Web Business Resource

If you do not know how to design websites yourself but want a new design, consider asking your website users to submit designs.

If you have a lot of users, surely some have very good design skills. You can have them each submit their designs, and then you can choose the best one as your new design.

You can run it as a contest. You can even save money that it would cost you to buy a design by offering a smaller amount as a prize.

Having a contest is always a great way to attract new users. Contests are a great method of viral marketing. So you can kill two birds with one stone.

What do you think?

I was just looking at the Jacksonville web design page at 352media.com. They have won a few awards and serve some noteworthy clients. Perhaps most importantly, they won 14 Addy Awards in 2006.

They serve people in any region of the country with production offices in various cities throughout the country. They have a team of nearly 50 people, which they can use to meet the custom web development needs of clients. In other words, they can provide specialized service for more than just a few aspects of web development.

They also work with CD and DVD development. So-called “CD business-cards” seem to be gaining in popularity, and 352 Media offers it.

They have a demo reel and a portfolio on their website. I doubt anyone could honestly say that 352 Media does not make good designs.

Web visitors love to interact with websites. One great interactive feature you can add to your website is online voting polls. Easy-poll.com is a website that offers free polls for webmasters.

The best part about easy-poll.com is that they manage everything with the web components they offer. So, for example, you do not need to use any databases or such on your server. They handle and calculate everything on their server.

It’s free, all you have to do is sign up. They offer “yes or no” polls as well as multiple choice polls.

Polls are a very popular feature for websites. Users like to have the chance to easily submit their opinion and then see the results from everyone else.

Graphic design and visual arts play a major role in internet business. I know that many people have an interest in learning how to do graphic design and related arts. If you would go to school in Arizona, you might be interested in the graphic design training programs at Collins College: http://www.collinscollege.edu/

Collins College seems to have three major categories of study related to graphic design. Firstly, they have film, video and visual effects. Secondly, they have IT and interactive media. Thirdly, they have visual arts and design.

Their website itself is honestly one of the most artistic in regards to design that I have seen.

Today I just want to give a quick to all of you online business people and webmasters. The tip is this: Make a quality website.

So many people try to make money online without providing anything. You cannot do that well. You make money by doing business, and that depends on your providing something. In the case of the internet, you need to provide a quality website.

Don’t waste your time or money trying to market a poor quality website. Instead, make a great website first. Make the best website you can. Don’t be lazy, because laziness won’t make you successful. A great website will help by promoting itself, because people will tell their friends, link to you, and such. If you have a bad website, most of time people will just hit the big red X when they come to your website.

What do you think?

by Johnny Barker

An unprofessional looking website can cause serious damage to your brand’s reputation, the quality of visitors and volumes of sales. A few dollars saved in web design could cost you losses in millions! Is compromising on web design really worth it?

Hire an expert team of dedicated web designers that has several years of experience in web designing. In addition ensure your web designer can design a high quality end product which is truly reflective of your brand. Does your web designer use state-of-the-art, innovative technology that truly brings a value-add to your site? Hire a web designer with a difference. Make sure they don’t cut corners when it comes to web design. That means no scratchy images, no cluttered web pages – just a clean, professional looking site that is representative of your brand.

Does your designer offer a first-class service that is designed to suit your unique needs. You can also just ask to customize your existing site to make it harmonious with your business goals. Ask you web designer to help enhance your online presence with search engine optimization services. Is you web designer one of the best in their field – and does it show? Can they provide a portfolio that shows how they have helped numerous clients improve their brand perception and enhance client relationships as well.

Ensure your web developer specialize in creating stunning, engaging web pages, and we also help provide a highly-interactive interface to your clients. This goes a long way in generating more leads and hence more sales for your business. Web sites should always have easy navigability, attractive interfaces and highly optimized content – which attract more traffic. Does your web designer take web design very seriously. After all web designing should only be executed by a thorough professional.

Why not try MyConsulting Melbourne Australia? Our web design services at MyConsulting are truly end-to-end. This means we cater to every spectrum of the web design segment. Right from search engine optimization, to design and layout of the web pages, to even using impressive graphics to add visual appeal – we at MyConsulting can help you with all these functions. That’s one reason we are a web designer Melbourne that provides holistic and comprehensive services.

Find out how we can complement your business to help you stay ahead in the competition.

Johnny Barker is an expert in allocating the right mix of Yellow Pages advertising, Google Adwords and Search engine optimisation for his SME clients in Melbourne Australia. He is a SEO consultant at MyConsulting Internet Marketing. MyConsulting offers services in Search Engine Optimisation, Internet Marketing, Pay Per Click Advertising, & Web Development.

Your web site is a direct reflection of your product and that is why you must have a well designed website that make sales, time after time after time.

Your website is your grocery store; your car lot. You must have an atmosphere that is pleasant to buyers. One that tells that buyer that you are not an amateur, but instead a trained, seasoned professional.

Surf ability:
Take a few minutes a look around at several web pages. What makes them appealing? Were there some that you closed out immediately? Why? Take notes and do your research. Keep in mind that when a person visit your site they have a goal in mind. They are either seeking information or shopping for a product. Give the person what they want without having to search for it. Be sure that all the information on your site is relevant to your product. Make the buyer think that they need your product to solve their problem.

Main Page:
Your main page serves a very specific purpose. It should be an avenue by which the customer can see your site. It should be easy to view. The main page is your first impression and we all know that first impressions can either close the deal or loose the deal. Make it simple. It is best to have links that are easily viewable by the reader and navigate them to where they want to be.

Your main page should load very quickly, chances are if it takes too long to load, you will loose your customer, he/she will click away to save time hoping to find the information or product elsewhere. To increase the loading speed of your main page avoid large graphics or excessive graphics. Too many banners or special effects can cause a page to load slowly as well.

Stick to mild colors. If your site is a content site where the user will be doing a lot of reading, it is best to stick to black and white. Color can be added when using tables, as a way to brighten up the page, but remember to keep the look of the page professional and appealing to the audience that will be visiting most often.

It is a great idea to set the pixels to a standard 800×600. You should also choose to set the tables in your web page to be a percentage of the page rather than a set number or inches. This will be sure to accommodate all screen sizes. Remember that a lot of Internet users will not use the same browsers as you, and therefore you should be sure that your site looks good on other browsers as it does your own. You do this by downloading several browsers to look at your page.

The overall look of your website is a way to make money. If designed properly, your site can be an excellent marketing strategy for your product or service.

About the author: Agatha Reynecke can help YOU start your own profitable business on the Internet. To learn more, get free info of our 2007 TOP Picks, visit: http://www.workingfordreams.com

by Rebecca Beltran

1. Write down a very clear description of the purpose of the website before you begin any work on it.

Most people skip this step because they think it’s obvious, but trust me, it’s important and your main purpose will make a HUGE difference in how it should be coded.

2. Stay objective.

I know it’s tempting to fall madly in love with your new virtual ‘baby’, especially if you built pieces of it yourself. But beware… On that path there be dragons.

I once had a client who built her entire website by herself. She was very proud of her baby, however it was not converting very well and she was getting very few clients from it.

I showed her what needed to be done to fix her conversion problem, but in the end she lost at least $22,000 worth of new business because she was too close to the project.

3. Decide early if it’s important to get free search engine traffic.

If it is important to get free traffic, then your designer/developer needs to know that as early as possible, as it will affect how they code the website.

4. Be prepared to work a bit.

I know, everyone says that building a website is a must and it will really help your business, but the real truth is that you get out of a website exponentially how much you put into it.

If you spend 1 hour getting it up, don’t expect that anyone who calls your number will trust you yet.

5. Do some homework.

In my opinion, most of the unfortunate websites out there are due to the website owner not being educated enough to know what to ask or how to chose the right people to work on the site.

You don’t need to learn HTML or PHP, but spending some time learning to differentiate between different kinds of websites and what is required to make them work will be time well spent.

6. Don’t spend 80% of your time tweaking the design.

Design is important as long as it looks clean, professional and easy to follow, then let it go. Trust your designer’s eye to make everything else work the way it should and go work on the content.

7. Pick a good designer/developer.

Learn what the difference is between a graphics designer, a developer and a programmer (hint: there are multiple answers depending on who you ask).

Would you like to learn more about making your website work for you instead of you working for your website? Sign up for the Rise Above newsletter at http://www.seattle-small-business-website-design.com/newsletter-signup.html and receive a free report on “7 Steps to Finding Your Muse Business Idea”.

by David Strom

I’ve heard lots of woes from people trying to work with their Web site consultants this week. You know the type: they promise that your site is “just about finished” and the pages “just need some tweaking” and yet nothing gets done. I have had to suffer through whiney rants about delays, bad programming decisions, tools that malfunction, missing logins and content wrecks.

Have we reached the point where building a Web site is a lot like building a new freeway? It takes far too many people, time, and dollars, upsets the people who have to live near it, and in the end is obsolete by the time the first people try to use it.

I remember the good ole days of the Web, say 12 years ago, when one person (like me) could build a site in an afternoon, without any really specialized tools or knowledge beyond knowing a few tags and reading a Laura Lemay book.

I am coming to the conclusion that we need to return to those simple days where one person can still build their site, without the heavy lifting of a Web Site Designer and a Web Programming Consultant and an Internet Search Specialist and a Web Marketing Person. (Capital letters deliberately intended to reflect the title’s self-importance.)

At one site, a simple database was taking months to webify. I ended up talking to the site’s graphic designer, who was the only one who had any project management skills and could reign in the wayward development staff. Said staff has trouble configuring something that my high school networking students could do in their sleep. Someone else was complaining to me that their copy of Dreamweaver had started behaving badly, and all I could do was recommend a clean uninstall of every Adobe product on her disk, short of buying a new computer. These are just a couple of the stories I could tell you this week alone.

So in the 15 or so years of the Web we have better tools, but they still suck. Better sites, but they are still annoying with pop-ups and dead-end links and overblown graphic frippery. Better site statistics, but still no insights into who comes where and why they leave our sites. Better traffic, but still a lot of mythology about how the search engines point our way. And speaking of search, why is it that we still can’t do better there on deploying good internal site search algorithms?

There is a simple answer: rebel, resist, and reclaim the Web as your own personal place. Avoid the consultantization of the Web. Fire your designers and programmers.

Start afresh with a blogging tool like Wordpress or Blogger and build your site around that. Or pick up a couple of widgets and components, or use dabbleDB or Pageflakes or stuff from Google or Yahoo. You don’t need a passel of programmers to work this Web.

Since moving over to Wordpress and posting these simultaneously to the blog and my email listserv, I have noticed that I don’t do any site maintenance over on good ole’ strom.com anymore. Why bother? The old archive of prehistoric articles is still there, and maybe even a few of the links still get people to the original places. A few pages are in the top ten category on Google, not through any forethought or planning of my own, and I am grateful for that traffic.

As Thoreau said, simplify. Part of being all Web 2.0 is never having to hear the sorry tales of your programmers that are behind schedule, over budget, and full of excuses why the dog ate their APIs. Forget about them, and build a simple, quick site that can deliver some value the same day you start the project.

David Strom is a noted speaker, author, and consultant. His blog can be found at http://strominator.com/, and he can be reached at david@strom.com.

by Ralph Ramah

We like to be complex in many aspects of our lives. We desire the latest electronic gadget, the most advance technology in our new car, the state-of-the-art digital camera. However, when it comes to web visitors browsing habit, nobody has time for complexity and we all want to find what we want online in the shortest possible time. What does not mean for web design companies? Why do some web design companies still propose complex web design solutions to their clients?

We live in an age where nobody’s got time. We are busy or so we like to think. So much information, so little time. So we zap through web pages expecting to find exactly what we want as quickly as possible. Why not? There are so many web pages out there. The average web surfer spends less than 10 seconds on a web site. If the web design is the least bit complicated or non intuitive, we are off to the next web site. If 10 seconds is all you have to impress your online customer, what sort of web design do you require to make an impact? The most flashy? May be not. Try simplicity and familiarity.

If you want to impress busy people who are short of patience and time, try the simplest web design you can put together. It is not surprising that Google is one of the most successful web designs in the world. How many people use the advanced search button on Google? The simplest web design solutions work. His does not mean that the back end of the web site need to be simple. You can have the most complex content management system; the most comprehensive feature set in your web design, but keeps the front end, the interface as simple and intuitive as you can.

Simple can mean different things to different web designers. Where do we start when putting together a simple and effective web design? Try Google heat map guide on where to place adsense on a web page. Granted it is disputed but it is a starting point for positioning the most relevant and poignant information on your web page. Next try a simple navigation, vertical left or horizontal top.

Many people like fancy stuff. There is nothing wrong with a bit of flash on a web design. However, avoid changing too much from the conventional paths. We all talk of change and recognise its benefits but we are animals of habit and we would rather go along the same easy path rather for hunt for new ways of getting somewhere. This principle applies in web design. Online visitors are used to navigating in a certain way. Change the path on your web design and you could make it too hard for your potential clients.

Keep it simple, keep it short and familiar. True, it does pay to design complex features into a web design. The more gadgets and flash, the more web design companies can charge for your web design. Some web design customers even want complex designs. It’s instinctive to think that the more money you spent on your web design, the more it will pay back. This is not always the case. Sometimes the simplest features, the more basic web design yields the most benefit.

About The Author: Ralph Ramah is the webmaster of Discount Web Design, one of the leading web design company in the UK offering quality web site design and SEO services

by Vishal Sheth

Making a website is not as easy as it looks. It takes a lot of work, determination and confidence to keep going. But once you have done it, it is a great achievement. The first thing you need before you do anything is an idea. You need to decide what your website will be on. For example, a website on the latest gadgets. Once you have this, you should have a structure on how you will set up your site

1. Get a domain name and Web Hosting: You need a domain name and web hosting to set up your site. If you are a beginner, you may be interested in using something like free webs, which a free sub domain and free web hosting. Microsoft office live basics are also offering a free domain name and web hosting. However, if you are serious, you need to be willing to pay a relatively small amount of money. [You can get quality web hosting from Scott Hughes’s AllHost.]
2. Start making your pages: Your website does not need to have hundreds of pages to be successful or good. As long as the content is good, that is all that really matters. You need to have a homepage which is easy to use and hyperlinks to make navigating through the site easily. In addition to having a homepage, a contact us page and a site map is a good idea.

3. Get traffic You need traffic otherwise you will get no visitors. A good place to start is to put your site into website directories. Once you have done this, you should attempt to have your website listed into the major search engines like Google and Yahoo. However don’t accept to get a top ten ranking

4. Improve Traffic You need to get links from other websites to yours. Reciprocal links is a good way to start, where you get a link in return for giving the other website one. Getting one way links is hard to get, unless you pay for them. You could entice the other websites with one way links but it is very hard.

5. Make revenue of your site: You can place ads on your site, and if people click on them, you can get money. Google adsense will give you ads free based on the text on your page. You can get between 10 cents and $1 for each click.

Hopefully this has helped you.

V Sheth: http://www.whatsnownew.com

by Gijo George

Naturally, homepage of a website is the most visited page of any website. This homepage can be compared to the center point of your business. Keeping this in mind, you have to prepare your homepage with utmost care.

The content in a homepage of website is very important in deciding the success of that website. If you have enough content in your website which can attract visitors to your mainstream business, then your website is a success. This page should contain unique content or information regarding the business you are dealing with. Give utmost care in developing content for this particular page. Ensure that the content you are using in homepage can attract people to buy product or services you are offering. Give a critical review on the content you are planning to put in your homepage. In short, the content should be able to give a new visitor an idea about your products or services.

Use a font that is readable and normal. Using fancy fonts will not do any good to your homepage. Use graphics judiciously. Never put more graphics than it is actually required in your homepage. Overdoing graphics in your homepage will actually kill the popularity of your website. The best equation between content and graphics is that graphics should justify the content.

Provide a search box in your homepage, which will make it easier for a new visitor to find your product or services.

To summarize, a simple homepage with quality content and graphics which supports the content will make your website a real promoter of your website.

About the Author: Gijo George says visit www.giftsspace.com for Unique Gifts, and www.woodcurio.com for Traditional Handicrafts.