Why having a website is crucial to your business success.

10 reasons your business should have a website

At ForeSceneWeb web design services we often come across this quandary from clients: why must we have a website? We politely suggest to them, considering the exponential growth of the Internet the question should no longer be about whether one should have a website or not, the question needs to be how soon should one get a website if one doesn't have it?

A website these days is as much an integral part of your day-to-day business as the telephone on your desk. Just as you will miss a great part of your business without your telephone you are missing great business growth opportunities by not having a website for your business. A plethora of new opportunities appear for you as soon as you have a website. Although there can be infinite reasons, given below are the 10 most important reasons why your business should have a website.

1. Expand your business to a global market

As a business you must be facing myriad forms of competition. You constantly need to innovate and find new markets. Your business website helps you leverage the length and breadth of the Internet and become a part of an unprecedented information superhighway. From one part of the world you can transact with customers and clients from another part of the world without having to walk even a few steps away from your desktop.

2. Open doors to new opportunities

Starting a business on the Internet is very easy and inexpensive. Sometimes all you need is a website; develop an idea overnight and in the morning start doing business with your new website. You can literally launch a new business via an existing or a new website within a few minutes.

3. Interact with your customers and clients

It is a big possibility that most of your customers and clients are hooked to the Internet and using it regularly for their educational, communication and business needs. They will be delighted to find you on the Internet and interact with you through your website. People these days find it easier to talk through websites rather than calling up or even sending e-mails.

4. Catch up with your competition

While you're pondering over whether you should have a website or not we are pretty much sure that your competitors already have websites and are reaping the benefits of doing business on the World Wide Web. By having a website you will be coming at par with your competitors and will be able to face them on an even turf.

5. Conduct research and analysis

Instant feedback from your customers and clients helps you improve your products and services with greater speed. You can organize debates and polls on your website to gather input from your customers and clients and then analyze that data to carry out improvements or follow a more aggressive marketing strategy.

6. Do business 24x7 year long

You website doesn't have to have working hours; it is open all the time. It can be reached from anywhere at any time. Even at 2 a.m. people can log on to your website and do business with you without you having to get involved in case all the interactive functions have been properly set up.

7. Advertise inexpensively

Once some decent traffic has built up on your website it is inexpensive to advertise on your own website. There is an ongoing form of advertisement; your products and services are constantly being advertised when people visit your website. The other form of advertising is when you launch a new product or offer a new service. You can always declare this on your website and your visitors will be your first customers and clients. In fact the response rate of website visitors is far better than the conventional advertisement audience.

8. Portray a progressive and contemporary image

Nobody likes organizations stuck in time warps. Your organization should be up-to-date with current technologies; this conveys to your customers and clients that you have got a progressive thinking and you adapt to newer technological trends with great flexibility and speed. By having a website you will be offering your customers and clients an interface they are much used to using on a day-to-day basis.

9. Save lots of money

Your website can save lots of money by automating most of your functions. For instance, when you sell through your website you don't have to maintain a stock or inventory. Simply maintain an online inventory that people can browse through and order from. Once they have placed an order you can arrange for the product and then get it shipped from the original supplier or the manufacturer. Since most of the processing happens through the website you don't need much staff to process the orders. If somehow you can transfer all your business operations to your website you don't even have to commute daily to your workplace; you can manage everything from where you stay. All these factors can help you save lots of money.

10. Educate prospective customers and clients

Sometimes you need to educate people in order to make them appreciate what you are offering. By constantly publishing informative and educational content on your website you can raise awareness regarding your product or service and convert casual visitors into paying customers and clients. Sometimes if the demand doesn't exist it can be created by making people aware of the need.

By ForeScene Creative Solutions, a New York web design company.

About the Author

JUAN MARTINEZ is author of this article on New York Web Design.

Find more information about New York Web Designer here.

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The Business Benefits of Web Standards for Business Web Sites

Web standards are standardized specifications for internet markup languages such as HTML, CSS, and XML. "What the heck does that mean," you ask? Every web site must be coded with some form of internet markup language to make it readable by an internet browser, such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. These standards were formulated by the W3 Organization so web designers all over the world can create web sites with one goal in mind: make the internet a better place.

Why should you care? There are plenty of web sites that do not conform to web standards, so why should you? If you're a business owner and you have a web site, there are actually many benefits to having a web standards compliant web site. In the competitive world of internet marketing, every little advantage you have helps.

How Web Standard Compliant Web Sites Help Your Business
Site Wide Look and Feel Consistency

When a web site is designed to web standards, there will be 2 parts to a web page. One part will be the actual structure and content of the web site, while the other part is the presentation. Because the presentation is separate, you can guarantee that all of the pages of your web site will look the same.
Less Bandwidth, Faster Loading

Once again, by keeping the presentation (found in the CSS file) separate from the web site content, pages will load faster because the CSS file only needs to be loaded once. In the days of yore, all of the text formatting had to be included within the web page, so it meant more data had to be loaded with every page view.
Better Search Engine Optimization

Search engine spiders crawl the web to index all of the web pages they come across. Compared to human beings, there are very significant differences in how search engines see a web site. Dynamic effects such as those created by JavaScript are not taken into account. Text rendered with graphics cannot be read and parsed either. Separating presentation from content increases the information/markup ratio, making CSS-based documents more pertinent with regard to the search terms, which gives them the opportunity to rank higher in search results. Because the web site loads faster, a search engine is also less likely to "time out" on a web site and leave.
Less Use of Javascript

Javascript is a coding language for web design that can severely harm a web site 's traffic and search rankings. Because Javascript has been used by hackers in the past, some people disable it all together from their browser. So if you have navigation on your web site that is powered by Javascript, it could be difficult or impossible for a visitor to get around.

In addition, Javascript can be clunky and it won't always display the same in every browser. Many of the reasons web sites use Javascript are for cool text and hovering effects that can be replicated with CSS code. That allows your web site to attract more visitors with a lot less web site code that has to be loaded.
Future-Proof

As newer internet browsers are developed, they will all be web standards compliant. This includes browsers on cell phones. Because a web standards compliant web site has presentation separate from content, the presentation files can be modified to suit web pages for print, on-sreen, and mobile viewing.
Accessibility

Technology today allows people with disabilities to browse the internet. If a web site is not compliant with web standards, the software a disabled person uses may be unable to render a web site. Being accessible is mandatory in many countries for government agencies.
Reducing dependency on any one developer

If a web site is developed with undocumented coding features, poor coding or coding hacks, then it could be near impossible for any one else overtaking the web site to work with it. Following standards-compliance in requirements documents is a very effective way to ensure measurable quality of the final product, the W3C being an impartial judge.

Because standards are very well documented, another person taking over some standard-compliant code can begin right away and will not need to become familiar with the previous developer 's coding practices.

About the Author

Shycon Design is a Denver Website Design firm that helps local Colorado businesses market their business on the web. More and more business owners are realizing that they need to be on the web to give their customers great service. We help them do it.

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How To Use Advertising to Boost Traffic For Your Website

The art of Internet marketing has always been surrounded by the dilemma of an astounding amount of investment.

This is a common problem faced by most small business enterprises. They invest a lump sum behind advertisements and if the campaign does not come off, it 's a major loss for them.

Before you start advertising make sure to read the tips below.Advertising is a specialized work and that is why a lot of things have to be kept in mind before the copywriting process.

First of all, comprehensive research has to be conducted to know who your potential buyers might be and what they want. A lot of firms try to sell their products instead of finding out what the customer is looking for and then offering if to them.

That 's why the copy should address their needs and tell them how your product would solve their problems. This will make the customers see that they are getting their money 's worth.

The ad copy should also maintain a logical progression. It must have a headline, beginning, middle-section and end.

The headline is the first major thing in your ad. The surfers don't have much time at their disposal, so you only have a few seconds to catch their attention.

That is why the headline is supposed to make the readers interested enough to go through the entire content. If your headline is successful, only then will the viewers spend time going through whole of the copy.

The next important thing is the opening paragraph. It should sustain the interest aroused by the headline in the minds of the viewers. The whole copy should be interesting and ought to keep the readers engrossed.

If, at any point, during reading the copy the reader becomes bored, then your campaign will fail. Moreover, the style of writing should be easy so that the reader will be able to follow from one paragraph to the next.

Try not to use too many sentences in one paragraph. Three paragraphs with three sentences are easier to read then one paragraph with nine sentences.

The copy is also supposed to proceed by revealing more and more about the benefits that you intend to offer to your customers. The ending should make the visitor take action.

Action can include anything from download a free file, signing up for a newsletter, requesting more information, or directly buying a product. Advertising should include specific and real information. False or information that sounds hyped might give the visitors a wrong impression.

You should always try to find the problems of your target audience the copy should focus on those needs. The copy should also hint at the possible solutions to the problems and tell them that how they can solve their problems by using your products or services.

The advertisements might also offer free gifts. But be sure that they are related to your product and that they are worthwhile to the prospective customers. At times, some offers can be given with a deadline. But, always follow the deadline, because if you do not, the customer might think that you have lied to him.

The copy can also include testimonials, because these statements will make your copy more authentic and readily acceptable. The last line of your advertisement should carry the major links and the toll-free number where the customers can call for more information. Last but not the least, the claims made in your ad should be a mirror image of the contents on the site.

Follow these simple rules and continue to improve upon them and you'll notice the difference in your ads!

About the Author

To find out more information visit Netlyte Houston Web Design. You can also request free information to find out how we can help you build your Website

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Web Design Using E4X Technology

I find myself longing for the old days, when I could design a web site in 5 minutes on a Sunday and then go play golf for the rest of the afternoon, and still collect a full week of salary for services rendered. That was back in 1996, when the internet was still new. Websites were created exclusively with HTML. The client would email me the content for their website, which I would upload to FrontPage, then insert some tags and a template for formatting and layout, add some graphics, and that was it.

Nowadays, I find myself working up to 10 hours per day designing web sites. I have to use so many different programming languages and specifications when creating a site that it makes me dizzy. I can barely type this article because my brain literally hurts from all the different programming languages I have swirling around in my head.

You might be wondering why my job has become so complicated in recent years. Well, it started with the wireless revolution, which made a mess out of cyberspace. Now, every wireless gadget is equipped with access to the internet and email. Cell phones, palm tops, laptops, even computer screens in automobiles have web browsers. These gadgets have platforms and web browsers that are very different from what is installed on an ordinary desktop PC. These new web browsers are not compatible with many elements of the HTML programming language. As a result, websites created purely with HTML are often invisible or inaccessible to the wireless internet user.

New languages and specifications such as XHTML, XSL, and XML were created to conform to these new web browsers. XML was probably the most important innovation of them all. XML enabled web designers to define data without telling the browser how to display the data, unlike HTML, which both defines the data and tells the browser how to display it. XML data can be viewed on any platform or browser because it is a simple text file with no predefined tags, allowing the programmer to define data any number of ways. XHTML and XSL were created to convert XML files into actual web pages that had style and structure and could be viewed across all platforms and browsers.

Now that you understand how and why programming has changed, you are ready for a brief introduction to the main topic of this article, E4X. E4X adds direct support for XML to JavaScript. An XML object declared with E4X is written like this:

var x = new XML()

Using this method, it is much easier to parse an XML document than it would be using JavaScript. Without it, you would have to use different XML components and libraries for each browser, because each browser is compatible with different versions of the language. Also, E4X is advantageous to use because it does not require very much code.

However, none of the mainstream browsers currently support E4X. A beta-version of Mozilla is compatible with it, but not the actual version. Firefox 1.1 works with E4X, but Internet Explorer, the most popular and widely used browser, does not work with it. Instead, Internet Explorer utilizes various programming components of a programming specification called AJAX, which uses a variety of languages, including JavaScript, XML, CSS, and several others.

If you create web sites for a living, you should probably take some time to familiarize yourself with E4X. Even though it is not actively used right now, it likely will be in the near future. For now, learning AJAX is probably more important because of the dominance of Internet Explorer as the web browser of choice, but that could change. If you have never studied E4X but are already familiar with XML, you can probably learn it through simple online tutorials because the syntax is not too complicated. If you have never studied XML, XHTML, XSL, or AJAX, then you need to enroll in some courses at a local computer programming institute immediately. Not knowing how to use these new languages could mean that your web sites will be invisible to wireless internet users.

About the Author

Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make an HTML form

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Custom web design and hosting

Contrary to popular belief, Web designing and web development are completely different fields of internet development. Web designing is centred on designing of websites, a typical web designer will look into design aspects like web banners, colour schemes and the fonts used on a website. A web designer does not work on advanced concepts like internet programming and scripting. On the other hand, a web developer utilizes various programming languages and scripts to create dynamic web pages. In essence, a web developer writes the code and the web designer incorporates the code into a site’s design.
If you are looking to have a website developed, here are a few tips to help you find a suitable web designer or web developer. Web designers and web developers alike, usually have a portfolio that showcases their best works, before choosing a web developer or web designer make sure you have a look at the developer’s portfolio. Look for a web designer that has worked on search engine optimization before or offers search engine friendly templates. It is important to work with a development team that knows the basics of search engine optimization and are aware of concepts like XHTML compliant designs.
Once you have short listed a development team you wish to work with, the next step is making sure your design team can work in tandem with your development team. To make life simpler, you should deal with a company that can offer both design and development services; this ensures that you have a single point of contact so you are not wasting time shuttling back and forth between the design and development team. It is important to keep in mind that search engine optimization should be carried out during the development of a website; therefore the smart choice would be dealing with a website that can offer complete web solutions. A company offering web solutions offers hosting, designing, development and search engine optimization of websites.
If you are working on an e-commerce website, it is important to invest in features like SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates. Users are comfortable dealing with websites that are secure, and SSL certificates are one of the prerequisites of creating a secure e-commerce website. It is essential to be in constant contact with your development team during the development of your website, once a website is uploaded and optimized it is very difficult to make corrections and design changes without affecting the search engine ranking. If you have any design or development concepts that you want to implement it is important to work on them before the website is uploaded.
Finally, it is important to make your website user friendly and simple to use. Most developers ensure websites are user friendly and will let you know if they feel a concept is too complicated for users. In addition, web developers also keep in mind factors like load time and will also ensure all your design and development concepts are compatible with various web browsers.
Although the programming language used does not adversely affect a website’s ranking or design, it is important to know the pros and cons of various programming languages. Popular programming languages include Java, ASP .Net, PHP and Ruby on Rails and a typical web hosting package includes support for PHP only. To use programming languages like .Net and Ruby on Rails you might have to upgrade your hosting plan. If you are not sure what programming language you should have your website developed in, it is best to leave the decision to the development team. In a nutshell, the best option is to use a firm that offers web solutions, so that the firm takes care of everything from the hosting plan to the development of your site.
Resource Box
Digital Ray Inc offers high quality custom web solutions and hosting in Los Angeles, California

About the Author

Ryuichiro Ueno is the author of this article on Custom web design and hosting.

Find more information about Quality Web Development here.

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How a Website Copywriter Can Unleash The Power of Your Website

Writing content for the web is a highly specialized form of professional writing - much different than writing brochures, reports and other company literature. That 's what a Dallas interior decorator found out recently after she paid a prominent web designer more than ,000 to create her Internet presence.

Her dazzling website was complete with flash graphics and images of the sensational homes she decorated. But for all the trouble and expense, her website didn't generate traffic. "It was like giving a party and nobody came," she said.

"Nobody came" because what little copy her website did have, was embedded in fancy graphics - making it unreadable to search engines. In the end, the decorator didn't give up her stylish web design, but she did engage the services of a web site copywriter to beef up her content with keyword saturation.

High search engine ranking absolutely depends on the quality copy a web site copywriter can produce. Before long, the decorator 's website had traffic to spare and she was taking her pick of high-end design jobs.
What happened to the Dallas decorator is not unusual. Many business owners pay big bucks for a snazzy website, then leave the skills of a web site copywriter out of the equation - risking their entire investment . With a web site copywriter at the helm, a company finds the "right words" to bring in buyers for their products or services.

The "right words" are those strategic keywords and keyphrases embedded in content. These words and phrases are the language web surfers type into Google and other search engines. Live in Des Moines and need a plumber? Type in "Des Moines plumber" or "plumber Des Moines" and you'll find a host of plumbing companies who were smart enough to use these keywords to drum up moneymaking traffic on their websites.

Another example: An Atlanta, Georgia remodeling contractor 's website wasn't paying its way so he hired a web site copywriter to turn it around. She did extensive research on his site and interviewed him at length about the specific kinds of remodeling jobs his company offered.

From there, she came up with a group of keywords and phrases that focused on his unique specialties. Besides the obvious broad keyphrase, "home remodeling Atlanta," she zeroed in on "Atlanta custom cabinet maker," "custom cabinet maker Atlanta," "Atlanta tub installation" and "tub installation Atlanta". Other keyphrases she selected were "Granite countertops Atlanta" and "Atlanta granite countertops".

The contractor was confused. "Some of these phrases sound almost alike," he told her. "What could possibly be the difference between "granite countertops Atlanta" and "Atlanta granite countertops"?

"Nothing to you and me," said his web site copywriter. "But in the eyes of a search engine the difference means night and day." She educated him about other Internet realities. "In a well-optimized website," she told him, "search engine placement and keyword advertising account for most web traffic.

Targeted keywords increase the chance that your website will achieve top ranking. When that happens," she said, "you're suddenly in the company of qualified buyers."

About the Author

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Building A Simple Web Site For The Beginner

When you're fairly new to the internet, the thought of building a web page seems like a distant dream. Well, I'm here to tell you that you can build simple web pages even if you have no HTML experience and without having to do a training course. It 's not easy at first, but it is completely within reach for anyone. I should know, I didn't know anything about web design and within a couple of weeks I had a simple lead-capture page built. So this article is from the beginner 's perspective.

When I started out, I had been considering ways of building an opt-in subscriber list. The obvious answer was to have my own lead capture page. I didn't have the money to pay for someone else to build it for me so the only option was to attempt it myself. So the first step is just to decide that you will give it a go. Second step is to decide what the goal of the page is. Is it a sales page to promote an affiliate product; a lead capture page to capture subscribers; or a home page? Whatever you decide, I recommend that you keep it really simple for your first one, just to get "your feet wet".

Now that you know what type of page you want, the easiest way to work out the sales copy, content, layout and design is to create it with a word processor first (like Word). This for me was the quickest and easiest way to come up with the design, to see what it would look like and to make changes as needed. Once I was happy with that I could proceed to the next step, which was to build the page with a web page editor.

Once again, I was restricted by the budget (as many people are) so to buy a web page editor was out of the question at this stage. But there are many different free options. I ended up going for FirstPage2006 by Evrsoft.com and downloaded that to my desktop. Once you have it downloaded, open it up and click on the Basic HTML Document button. At this stage I copied and pasted the text from my Word document to Notepad (to convert it all to plain text).

Then on FirstPage2006 (FP2006) go to file, click on convert text file to HTML, locate your Notepad document and click on open. That will open your Notepad document in FP2006 in HTML format. Now all you have to do is go through the content and modify the font types, sizes, colours, alignment and margins. This can be very tedious at first but keep going and you will get there. Just a tip: save your work every few minutes, as I found that I made many mistakes along the way before I was happy with the layout. I won't go into all the features of the page editor because it will depend on which one you've got but keep playing around with it and you will learn quickly.

Have a good look around at other web sites to get ideas and to learn from them. Especially look at the ones that catch your eye and model your site on their 's (please note, don't copy their work but you can model successful elements of the page). Good sales copy is beyond the scope of this article, but basically go for a big, bold headline (usually red looks good) and a sub-heading that conveys benefits and arouses curiosity. If you have a long sales letter, break that up with sub-headings that people can "scan" to keep them on the page. That also depends on what the goal of the web page is as well.

Once your page is finished it 's time to get a domain name, hosting for the site, and upload everything to your host. Your hosting company should have instructions on how to upload your site.

This is just the very start of things. You should consider getting extra training to enhance the basic skills that you've learnt and maybe upgrade your free editor as well to build better pages. Even so, you can still build professional looking pages with the bare minimum so just give it a try. Once you build that first web page, there will be no holding you back and the satisfaction and rewards are well worth it.

About the Author

Andrew Jones has been a business owner for the past 10 years, and is now a Plug-In Profit Site owner. To find the best
earn extra income opportunity.

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Is Your Web Site Driving Away Visitors?

Much has been written about optimizing your web site for search engines, but less emphasis is placed on usability. Optimizing for usability and for search engines is not a contradiction.

What is usability? Basically stated, can the visitor to your site find what they're looking for quickly and easily? If your site is not usable, visitors will go elsewhere. Here is a list of some of the most important usability factors.

1. Does the site load quickly? Inefficient code and large or too many images will slow down page loading. Remember, if your page hasn't loaded in about eight seconds, the visitor is likely to go elsewhere.

2. Are the pages attractive, appropriate, and is the information presented in a consistent, simple, and concise form? What is attractive and appropriate for a rock band won't work for an accounting firm. Use colors and style to project the image of your business that you want visitors to see.

3. Can the site be easily navigated? The location and presentation of the navigation buttons should be consistent on each page and the visitor should be able to go from any page to any other page on the site. Ideally, a visitor should be able to get to any page with one or two clicks, and not have to "drill down" numerous levels unless absolutely necessary. Fewer navigation clicks are better.

4. Text size. All web browsers allow the visitor to resize the text on a web page. This is done to accommodate visitors who have less than "jet pilot" eyesight. Yet remarkably, many web designers will "lock" the text to a specific size to keep larger letters from "breaking" the page layout. While it 's a little more work, a web page can be built to allow the visitor to set their own text size preferences while preserving the integrity of the page layout.

5. Text color. For whatever reason, we're seeing an increasing number of sites in which there simply is not enough contrast between the text and the background. Maybe the designer thinks it looks cool, but it 's hard to read. We also see sites in which the "mouse-over" state of a navigation button disappears into the background. Choose your colors carefully, and from a readability perspective. It 's hard to beat black text on white.

6. A web page is not print media. Studies have shown that people read web pages differently from printed material. People tend to scan a web page looking for major points. They are not likely to read long paragraphs on the web. (The exception to this is informational articles you may have on your site. But you've used concise text to get your visitor interested to get them to the article.)

So keep your page text short, use outlines, short paragraphs, and sparingly emphasize major points with bold text. (Avoid underlining major points because users may confuse the underlines with links.)

7. Just as a written paragraph should have one basic topic, so should each page in your site. There 's a tendency to cram everything onto the home page. Assume you have a site on which you sell a weight-loss medication. After the holidays, many of us need that. Anyway, use your home page to grab your visitor 's attention and show them how you can solve their problem. Although you love your family and dog, and you spent years developing your secret formula, put all that wonderful information on some other pages.

8. Avoid splash pages. Splash pages are those introduction pages that serve no other purpose than to - well - introduce your site. They frustrate visitors and search engines don't like them.

9. Your navigation buttons must provide a clear indication of what the visitor will find when they click the button. Don't confuse and irritate your visitor who clicks "Products" and finds himself on a page with stories about your dog.

10. Provide the name of the page on the page so the visitor knows where they are all the time. If more than one level deep, provide "breadcrumbs" so the user can navigate their way out.

11. Finally, make your contact information easy to find and complete, including name, address, phone, Email, and address. Doing so exudes professionalism, confidence, and integrity.

Optimizing for search engines and real people are not incompatible concepts. In fact, search engines are becoming more "human-like" in how they rank sites. Make your site appealing to visitors and good things will happen.

About the Author

Janet Winter and her husband, Phil, are owners of Web Design Partners, a full-service Web design firm. If you have questions about Web topics, you can contact them at WebDesignPartners.com. They also operate three e-commerce sites, "http://www.wildbirdgoodies.com">WildBirdGoodies.com, WelcomeBabyGifts.com and APamperedDog.com.

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Does Your Website Sell Your Product?

Internet marketing comes down to one thing, the website’s ability to sell a product. If this does not remain the focus of a web design then no amount of money will buy the success needed by ecommerce businesses. The most important part of all web marketing campaigns is the website.

The website must accomplish two things. First, it must sell a product. This is done by pre-selling to the consumer, and using ‘call to action’ phrases and buttons to sell the product.

The second focus of a website is to build in Page Rank, climb higher in the searches, and increase the traffic of ‘target audience’ buyers.

Step #1: The Product

The first step to designing a good website is learning what the product must give before the consumer will buy.

What problems can the product solve?
What benefits will the consumer receive?
Can consumers buy the product locally?
Is the product available for less – or free?
Is there a better product out there?
Does anyone need the product?

Step #2: The Consumer

Who wants to buy the product? This is a vital to the success of the website. Knowing the customer is important. However, there are two types of customer on the web. The first type have no intention of buying. They often surf the web looking for free information, and chatting in forums, but they never make the decision to buy.

They spend most of their time writing complaints or making their opinion heard. These people are a waste of time and resources for the Internet Marketer.

The second type of consumer may not enter the site with the intention of buying, but they can be sold. These are the people the website needs to target.

What do they want?
Why do they need it?
What bugs the buyers?
What do buyers hate about the product?
How much is the consumer willing to pay?
How do they communicate?
Who are they?
What do they value?
What is important to them?

Step #3: The Sales Method

The first two steps will define the sales method needed to sell people. There are as many selling tools, and sales aids used to sell as there are products to sell. Each target audience is sold a different way. A squeeze page may attract someone who is new to the web, but it will feel excessive and over-the-top to web savvy consumers with a post secondary education.

Squeeze Pages
Text selling
Images and Graphics
Emotional Triggers
No Sales Pressure

Clowns saying ‘buy now’ might encourage someone who is emotional and expressive, but they will turn off someone who sees themselves as professional or busy. The grammar style used is also important.

Are your consumers health and environmentally conscious, or do they buy fast food and watch television all night?

The good news – it is easy to find the answers to these questions. The answers are all available in the forums, on blogs, and on the competition’s website. Look at the vernacular and vocabulary used by the people who need your product. This is where ‘skill level’ comes into play.

Step #4: Consumers Skill Level

The last step is to gear everything toward one skill level: Uninitiated, Beginner, Novice, Advanced, and Professional. Talking over, or under your target audience will cost sales. Find content that pre-sells your potential customer.

As the website grows, and the business matures, it can expand to take in different skill levels, but it is vital to make sure that the consumers know where to go to find the information they need.

One might ask what skill level would have to do with a product like an MP3 player. But, it is important to realize that all products have a skill level. A generic MP3 player will have a different audience than an Ipod.

A business computer will have a different audience than refurbished computers sold on eBay. This differentiation is based on their skill level, both the skill level developed by the consumer, or the amount of power and flexibility needed by the consumer.

These four steps will help you develop a website that will compliment your Internet marketing campaign and drive people to your business’s shopping cart.

About the Author

Mark Walters is a third generation entrepreneur and author. He offers free training and investing videos designed to speed you towards financial independence at http://www.CashFlowInstitute.com

Article Source: Content for Reprint

Spring Cleaning and Website Maintenance for Your Website

Regular website maintenance is an important aspect of owning an online business. Just like a house, your website needs an annual spring cleaning. Certain website maintenance tasks should be performed throughout the year to keep content relevant. Other tasks can be done once a year.

You may be worried that website maintenance is costly, but there are many budget web design methods that can be employed to get the job done. Here is a list of budget web design tips that will help you perform the regular website maintenance that every site needs.

Budget Web Design Tip 1
Visit Competitor Sites
The contents of your site should project the image that you want to promote. For example, if you have a fun website, you should have lively colors and graphics. If you have a website that is serious in tone, the look should reflect that. When performing any type of website maintenance, you should regularly check competitor sites to see what else is out there. While you're surfing the web, be sure to take notes on what you liked, what you didn't, and why. Use these notes to develop an original site that stands out among the competition.

Budget Web Design Tip 2
Analyze Your Website
To properly perform website maintenance, you need to know what your website needs. To determine this, put yourself in your visitors' shoes. Look around. Do you see anything that 's missing or can be approved upon? If so, determine how it can be changed. You may also want to consider having a trusted friend or family member look over your site. Ask them to provide an honest assessment, and then use their opinions to better the site. Specific things you may want to ask them about include the site 's look and feel, the ease of navigation, and the site content itself.

Budget Web Design Tip 3
Update Your Content
Refreshing content is the top reason to perform website maintenance. Keeping your news pieces and informational content fresh is important. If your web content is stale, visitors will search elsewhere for the things they need. Studies show that sites that are updated regularly have more returning visitors and higher page views. Search engines will also give you more attention if you regularly update your pages with fresh content.

Budget Web Design Tip 4
Learn New Design Skills
Credible websites look professional. If you don't have the design know-how to perform website maintenance yourself, brush up on your skills. There are many free classes and low priced ebooks online that can teach you everything you need to know to redesign your website. There are also many different tutorials that can take you through the process step by step. If you don't have time to learn as you go, you may also want to consider hiring a reasonable priced professional who can perform website maintenance and get the job done for you.

Budget Web Design Tip 5
Track Your Results
After you have completed the website maintenance and implemented a few changes, you will want to track the results of your efforts. Check the logs on your website to determine whether or not you had an increase in visitors or sales. If there are no changes after several months, you may want to consider stepping up your efforts. Run back through the list of budget web design tips. Was there anything you missed? Was there anything that you could do better? If so, take the time to do it. Remember, profitable websites aren't started overnight. They take hard work, dedication, and continuing efforts to succeed.

About the Author

Cliff Posey, owner of CRP Marketing, owns and operates http://webbusinesstoolsonline.com. Cliff Posey has also operated several other successful web businesses including Love Song Cards and Radio Career Consultants. The content in this article was developed from his experience in these businesses.

Article Source: Content for Reprint

Freelancing As A Work-At-Home Web Designer

One of the most lucrative venues the Internet has provided is in the field of web design. Today, more and more people and businesses need skilled freelancers who can create and maintain their websites and this is where web designers come in.

With the continuous roll out of broadband services in various parts of the globe, it is not surprising many businesses want to establish a corporate website. After realizing how the Internet can help their business, many company owners want to establish their own web sites to boost their marketing strategies.

Aside from jumping into the bandwagon of modern technology, having a website also gives companies a powerful online presence.

Becoming a Web Designer

Undeniably, the market is growing for freelance web designing today. If you are a web designer and you are considering freelance work, then it is now time to narrow down your options. The market for web designing continues to grow as long as there are companies who need web designers in creating a front for traditional businesses or services.

Aside from having businesses as potential clients, freelance web designers can also rely on the billions of existing web pages on the Internet because these sites will need to be designed, built and maintained later on. If you're planning to do freelance web designing, then you should gain knowledge and experience to become one.

The first thing you need to consider is getting educated about the field. Today, there are many colleges and universities that offer multimedia courses and degrees. By enrolling in one of these educational institutions, you can learn different disciplines to become an expert in the field of freelance web designing.

Secondly, you need to reassesses your skills to become a successful freelance web designer. To become a competent web designer, you should be able to complete a web site on your own. By doing this, you will have the knowledge in designing the layout of your client’s site while designing the elements that involve the use of Photoshop and Illustrator (Adobe) or Fireworks and Freehand (Macromedia).

Also, to become a successful freelance web designer, you need to understand aspects such as: design and image optimization to give good download; making the site easy to use; making it more search engine friendly; and most importantly, making it cross browser compliant. You will also need to have a good knowledge of HTML code as well as how to use an HTML editor to create a web page.

An excellent resource to learn about launching a freelance career is Andy Anderson’s book or audio book, “How to Make Money from Home as a Freelancer,” published by http://www.PaydayPublishing.com

If you'ret new in the industry of freelance web designing, you might be using Microsoft Front Page; but most freelancers say that newbies should veer away from using it because it has a lot of proprietary codes that are oftentimes non-cross browser compliant.

Macromedia 's Dreamweaver is the best option to create a site because it will save you time and energy when compared to hand coding. Aside from that, it is also important for you to understand the HTML behind the design.

Aside from Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop with Imageready, both Illustrator, and Flash can also help you create better web sites.

Freelancing as a Web Designer

In the movie Star Trek, space is considered to be the final frontier. Since ordinary civilians are not yet able to complete the voyage to seek new worlds, the best thing anyone can do is reach out to people in different states and countries by communicating in cyberspace.

The Internet has become valuable for a lot of people. Not only can someone send an email or do research, this can also be used to transact business. This is better known as electronic commerce and the only way to do this is by creating a website.

The website should feature the products or services that the entrepreneur is offering. Those who want to sell NBA apparel should offer the merchandise so that customers can check it out. Those who like it can place an order and the only thing to do is pack it and send this to the recipient.

Not everyone is a computer expert or has the slightest inkling of how to make a website. Fortunately, the entrepreneur can get help from a freelance web designer who can put everything up and make it happen.

Illustrating or graphic designing is one of the industries where freelancing is abundant. Because the job can be arranged in a per project basis, more and more potential clients prefer to hire freelance illustrators or graphic designers because they don’t have to pay the artists just like the regular employees.

If you are in the field of illustration or graphic designing and you would want to accept freelance jobs or projects, then you should start building, promoting and marketing yourself. According to most freelance illustrators and graphic designers who are into the field of freelancing, a freelance graphic designer should be possess a dedicated passion for a demanding job and clients as well.

If you are a full time web designer and you are planning to go freelance, here 's a set of considerations you might want to contemplate on before indulging into an adventurous yet demanding job.

1. Determine and set your goals. Just like in any job, becoming a freelance web designer will require you to set and determine your goals before finally jumping over a new set up. Since becoming a freelance web designer will eat much of your time especially if you're just starting, you need to contemplate if you should drop your day time job and if you can handle meticulous and demanding clients at hand.

Part of determining and setting your goals is asking yourself what you are getting out of the career shift and what made you decide to do this.

2. Assess yourself. Going freelance means you need experience, discipline, knowledge, and expertise in the field you are in. If you think you have these traits, then you should also assess if you have the drive and ambition to turn your skill into a success.

Also, you have to ask yourself if you have the willingness and the patience to start a new career. It is important that you have the talent, drive, and motivation to generate more income from your potential clients.

3. Check your business acumen. Knowing different business routes and knowing how to run a business will definitely help you become a successful freelance web designer.

4. Gauge your capability to decide. Decision-making is a very important aspect in freelancing. If you are really planning to freelance, then you should have the heart and the mind to decide. Since you'll be making a lot of decisions eventually, you should start learning to decide wisely.

5. Check your overall attitude towards shifting to a new working environment. Before finally jumping into freelancing, you should ask yourself how to handle stress, possible rejection, and competition.

About the Author

Launch a freelance career today! Download Melissa 's free e-book, Creative Freelancing, at www.WritingCareer.com or visit her blog at creativefreelancing.blogspot.com/

Article Source: Content for Reprint

Web Design Creation Options

Do you want to make money through the Internet but you don't have enough experience or capital to start your own online business? You don't have to worry, for a lot of online marketing options exist for you to start with. One of these options, and shall I say the best, is affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing provides first time online marketers like you the chance to market something online even without having your own product to sell. All you have to do is to sign up with an affiliate marketing program, which is usually owned by an online merchant or retailer, and start picking the products you want to promote. As an affiliate, you are paid by the merchant for your services on a commission basis, that is whenever you have directed a visitor to the merchant 's site and the visitor actually buys something.

Becoming an affiliate in an affiliate marketing program is often quick and easy, and for most affiliate programs, signing up is also free. But despite these and all the benefits being promised by affiliate programs, many people are still hesitant to get into affiliate marketing. One of the reasons why a lot of people remain hesitant is the lack of a website to start marketing his affiliate products with. This now leads us to the question of whether a website is required or necessary in affiliate marketing or not.

Many people say that one can do affiliate marketing even without a website to start with. Actually, one can really start promoting and marketing his affiliate products even without a website; and there exist a lot of ways on how this can be done. In fact, many affiliate marketing strategies that leads to success can exist without actually needing a website. Among these strategies are email marketing, offline promotions, writing e-books, writing ezines and engaging in online discussions like forums, chats, message boards and others.

Email Marketing

Email marketing, or maintaining email lists, is actually the most popular affiliate marketing strategy that doesn't require the affiliate to maintain a website. In this affiliate marketing strategy, what you basically do is maintain a list of the email ads of your prospective customers and provide them with articles that are relevant with the affiliate products and programs you are promoting. Articles that you provide your contacts with need not always be promotional, for many individuals find such types of email annoying. Rather, it would be better if you provide them with something informative and just add small text ads that link to your merchant 's site.

Offline Promotion

There are many ways on how you can promote your affiliate products offline. Among the common medium used for such promotions are classified ads, brochures and flyers. Classified ads would generally work better compared to the other two because classified ads in periodicals often get a wider audience.

Writing Free e-books

If you have a knack in writing, writing an e-book can be the best way for you to promote your affiliate products in the absence of an actual website. Just like in emails and newsletters, your readers would better appreciate your e-book if it is not too promotional but rather informative. Be sure, however, to make the contents of your e-books relative to the actual affiliate products you are promoting. And just like in email marketing, you can just place text ads or banners somewhere near the end of your e-book that links to the merchant 's site.

Writing Free Ezines

Ezines are publications or articles that aim to inform individuals about a particular topic. If you don't have a website and yet want to be an affiliate, you can well use ezines to promote your affiliate products or to insert links to your merchant 's site. If you have a website, your ezine article may actually work well as content for your site. But since you have no website, you can just submit your free ezine articles to various websites that hosts ezines, like goarticles.com, ezinearticles.com and others.

Online discussions (Forums, Chats, Message Boards, etc.)

With or without a website, you just can't ignore online discussions because they are great venues for marketing your affiliate products. In chats, forums, message boards and discussion boards with topics related to your products, you can easily find people who may be interested with the products you are promoting.

With all these strategies, it may appear that one really doesn't need to have a website to start marketing his affiliate products and promoting his affiliate programs. Well, starting in an affiliate program without a website may be easy, but getting successful in affiliate marketing without a website is another thing. While one can actually gain enormous success in affiliate marketing even without a website, it is a rare instance that "newbies" like you can reach the same levels of success.

Having a website is not really a pre-requisite in entering into an affiliate program, unless otherwise the program owner would require you to have one. But while this is so, I would still recommend that you have for yourself a website, if not now, then maybe at a later time. Having a website creates a lot of advantages in affiliate marketing. For one, it provides you a place where you can creatively promote not only one of your affiliate products but all of your affiliate products. With a website, you can also advertise your affiliate products to a wider market.

Again, having a website is not a requirement in affiliate marketing. But with the advantages that a website can provide, I'd rather have one for myself and make affiliate marketing a lot easier for me.

As a web designer, you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience. It doesn't matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world -- if your website is poorly done you won't be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.

When I'm talking about a "good design", I'm not only talking about a good graphical design. A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components which contribute to a good website design -- accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design.

Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I've come across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it 's high time to take serious action!

1) Background music

Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and everytime a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I'd just turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, they just add to the visitors burden when viewing your site -- users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed.

2) Extra large/small text size

As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics -- user accessibility is one big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it 's illegible you won't be selling anything!

3) Popup windows

Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just close them on instinct everytime each one manages to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and, well, pops up on my screen. Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor 's screen. Your website loses its function immediately!

In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it 's meant to do effectively. Don't let some minor mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally!

About the Author

Written by DIY Conservatories

Article Source: Content for Reprint

Web Content Strategy 101

Your content is what gets you in search engines, speaks to visitors, and ultimately decides the success or failure of your site. Meanwhile, your content has to be updated at least once a month if you want to get return visitors and search engine traffic. You need to have a web content strategy for your site to succeed.

Web Content Strategy Components

There are four basic ways you can get content for your site.

Free-reprint content that you can publish on your site in exchange for putting a link to the authors' site under the article. The main benefit of this kind of content is that you can build up your site quickly.
Original content contributed freely by your visitors, such as message boards and guestbook-style comments. The main advantage of this content is that it costs nothing and gives you insight into your visitors. The disadvantages are low quality and the constant vigilance needed to police it for misbehavior.
Original written content that you allow other sites to republish in exchange for a link to your site. This content is usually informational articles, whitepapers, and sometimes, press releases. Exchanging content is an essential component of getting links to your site.
Original written content that 's exclusive to your site. You should have some content that you hold back from republication, to avoid giving visitors or search engines the idea all your content can be had somewhere else. This can include FAQs, "about us" pages, case studies, testimonials, and other content that other sites would not want to reprint anyway.

What Kind of Content to Use

So, which of the four kinds of content should you use on your site? Ideally, all four. That way you'll maximize the amount of quality content your site can have.

Just be careful not to rely too heavily on free-reprint content. If most of what 's on your site isn't original to you, you'll suffer in credibility, both with your visitors and the search engines.

Here 's a good starter content strategy:


One-quarter free-reprint content.
One-quarter content contributed by visitors.
One-quarter originally written content you let other sites reprint in exchange for a link to your site.
One-quarter originally written content you do not redistribute.

Scheduling Content Updates

Search engines, especially Google, seem to give pride of place to sites that regularly update their content. Regular content updates also give visitors a reason to return.

In short, if you have thirty web pages worth of content this month, it 's better to post one page each day rather than put them up all at once. To make sure you do this, schedule an hour each day for updating your site 's content.

One way to get regular content updates for your site is to start a blog, a "web log" in which you write your thoughts and post news. The one disadvantage is that many web users are getting tired of blogs, which are often not well written and contain more opinion than information. Search engines, too, seem to be featuring blogs in their results less often.

Identifying a Content Provider

Ever wonder how Bill Gates keeps the MSN and Microsoft sites so content-rich? Doesn't he get RSI from writing a thousand or more pages a day?

You guessed it: Bill Gates does not write the content for any of the Microsoft websites. Nor should you write all your own content. All successful website owners have someone else write a large part of their content. This person or company is called a "web content provider."

Your web content provider has to be a person or company with proven experience writing content for the web, rather than just print content. Ask to see writing samples. You might even ask if you can commission just a single page to start with, for evaluation purposes.

In short, your web content is too important to leave to chance. Make sure you have a strategy for getting the best content. Contact a content provider to develop a web content strategy today.

About the Author

About the author: Joel Walsh, a professional content writer and founder of UpMarket Content, recommends you check out their site to learn more about what you can get from a web site content provider:http://upm arketcontent.com/website-content

Visit media43.comfor more information.

Article Source: Content for Reprint

3 Proven Free Methods to Increase Your Website Traffic

Internet Business is dead without website traffic. It is true that traffic is lifeblood of any internet business. A good business plan, with hot product and with good looking website is not going to make any profit online if there is not a steady stream of traffic to the website.

Internet history has proved that ugly websites with huge traffic are most profit full websites online. So I warn you that do not waste time, energy and money on just web design. I have seen new business owners, spending big bucks, and several months just creating good looking website and when it comes to the traffic generation they are already exhausted and they have no more budget to spend.

If you have budget for advertising, a website with great copy which has good conversion rate, and you have also hot product then pay per click traffic is best way to go. It is fast, proven and bring targeted traffic which means more sales. It costs money but with a great copy and product this method will make you rich online fast.

Now we come to proven free traffic methods, when you are short at budget, or you want to benefit from free traffic streams online, following are three proven ways to increase website traffic without spending a dime.

1. Search engine traffic with simple SEO strategy

Search engine optimization seems difficult and hard game to get free traffic from search engines. But I tell you from my own experience that it is not that hard. It is doable and I have done this for my and my clients' sites again and again.

Yes It takes some time and some effort from your part. You have to know what you are doing, and you have to be consistent with your SEO strategies.

There are three top search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN. When you will start SEO, Google will not even notice you so do not be discouraged, but MSN will start sending you traffic within some days. Then if you keep applying your SEO strategies, Google will start ranking your site higher and higher. As I said already that you have to be persistent to get real free traffic from search engines.

2. Write articles and submit to the article directories

This is another proven free traffic method. You build incoming links for your website, you build your brand, and you get direct traffic from Article Directories, from the Publishers who publish your articles and also search engines rank your site higher due to more quality incoming links for your website.

3. Related forums and communities

Online forums and discussion communities are free to join. It is best method to attract the targeted traffic to your website and present your product to the users who are already interested in the topic.

You just have to locate the related forums which cater your target market, register there, and take part in the forum discussions, be the expert, do not spam, just be very helpful to the community, and they will start looking for your products, and will actually buy from you. It is time tested and proven way to get more free traffic and more sales.

So you learned three free traffic methods in this article, SEO, article marketing and forum marketing, I suggest you implement these traffic tactics in your traffic strategies marketing plan.

For example you can plan that you will write at least one article per day. You will post in the forums everyday, and you will check and improve your search engines positions every day, or twice a week.

After all it is action from your part which will make difference. Otherwise everyone knows that how to get free traffic, but they will not get a single visitor if they do not apply the knowledge they have about traffic tactics.

Take action today, do not delay for another day, you will loose traffic that is more lost sales and profits.

About the Author

Mohsin Rasool is a Free Instant Traffic Expert, You can grab Free Instant traffic Reports here | Also visit Internet Business resources.

Article Source: Content for Reprint

5 Tips To Great Web Design

If you're building your very own website it will really serve you in the long run to pay special attention to website design from the outset. Sure you can go back and fix things at a later date, but a lot of damage can already have been done to your online credibility by that point - and that credibility may take a very long time to build back up again, so why take the risk?

Here are five do 's and don'ts to ensure that any Website you design lives up to a basic level of good usability from a visitor 's perspective.

1) Splash pages are not a good idea

What 's a splash page? It 's the first page you see when you arrive at a Website. The specific ones that are bad are those that say something like 'Welcome!' and then have you waiting for several minutes while some audio or video presentation loads - not a good idea. Remember, your Website visitors will typically have a very short attention span.

Your site is competing with millions of others and making your visitors wait around will only make them want to hit the back button in their browser and go visit somewhere else. The first page, the 'Home' page, of your Website should be a genuine content page with a fast load time, i.e. not excessive in the graphic department, where all of the other pages and sections of your site are easily accessible from.

2) Don't overdo it with the banner adverts

Excessive use of banner adverts will tend to give your Web pages a slow load time and, particularly if they flash and pulse in a kaleidoscope of color, will irritate and annoy your visitors rather more than they'll entertain them. But they'll make you money, I hear you say? Will they? Most experienced Webmasters will tell you that the days of successful banner advertising are pretty much in the past.

Most Web surfers these days have learned that banners are advertising and obvious advertising tends to get tuned out. You can get away with one or two banners per page that look in context with the general look and feel of your Web pages but overdoing it will only make you look like an amateur. Banner farms are so old hat and don't impress anyone these days, if they ever did.

3) Make your site 's navigation menu simple and easy to understand

How many Websites have you found that left you completely bewildered when it came to finding your way around and locating the information that they appeared to promise and that you were looking for? Probably more than you care to remember, sadly. And how many of them did you choose to revisit after having been bamboozled first time around? Not many, right? Well, learn from your own experience here and make sure that you put a lot of time and effort into planning your site 's navigation menu so that it is logical and easy to understand. It 's a good idea to test it on a few friends to see if they can find what they're looking for without any help from you. If they can't, it 's back to the drawing board.

4) Choose your Website color schemes wisely

If you give your visitors a headache when they're at your site they'll a) leave quickly and b) not come back. One of the best ways to achieve those two undesirable effects is to choose some sort of garish color scheme that even your Website 's Mother would not be able to love. Pay particular attention in this regard to text. Make sure that your text is of a size that makes it comfortably readable and that it stands out clearly from its background. This is best ensured by sticking with normal black text on a white background.

5) Get rid of that annoying muzak

You don't have cheesy 'tunes' playing in the background on your Website do you? If you do, please get rid of them. It really won't do you any favors, you'll just come across as a complete amateur who really doesn't care about annoying their visitors, and if you want a successful Website, that 's not something you should be going out of your way to do. That 's not to say that audio and, indeed, video don't have a place on a successful Website.

With the ever-increasing use of broadband Internet connections it is perfectly possible to integrate informative and entertaining audio and video presentations into Web pages that might even be more acceptable to your target audience than plain old text on its own. Just make sure that the audio and video you provide can be turned on and off by your Website visitor and has easily-adjustable volume.

It 's really very tempting to just jump right in and start building your Website without much planning but it really is more sensible to spend a reasonable amount of time working things out on paper first. Doing this will almost certainly save you time in the long run by minimizing the number of mistakes you'll have to correct that jumping in with both feet without thinking will inevitable lead to.

About the Author

Kevin Sinclair is the publisher and editor of Be Successful News, a site that provides information and articles on how to succeed in your own home or small business.

Article Source: Content for Reprint

Good Web Page Designs - The Right Colors Equals More Cash

I wonder if you knew that visitors to your website form an instant opinion? And they form it about you and your offer. They can't help themselves. Their instant opinion is formed in their subconscious mind. It happens automatically. Your site visitors can't help themselves. It has absolutely nothing to do with the text on your website. In fact, their instant opinion is formed before the visitor will have read a single word of your copy.

The quality of the images on your web page won't make any difference. Their quality doesn't affect in this instant opinion. You might think if you make an unrepeatable offer, that your visitor is bound to be swayed by that! I'm sorry, the instant opinion clicks in, and your brilliant offer lies unseen. This is because the second your page is displayed your subconscious mind goes to work, and the instant opinion begins to form. By now, you are probably wondering just what it is that has this power. Exactly what can have an immediate reaction in your site visitors. This may surprise you, but the answer is colors. Your visitor 's instant opinion of your website is primarily due to the color scheme which you have used.

The spooky thing about this is that as a web page viewer we can do nothing about this. Colors evoke an intuitive reaction which we have no control over.' There isn't anything we can do about this. Colors has an affect on each of us. As you will know, millions are spent by big companies in deciding the correct colors of new products and in their marketing campaigns. What they fully understand is the psychological power of colors. And they use this to the maximum in their promotions. The right colors can be the critical factor in the success of big company products. What this leads us on to that colors have a key element to play in the design of web pages. Colors on a computer screen also invoke this subconscious reaction in us all.

By the psychological power you could encourage your website visitors to leave your page the instant they see it. No matter what your website is about, it may simply be unsuccessful due to the colors you're using. Forget the text, it might never be read! But all is not lost. In the same way that colors can be a turn off, it is possible to create a positive feeling through the use of colors. This color psychology is nothing new. This has been with us for generations. It doesn't make any difference whether you know about color power, your subconscious mind is affected.

For example, a particular color scheme could convey a good feeling in each of us. However, a different color scheme might convey not so good feelings. If you do this, then you will be conveying a trust, sense of belonging and warmth. If you get your colors wrong, you could be conveying negative feelings like distrust, rejection and coolness. The following list gives an idea of the emotions associated with their respective colors:

RED
Strength, danger, leadership, love, excitement, sense of power, energy etc

ORANGE
Confidence, cheerfulness, steadfastness, courage, comfort, friendliness, playfulness etc

YELLOW
curiosity, caution, intelligence, amusement, brightness, organization, joy etc

GREEN
Life, healing, harmony, food, money, nature, health etc

BLUE
Love, patience, trustworthiness, acceptance, peace, stability, tranquility etc

PURPLE
Independence, ambition, dignity, wisdom, royalty, luxury, nobility etc

BROWN
Reliability, primitive, comfort, tribal, earthiness, nature, durability etc

BLACK
Wealth, dramatic, power, style, elegance, formality, sophistication etc

WHITE
Purity, goodness, easy, cleanliness, fresh, innocence, simplicity etc

In summary, the color scheme you use on your web pages need to be reflected by the product or offering you make. What happens is that the subconscious mind of your visitor will attempt to reconcile the colors with the message. If it can't, it will lose interest. And you may never see them again. It is important therefore that your website uses the right color scheme. If you can achieve this, you will produce better results from your website. In summary, the difference between the right and wrong color scheme on your website can be the difference between profit and loss.

About the Author

Brian McGregor is an internet entrepreneur and business consultant, and author of the ebook CASH COLORS. If the topic of good web page designs is of interest to you, CASH COLORS shows how to make your web page colors work for you, as opposed to against you. http://www.cash-colors.com

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How To Create a Profitable Website

For most people, the main reason for creating a website is to make money. Before you can begin generating the profits you are looking for, your website must contain certain elements. An ideal website consists of many different factors and elements that all come together to appeal to your visitors, create a need, and ultimately produce the revenue you are looking for. This article will provide with you some of the necessary elements that every website must have to generate appeal, need, and revenue.

Design

Your website should scream professionalism to your visitors. No one is going to be interested in a poorly designed site or what it has to offer. At the same time, your visitors will likely not be interested in a flashy or busy website. You have to find the middle ground. Your website should be clean, easy to understand, and formatted in a non-confusing way. Avoid clutter, use professional colors, avoid bright colors, and put everything in a way that is easy to find.

Navigation

Just as with the design, your visitors want a navigation system that allows them to find just what they want, when they want it. Make sure you have clear avenues to and from all your pages. You do not want your visitors getting two to three clicks into your website and have no idea how to get back to the home page. You also do not want your visitors to go through a massive amount of clicks to find what they are looking for, you will lose their business instantly. When creating the navigation system, keep clear, clean, and easy in mind.

Merchant Account

Without a merchant account, you will be hard pressed to make any sales or profit. You should obtain and implement a merchant account into your website to process payments. A merchant account allows you to accept credit card and debit card payments, processing them accordingly. You can find a host of merchant accounts, but on the internet the best payment method to date is PayPal or a like company.

Forms of Revenue

How can you expect profits without something to offer? Simply put, you can't. Therefore, your website must contain products and affiliate links to help generate money. These are essential to making profits. Make sure you have affiliate links and products that appeal to your targeted audience.

If your targeted audience are pet owners, you will want to implement pet products such as toys, cages, or food into your website. If affiliate links are more your style, make sure the affiliate links are with merchants that provide something pet related. It is necessary to appeal to your target audience.

Know your target audience

This goes along with the above requirement. It is essential that you understand who you are trying to appeal to. Ask yourself what customers do you want? What do they need? How can you provide them with what they need? Some things to consider are do you cater to:

A specific gender?
A specific age group?
A specific group of people?
Specific circumstances?

These are all very identifying points in understanding your target audience. This will help you when it comes to identifying which products, affiliate links, and later what content you should be implementing into your website.

Content

Content is of the utmost importance, probably second to knowing your target audience. You must have well-written and well-researched content on your website. You must again create appeal and need before you can create a profit.

Your content should be specific to your target audience. In the example of pet owners, you might include content about raising a pet, feeding a pet, housing a pet, new pet owners, breeding, and other such topics. Essentially, you have to instill the feeling of trust and expertise in your visitors. You have to show them your expertise in the field and let them know you know what you are talking about.

Auto-Responder

An auto-responder is an excellent method of contacting your customers. The auto-responder will allow you to automatically contact your visitors, customers, and potential customers at specified intervals that you have designated. For instance, you could greet and welcome the customer on the first contact, then several days later, send another pre-written auto-responder message to remind them, and so on. Keeping in contact is a necessary element to creating a profit. Without reminding them of who you are and why they need you, they may simply forget you even exist.

Contact Form

The last but extremely necessary element in creating a profitable website is implementing some sort of form. This form will be your way of obtaining the contact information and email address of customers and potential customers. This is essential in order to even implement the auto-responder in the previous tip.

In various places on your website, you will want some sort of form even if it is just asking for their first name and email address to build your list of prospects. This is important to making most sales. It is a proven fact that many customers do not make a purchase on their very first visit to your website. No, in fact it will not be the second or third. In most cases, it is not until the sixth or seventh contact that they will make a purchase from you.

All of the above tips are requirements that you must consider in order to have financial success with your website. Just remember to create appeal, create need, and it will result in profits.

About the Author

Omar Johnson is author of the homestudy course "How to Make Money On the Internet While You are Asleep" for more information visit Make
Profits Easy

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Common Website Design Errors

With so many new websites going online every day it is no wonder many of them never succeed. We all hear about the new site that has only been online less than a year and has millions of visitors each month. Why do some sites do so well and others flop? There are many reasons for this and these are just some of the more obvious and often overlooked ones.

The landing page takes too long to load.
Many website designers and marketers believe everyone has a high-speed connection, which is not the case. Even with a fast connection many pages will take up to 30 seconds to load, which is just too long. Unless someone really wants what you have, and can not get it anywhere else, they will not wait; and forget about the person on dial-up. Unless yours is a hobby site, or sales are not important to you, forget about Flash and large fancy graphics.

Site is not finished.
This may not seem like a big issue except that people who go looking for something do not want to see an under-construction animation where the information should be. You just wasted their time and probably annoyed them also - not a good start. Do not advertise or promote something you do not have unless you are doing a product pre-launch, and never lead your visitor down a road to an empty page. Its one thing to upload an unfinished site for testing, however, do not promote it.

Bad navigation.
If you have ever gone to a site and got lost, then you know what I mean. You click on a link and another to the point you give up looking for the information or product and just do a re-search for another site. This type of marketing may work in an offline store but it has no place online. Offline you could keep a customer in your store by creating a maze and therefore introducing them to more of your products. Online this does not work as the exit is never more than a click away, and do not forget it. Make your site easy to navigate and have links, at least to the home page, on every page. Never try to trap your visitor.

No contact information.
While I am not saying you should give out your address and home phone number, you must at least have an email link on your site. Many sites do not have an email and use a contact form instead. These forms are usually to hide their identity and your visitors will pick up on that. Remember, people hide their identity for a reason. The more open you are with people, the more open they will be with you.

Old content.
If you want to get repeat visitors, you need new content; it is just that simple. Many sites never change and rely on new visitors and customers. This is the hard way to do business, as a repeat customer is much easier to sell to.

Broken Links.
It is a good idea to manually check your links as often as possible. Take a run through your site on a regular basis and mainly check links heading off your site. If someone else changed their site and you are linking to them as an affiliate, for example, your link may get disabled. You internal links should not cause many problems, but it never hurts to check.

If you are expecting to get a full time income from your site expect to put some work into it. The, build it and forget about it, idea only works for hobbyists etc.. Most people making a full-time income online work at it full-time, no matter what they would have you believe.

About the Author

Ted Curry is part of the marketing and design team at MEC Marketing, specializing in online marketing geared towards established businesses and those just starting out. Visit the MEC team at http://www.mec-marketing.com and get your online business rolling.

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Why SEO Sitemaps Give Websites a Financial Boost

A lot of web pages will find an SEO sitemap useful in improving their performance. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, the process that aims to create or revise Internet sites so that it can be better found by search engines. The objective of SEO campaigns is to have websites appear in the top listing or first results page of search engines.

Internet search engines, such as Google and A9, maintain a very large database of Web pages and available files. To do this, they devise a program called a web crawler, or spider. This software automatically and continuously surfs and hunts content in the Web. Pages that the spider finds are retrieved and indexed according to text content, giving more weight to titles and paragraph headers.

Spiders never stop navigating the web from page to page, to index the relevant content of the Internet. Besides looking at the text of titles and headers, some programs are able to identify default tags and keep a library of these page keywords or key phrases in the index.

When a user connects to the Internet types a query, which is automatically interpreted as keywords, the search engine scans the saved index and creates a list of web pages that is most appropriate to what the user is searching for.

SEO will use all the combined techniques of keyword analysis, smart code, good content literature, link popularity study and website organization to place the subject web page as high as possible in the list of search results in search engines. Web pages displayed on the top of results pages are assumed to get the most attention, and therefore, opportunity for earnings for web businesses and pages with sponsor links.

Search engines usually return a list of results ranking pages according to the number of Internet sites linked to them. Results can be classified as organic, or sponsored links. Sponsored links are shown prominently because their creators or agents paid the search engine. Sponsored links are the main source of income of search engines. Organic search results are the lists of actual results from the engines index and are directly related to the keyword typed in the request.

One of the more effective techniques of SEO is the creation of a well-organized site map in a website. Since the site 's main page and other content are directly linked to a site map, spiders can more easily move through the website, identify the key words of the content, and index these for a search engine. This is where the SEO sitemap helps the website creator or administrator.

Site maps are usually pages filled with links. These are shown as tables or lists, although lists are generally more effective. Writing code for SEO sitemaps is very easy and simple to format and maintain. These are ideally basic HTML pages with default tags, logical titles and keywords scattered in the Meta description. Introduction areas can contain more of the keywords. The site should have a main heading for every directory.

A simple list layout helps reduce unnecessary tags that might hide your keywords. Some spiders give more weight to the following, than text in the normal body of the webpage: heading text, content within link elements, text nearer the top of the page and the text written for a link. Therefore, writing the keywords and links in these areas could somehow move up the web page 's ranking. This goes for SEO sitemaps as well.

Web sites should be designed consistently, so navigation models should follow the flow of the site map. Therefore, the first section in the site map should be the first link in the navigation bar.

In an SEO Sitemap, and most pages, the headings contain title attributes where more key phrases in the site map can be added. Keywords are generally well chosen and written in the body of a webpage. However, in an SEO site map with little text, key words should be added as much as possible. As much as possible, web links should follow web page titles, and must undergo SEO during coding. Care must be exercised not to cram the page with keywords and links, or the page will be interpreted as blatant spamming and not receive any traffic at all.

There is no way to guarantee that a website will be shown in the topmost ranking of "organic" search results for an extended period of time. However, smart and responsible SEO sitemap techniques can be used to place the website high up in the search position. Regular monitoring and adjustment of the SEO Sitemap and search results would ensure that a website is kept near the top ranking and receiving lots of web user traffic.

About the Author

Copyright 2007. Give your websites a complete makeover with my powerful website design software and morphing tool. Take a walkthrough video tour and witness first hand for yourself how easy it is to transform your website and maximize your online profits now at http://www.kaleidosite-pro.com

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