into being creative. But here is the chance to read something that offers some possible methods and solutions when getting motivated and staying motivated.

The main things to take into consideration are:

Set goals
You will find it is a lot easier to stay motivated when you feel like you’ve reached a target. Give yourself something to achieve and break the work load down. If it is a large website project you are working on, set yourself mini goals so you are reaching targets every few hours or days rather than spending weeks trying to get the lot done.

Small bite-sized objectives
As mentioned briefly above, set yourself up for more success than failure by being realistic in goal setting and come up with small, bite-sized tasks to start with. As you complete more tasks, start making your goals more ambitious.

Build a creative workstation
Whether you design websites at your desk, in a dark room or a home office, you need to assign a place to yourself where you can be creative. Once you’ve decided on that place, use it! Each creative task and success you achieve in your вЂ

About the Author

Contact me at Cheap Web Design UK - Design Oven http://www.designoven.co.uk/

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How To Develop A Website For Your Business

An online presence has become an integral part of any business, no matter what field or niche they occupy. E-Commerce has skyrocketed exponentially since its inception, and there is no evidence that it will slow down anytime soon. Therefore, you will never achieve your full potential unless you have a website. Just having a website does not guarantee you instant success; in fact, it takes a lot of work and time before you start

To those that have never developed a website before, the job can appear quite intimidating. Most people think that advanced design and programming skills are required for one to make their own website. While developing a website by hand from scratch is certainly an option that gives you complete control and freedom, it is not the only option. A variety of programs are available to assist you with constructing web pages, and they are easy to use even for non-tech savvy people. Of course, some time must be invested in learning how to use a program, but that is nothing compared to what it takes to learn actual coding knowledge.

If you are not set on having a completely unique design, you can opt to use a template. Templates are already made designs that you just need to fill in with content. They are exportable and can be easily uploaded to a web server. With some programs, websites made from templates can be live in as little as six steps. For most online businesses, templates are acceptable. If you have special needs or are designing a website for a medium or large sized business, the custom approach should be taken.

Not just any design will cut it for your business. It needs to be attractive and stimulating, so that visitors will stay and hopefully purchase something. Content needs to flow, meaning readers should be able to read pages in an organized manner. Visitors should not be jumping around from place to place in order to find what they are looking for. Menus should act as guides and take up as little space as possible. Ease of use is imperative to pleasing clients, so take care in removing any obstacles to navigation of your website.

One of the most important things about your website is the color scheme. Colors define your business 's image and are critical in how customers view your company. With the wrong colors, you can make a negative impression, and many people may find your design bland and disengaging. The technology of color is more complex than most people believe. You need to consider a wide range of issues, including the fact that not all browsers share the same color palettes. When facing the decision of what color scheme to implement, it is best to consult an expert.

If you simply need a website for the online presence, then stopping at one project is fine. To drastically increase sales, it is best to have a network of websites, all promoting your products or services. Websites which compliment your primary site are referred to as mini-sites, and having a good number of these kinds of sites can improve your reach and customer base. Do not get the wrong idea, though. Mini sites still need attention to detail and occasional upkeep, just not as much as your main website.

About the Author

If you need high quality VPS Hosting or FFMpeg Hosting with a guaranteed high uptime look no further.

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