Web-Design

How To Work With Your Design Team

2005-10-22T23:42:00.000-07:00

By Sherry Holub

As the Creative Director at JV Media Design, I oversee and manage all creative projects and staff. In order to undertake this task, I have developed an outline for our team to follow that facilitates the process which takes each project from concept to completion. Part of this process involves educating each of our clients on what we need from them in order for the project to move forward.

Although some design studios may not be as organized, it would still benefit each client to know in advance what might be expected of them before proceeding with a design job. Successful projects come from not just a talented design team, but also close interaction with the client throughout the process.

Below is a general outline of how you or your company can work with your chosen design team.

Consultation, Planning, and Choosing a Representative

The most important step in many things is the first and that rings true in the design field. Your designer should set up a phone or in-person consultation with you prior to the beginning of your project. Here, you should discuss every detail of your project so that the designer can plan the workflow and milestones. Some designers will also offer you a questionnaire to fill out to help determine this information. It is very important, especially when working on interactive/multimedia and custom programmed (database/ecommerce) websites to have more information than not enough. If you discover that you forgot to mention a key function in your initial consultation it could not only set your project back, but also cost you more money to add it in after you have already signed a design agreement or contract.

After the initial consulting and planning for your project is complete and you have signed a design agreement, the next task is to choose a single representative from your company to interface with the design team throughout the project. This prevents many problems such as conflicting information before they even have a chance to happen. The chosen representative's responsibility is to:

1) Get the design team any content (text, chosen images, etc.)
necessary for the project

2) Respond to any questions or requests from the design team

3) Notify the design team of any changes or modifications necessary
on the project

4) Sign off on any milestones

Content

Content is possibly the most important aspect of your website. It is equally important to make sure that your content represents your company the best possible way. Before giving text content to your designer, you need to check and recheck it for grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors. You may also consider hiring a professional copywriter to produce content for your site. Either way, most design companies do not reread your content checking for and/or correcting errors and will charge an extra fee for this service. Just make sure your content is the best that it can be when you hand it off.

The Design

Most design companies will offer a number of "mock up" or concept designs for your project with a certain amount of revisions. It is important for you to review each design with your associates and make any changes necessary to achieve the final look for your site. Once a final design is approved, if you make additional modifications you may be liable to pay additional charges. Your design team should help you avoid this by working closely with you and making suggestions during the concept phase.

When Problems Arise

It is important to remember that although your design team relies on computers to create your site, they are only human. There are occasions when an instruction may be misinterpreted or not as clear as it should be. It is up to your design team to ask questions when things are not perfectly clear to avoid problems and it is up to you to give as much description and detail in order to complete the project. Phrases such as, "We are looking for something edgy", or "We'll know it when we see it" really do nothing to help the progress of your project.

Additional problems such as delays can usually be avoided by keeping a clear line of communication open at all times. If you have questions during the process, do not hesitate to bring them up. Your design team should be available normal business hours via phone, email, and/or an instant messenger service and be able to solve any problems that arise quickly and professionally. If they cannot, make sure you receive adequate explanation (there may be extenuating circumstance in any case) or refer back to the agreement you signed with the company.

Completing the Project

Your design team should thoroughly check your finished website to make sure that it works on the top internet browsers (Internet Explorer and Firefox) and has no errors in functionality. They should also be available to make any final edits and/or changes before the site is taken live on the web.

When the project is completed to your satisfaction, many design companies will present you with options for maintaining your site such as; "on call" maintenance or a monthly, quarterly, or yearly contract.

In Conclusion

For a successful project it is important for both the client and the design team to work together. It is up to the client to explain the project thoroughly and give the design team a good idea of what is expected and it is up to the design team to keep lines of communication open, ask questions when things may be unclear, and use experience and expertise to do the job.

Sherry is the Creative Director and Senior Designer at Southern California firm, JV Media Design (http://www.jvmediadesign.com).

Making Your Website Attractive, Interesting, Engaging and Interactive

2005-10-22T23:41:00.000-07:00

By Steve Brining

In this article you will learn the importance designing your website around your customers and their needs. A websites form and content is what will determine if a visitor will stay just a visitor or turn into your next customer. Today we will discuss how to accomplish the later.

To succeed at your online business (whether you are selling your own product/service or are selling for other merchants as an affiliate), you need a Web site created just for that - a simple, focused site. One that is easy to build, maintenance-free, low cost, credible, and a powerful traffic-builder and customer-converter.

Having the right tool and the right product alone doesn't insure the success of your website. There are many factors to be considered while designing a site. Unfortunately, most of these are easily ignored by Internet business owners.

Build It for Speed - It's a fact of modern life - people are in a hurry. This means that you have between 10 and 30 seconds to capture your potential customer's attention. To minimize your load time, keep graphics small. Compress them where possible. Use flashy technology (JavaScript, Flash, Streaming Audio/Video, animation) sparingly and only if it is important to your presentation.

Target your Market - Know who your market is and make certain that your site caters to their needs. It is critical that your site reflect the values of your potential customers. Is your market mostly business professionals? If so, the site must be clean and professional. Is your product aimed mostly a teenagers and young adults? Then your site could be more informal and relaxed. The key here is to know your market and build the site to their preferences.

Focus the Site - Make certain your web site is focused on the goal, selling your product or service. A site offering many unrelated products is not necessarily unfocused, but this is often the case. If your business does offer many products, dedicate a unique page for each instead of trying to sell them all from one page.

Credibility Is Crucial - The most professionally designed site won't sell if your customers don't believe in you. A clear privacy statement is one way to build your credibility. Provide a prominent link to your privacy statement from every page on the site as well as from any location that you are asking your visitors for personal information. Provide legitimate contact information on line.

Navigation should be simple - Make site navigation easy and intuitive. Simple and smooth navigation adds to the convenience of the visitors. Add powerful search and catalog features. Many times a lot of visitors do not have the patience to navigate through the whole website to find what they are looking for.

Consistency is the key - Make sure the site is consistent in look, feel and design. Nothing is more jarring and disturbing to a customer than feeling as if they have just gone to another site. Keep colors and themes constant throughout the site.

Make your site interactive and personalized - Make your website interactive. Add feedback forms as well as email forms that allow your prospective customers to ask you any questions they might have pertaining to a product. Personalization of your website is another key element that can lead to customer delight and can increase your sales. Personalization technology provides you the analytic tools to facilitate cross-selling and up-selling when the customer is buying online. It would give you an idea of what products to cross-sell and up-sell. For example, when a person buys a CD player, a disc cleaner can also be offered.

Content is King - Good content sells a product. Ask yourself the following questions. Does your copy convey the message you wish to get across to your visitors? Is it compelling? Does it lead your visitor through the sales process? Have others review, critique and edit your copy to insure it is delivering the intended message. Always double check your spelling and grammar.

These eight, simple rules will go a long way toward the improvement of your website and most importantly, turn visitors into customers.

Warmly,

Steve Brining

Steve Brining owns Lupine Computer: a reseller of computer supplies and accessories (including hardware and software). Receive free newsletter on various business topics. See http://www.mylupine.com for great prices and to sign up for the newsletter.
Steve also has his MBA in E-Business and consults with start up companies formulating effective strategies for growing their businesses. He also has another business with tools and books aimed at making money in marketing (http://www.moneyinmarketing.com).

Design Web Pages for Art's Sake or Data?

2005-10-22T23:40:00.000-07:00

By Ken McKay

Should your home page be a work of art, or should it concentrate on providing useful information?

As shown below, the answer is both. The web page must first have sufficient information for the search engines to index it and show it in the results of a search, but also be sufficiently attractive to encourage the visitor to read more.

Compare web pages with other media:

A brochure is picked up by the reader, or handed to the reader, and therefore a search is no longer necessary. A brochure's cover page may be a work of art with no information, but it already has the reader. The information can be all inside in great or little detail, or the inside can be all pictures. It doesn't matter because it's already in the reader's hand, without any search.
A print advertisement is already in the publication the reader has purchased. Readers are usually unable to avoid seeing them when turning the page.
Television and radio advertisements find all readers who are watching or listening. Readers don't need to search for them.

Satisfy the search:

A web page must first work hard to find a reader by being relevant to a search. This relevance is only achieved by words which the search engine can index, not pictures.

Only the most relevant are seen:

It must be more relevant than possibly ten million other web pages containing the same search words. Who would think to look for that web page on page 99 or page 999999 of the search results. Usually, if the web page is not on the first 2 or 3 search engine pages it won't be seen by the average internet surfer. The effort spent making it a work of art is wasted if nobody sees it.

Look good:

The web page must then encourage futher interest by looking professionally designed. A visitor won't care if your favorite eleven year old nephew sacrificed a lot of time to build it, instead of going outside to play. If your website doesn't look professional these days, you lose the visitor.

Be easy to follow:

But having reached the visitor in front of ten million competiting web pages, with an attractive website containing all the words the visitor searched for, the information on the website must also be clear annd easy to navigate. Visitors want to see at a glance whether you have the answer to their query, whether you have the product they are looking for, with price and delivery. A brochure or print advertisement may have all those, but the visitor can always put the brochure or advertisement down to read later. A web page must engage the visitor there and then, in case they get distracted and do not find their way back.

Conclusion

A web page should be both attractive and information rich in order to do its job, but if it's not found in a search it's a waste of time and money.

Ken McKay is designer of commercial websites in Australia. More information on web design is available at platypus websites - http://www.platywebs.com.au

Ten Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Write Your Website Like Your Company Brochure

2005-10-22T23:39:00.000-07:00

By Pete Wise

Even nowadays, too many companies are essentially cutting up their printed brochures and pasting them online as the prime content for their website. It seems like the cheap and easy option – but actually it’s the very expensive one, and it will cost them countless customers and almost guarantee low search engine rankings. Here are the main reasons why you need to create content for your website from scratch – and not recycle existing print copy.

1. Your brochure is primarily aimed at one audience – customers. Your website is aimed at two – customers and search engines. People read text online quite differently from the way they read printed materials. They scan much more, for one thing.

2. Print copy often contains a lot of puffery phrases like ‘our service is second to none’. ‘Service’ is a stop word with some search engines and will be ignored in a search query. And how many people use phrases like ‘second to none’ in a search?

3. Your brochure is a fixed and rigid entity. You might reprint it every couple of years, but essentially it’s an unchanging unit of 4, 8, 12 or whatever pages. You can do roll-folds, print it on glossy paper or write it upside down in Esperanto if you want, but once it’s done it’s done. Your website can not only change, it should – and frequently.

4. Your website can certainly reflect your brochure. But it also has to act as your sales letter, your shop window, your receptionist, your storeroom, your sales assistant, your despatch department, your PR department, your think-tank, your newsletter, your press ad, your poster, your helpline and...you name it.

5. Does your brochure have one to three keywords per page, repeated an optimum number of times and in the right places? Of course not – one of the main reasons why your website should be treated separately.

6. Is your brochure written in such a way that anyone can pick it up and read any page and without even looking at the front cover, let alone the index, find what they’re looking for? Remember, a visitor can arrive on any page of your website. They should know what you’re about straightaway – and if the page has been optimised well, there’s a good chance visitors will find what they’re looking for at once.

7. Good print copy is clear, concise and broken up into short sentences and paragraphs, with easy to read headlines and subheads. This applies in spades to website copy, which readers scan even more than they would a printed page.

8. A brochure can be put in a briefcase, in-tray or just left on a shelf or table for perusing at leisure. With a website you have only seconds to gain interest and retention.

9. How do your customers obtain their brochures? Are they handed over by a salesperson or distributed at exhibitions? Sent out with a covering letter? Unless the visitor has been personally directed to your website, chances are he or she is viewing it cold, with nothing to back it up. This needs to be taken into consideration when writing it.

10. Need more information? Like to view our other products? Want to contact us? Looking for testimonials? With a website, all these questions can be answered with a single click, and the copy should always be written with that in mind. Remember, you can’t click on a printed brochure.

So never just stick your brochure online and hope - you’ll be disappointed every time. Write your website from scratch. Better still, get a professional like me to write it. I can also handle your brochure writing, if you happen to need a brochure writer. But I promise the content of each will be very different.

* Peter Wise is an advertising copywriter, website copywriter and SEO copywriter based in London, UK. He also writes direct mail, brochures, newsletter articles and press releases. You can reach him at +44 (0) 7767 687524. For further information, please visit http://ideaswise.com http://ideaswise.com

ECommerce Website Design - 12 Quick Tips for Beginning Webmasters

2005-10-22T23:36:00.000-07:00

By Dan B Cauthron

Effective ecommerce web site design is almost an art unto itself, but it can be managed by even the most rank beginner if a few underlying concepts and principles are attended.

Whether starting from scratch with an HTML editing software, or with a ready made free web site template, it's imperative to work toward presenting a good impression on the first visit, especially on the Internet where those first impressions are made in a matter of seconds, and second chances are rare.

Here are a few ecommerce web site design tips that will help to quickly gain a visitor's interest, and keep her browsing for more.

1. Capture the visitors attention immediately with an interesting headline or a thought provoking question. A first time visitor will spend no more than a few seconds in deciding
to browse the web site further or to click away.

2. Ensure that the web site will load quickly into any browser by keeping large graphics, animations, and flash presentations to a minimum. Those features should be used only if they contribute to an overall message, and not for perceived entertainment value.

3. Avoid overbearing color schemes or busy background patterns. What may look great on a living room wall could prove irritating to an online viewer. Background colors for text areas should be limited to white or pale shades, with dark or black common faced font (ie. arial or verdana) for maximum readability.

4. Compose your primary message to focus on the visitor's interests, needs, and desires. Then demonstrate how the web site or product can help to fulfill those. Few visitors will be interested in the web site owner's accomplishments or the business history. If that data is necessary, place it on a separate "about us" page.

5. Inject a conversational style into the text and the message conveyed. In most cases, it's best to avoid dry corporate syntax or technical jargon, unless the web site will cater to visitors who speak those languages. A site that portrays a personality and a casual human element will be much more attractive to repeat visitors.

6. A majority of Internet users are intelligent and educated, so proofread text areas for spelling, punctuation, and grammar. This is an absolute must toward presenting a professional image.

7. An effective ecommerce web site design should be clean and free of clutter. Ample white space surrounding graphics and text areas will make for ease of readability. Paragraphs of text should be limited to five or six lines.

8. Ease of visitor navigation can be accomplished by placing a standardized menu on each page of the web site, containing links to all other pages on the web site. A visitor should be able to navigate among and between separate web pages with a single mouse click.

9. For a large site, break the content into sections and create
separate pages accordingly. Most Internet users do not like to scroll down indeterminately on overly long pages. Manage your individual page length to three screens maximum.

10. Openly display the owner's name or company name, a physical address, plus an email link and at least one other contact method (ie. fax, telephone) in any ecommerce web site design. This will serve to cultivate visitor trust and add credibility to the web site as well as the owner(s).

11. Before publishing the web site to the Internet, validate and check the HTML code for errors by visiting http://htmlvalidator.com or a similar HTML validation site.

12. After publishing, but prior to any promotions, test all web pages for proper resolution in several browsers. A web page that looks great in one browser may not work at all in another. As of this writing, the three most commonly used browsers are
MS Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera.

In the initial stages of web site development, the tips presented here will help to lead any beginning webmaster to an effective and successful ecommerce web site design.

Of course, there is much more to be said about optimizing a web site for search engines, and about the actual mechanics of building the web site. Resources and tutorials toward those
ends are freely available online, and can be accessed with a simple query to any major search engine.

Get No Nonsense Information and Resources for Serious Internet Marketers FREE of Charge at: http://DanBCauthron.com

A Framework for Deciding Website Shape and Content

2005-09-30T00:44:00.000-07:00

By Michael Hart

Information published on the World Wide Web is typically written in ascripting language called HTML (or Hyper Text Markup Language), which consists of text files (ASCII) with special "tags" or codes that look a lot like old-fashioned typesetting code which a web browser knows how to interpret as multimedia pages of information.

[1] The site’s purpose and goals:

To plan new pages, their purpose must be defined; as you plan the revisions or new sections of a Website, remember each webpage should have an objective, but within the constraints of the Website's purpose. Remember KISS (keep it simple, stupid), the mantra by which you should live. This may not always be possible, but should be the benchmark against which to test design and content principles.

[2] Planning the documents:

HTML documents (Web pages) can be either visitor centred or author centred. The former delivers the content or information solely geared to what the visitor wants, and was the original function of the Internet.

Author centred, on the other hand, seeks to impose on the visitor the information the author wants to provide, even if the visitor did not know he.she wanted it - i.e. self marketing.

Any site planning should identify and list the type of information in each category to be provided, so that the shape of the site can be balanced. In general, the lack of such balance can make a site pointless - a wholly author centred site may never be visited, whilst a wholly visitor centred site may be popular but deliver insufficient value to justify its existence.

[3] Organising documents:

Before you start designing HTML documents, make a plan for organising the information you wish to present on the Site.

Information on a Website is organized into HTML documents, known as Web pages. Since it will frequently be the case that you have more information than will reasonably be presented as a single page, you need to decide how to divide information into logical pages and then link those pages together into a sub web site related set of linked HTML documents).

Hierarchical structure:

Where main pages are followed by subpages. There is, effectively, a Home page for each topic, containing its headline points, each of which may link to more detailed information or information of a lesser importance which makes up the second level and so on.

Linear structure:

When a set of related pages are connected in a sequence which restricts the ability to move through the site. When the visitor finishes one page, he can go to the next page, or back one page, but is given no option to jump.

This can be very frustrating, and should be used only where the rigid order is important, as in step by step instructions, (e.g Windows Help File format) or completion of on-line order forms.

If you are trying to attract the casual browser, this format should be avoided in those pages which are intended to catch the interest, or provide a sample of the site, nor should it be used where the site is providing information for reference purposes, e.g contacts, products, database.

In practice most linear arrangements are merely a part of a larger site, and will provide a constant set of links or buttons along the top or side of the page to allow the visitor to escape

Webbed structure:

A webbed structure is one which allows any page on a site to link to any other page, without any logical framework. This can be through use of a common set or extensive buttons or links on each page, or, more sloppily, by hyperlinks within the text itself.

Such structures can be very disorienting for the visitor, and should be used only where relevant. A classic use is in glossary or in indices, where the originating page is properly organised for searching, and clicking on the relevant entry takes you to the relevant page, and there are links within that page to all related subjects.

Mixed structure:

A combination of one or more of the above structures to form a larger one.

Once you are clear about the content the above types of structure must be applied to ut. To determine which structure best suites the content you have decided to provide, draw an organizational chart by hand, of your site, and then link the various parts together to form the flow between them, as shown in the above examples. This should show how the pages are grouped and how they will be linked to one another.

Here are the rules and conventions for names of files:

1) All file names should be no more that 30 characters long.

2) All life names should be written in lowercase (ie not “LIKE THIS” but “like this”.

3) The file extensions for HTML documents must be ether “.html” or “.hmt”.

4) The initial page of a website (the first page that is loaded) must be named ether “index.htm” or “default.htm”.

On most web servers you can designate one standard name that is the "default" web page for that directory and on most systems that name is “index.html”. This first page can have any name but if this is the case, you must type the this name as part of the URL, but if this page is called “index” or “default”, it will be loaded automatically. (This also prevents the directory index from being displayed)

5) If you use a special editor program to create HTML files, you will not see the ".html" extension on the desktop file name, so in that case, you would chnage the file name to index because under the hood, the computer knows that there is a ".html" at the end.

[4] Planning pages:

To develop a plan for the pages, create if one does not exist, a word processing document that contains the following information:

1) Who is your target audience and their background, skills, interest, values and knowledge. Study your target audience. It may help to look at some of your competitors sites to see how they appeal to their target audiences.

2) What are they doing right? What are they doing that needs improvement? List your audience background, their interests, skills, values and knowledge?

3) What is the purpose of the page? To educate, entertain, provide unique help or information to others, or a combination of these. Again, look at other Websites on the Web for ideas.

4) How dynamic is the content of the page, and how often is it going to need to be updated (daily, weekly, twice a month, or monthly)?

This document should also generally describe:
5) The destinations of the hyperlink (URL), images, and other related files to be used for each page.

6) The location and type of standard header, footer, navigation scheme and text files for each page.

7) The colours and background colour, text colour, link colour, and visited link colour.

8) The Website style

[5] Design principles:

The pages your design or substantially modify should achieve the results stated in the respective section of the Website plan. The following section is concerned with design.

When designing a page it is very important to think about what you are trying to achieve with the site, what is it that visitors want from it. You need to consider your audience when designing pages for the Web. Make sure your visitors can navigate the site quickly and easily, and make sure they can find what they want.

In is important to note that you may have to adjust your writing style for the Web, many to get the information across as quickly as possible.

Web usability studies show that Web readers tend to skim over information rather than read it. Mainly use to it being harder to read much on a computer monitor and that the reading speed on a screen is about 25% below reading the same material on paper. Before designing pages, consider the following design principles:

1) A page should be useful.

2) All the elements of a page should have a purpose.

3) Avoid the use of multimedia (background sound, Quick time movies) unless there is a very good reason.

4) Technologies should integrate seamlessly into the existing Website structure.

5) A page should operate quickly, each page should download within 15 seconds.

6) A page should be structured to allow visitors to navigate with ease.

7) Graphics should be kept to a minimum to allow fast loading of your web pages.

8) Use standard headers and footers for each page.

9) Notwithstanding the long term aims of the Website or subsections of it, make sure anything that goes against ease of use and speed does so for a reason.

10) Use the same background colour throughout your site. (White is most common color)

11) Use the same colour for your text throughout your site. . (Black is most common color).

12) When linking to large files, always give an indication of the file size and if possible the time to download on various modems.

13) User help should be provided when elements are used in a nonstandard manner.

14) Use a common font size and colour for specialised text segments.

15) Establish site wide consistency rules and standards to be followed from the user-interface design viewpoint.

[6] Web design hints and tips:

When placing information on the Website or adding additional web pages, consider the following:

Content of document:

People return to a Website because the site is constantly updated with new and relevant information, not to see flashy graphics, or amazing active pages.

When putting anything on a document, including multimedia, the most important considerations should be the need, relevance and the context. Why is it needed? Why is it needed here? Will the users have appropriate tools to view it.

Advanced technology:

Use of any technology should serve a purpose. The approach should be use of a technology and not the other way round. When addressing the use of nonstandard technology consider:

[a] Where is a certain technology applicable, and why?

[b] Does it help solve any existing problems?

[c] Does it offer any specific advantages?

Except for the purposes of marketing and promotion, functionality (ease of use) should take precedence over all other considerations of technology.

Use of advanced HTML to achieve complected effects requires more considerations as HTML becomes les "standard". The most important of which is that unlike standard HTML, many of these technology are not platform indecent and will cause problems for visitors with bowsers that do not support a give technology.

Pages should be developed tacking into consideration the effects that advanced technology (such frames, DHTML, Jave applications and scripts) will have on bowsers that do not support a give technology.

A good web page does not restrict someone from content simply because they are using a different web browser, it is a very good practice to use only the standard platform indecent HTML endorsed by the World Wide Web Constortium

Appropriateness:

Implementation of an idea using a certain technology should depend on it's usability and it's feasibility not because it looks promising and only if there are the resources to implement it.

Spelling:

Spelling errors will virtually destroy the credibility of the business Once completed writing the content, run a spell checker over the text.

Animation:

Placing any animation on a Web page can distract attention from the rest of the material on the page. Unless the animation deserve that much attention animation should be avoided.

Do not use animated Dynamic HTML effects to move images and text around the screen for the sake of it DHTML is best used to present an interesting interface to condense or hide information until it is required.

Scrolling Status Text:

The status bar is for status messages, for example: the location of the link beneath the mouse pointer, the progress of a page download. People do read these messages. It's unprofessional to hijack this area of the browser for a gimmicky scrolling message.

Java Applets:

Java can take a while to start up in a browser. And should be used with care as if a site is the first visited in a session it will cause a reasonable delay to the visitors. (A Java applet is a small Java program that is embedded in a HTML page)

Platform independence:

Proprietary or deprecated effence should only be used where they do not cause errors in other browsers. Proprietary tags, or HTML extensions, are by definition supported only by one browser, for example Netscape's

<BLINK>, <LAYER>, <ILAYER> tags.

It is strongly recommend that the

<BLINK> and <marque> effects are never used. They distract attention away from the rest of the page, they can't be turned off, and can become annoying after only a short while.

Page Length:

Try and keep pages under 2 scroll lengths long. Nobody wants to read all the way down a huge page to find what they're looking for. This applies mainly to the first page of your site. Break the page down and link to these pages, so visitors can just click the link they want and then view that page.

Use of HTML Frames:

Frames break the unified model of the Web and introduce a way of looking at data that has not been well integrated into the other aspects of the Web. Therefore, they should either be used with caution, or not used at all.

Broken links/images:

Broken links and images are an instant turn off. There's nothing more irritating than finding a link to a page that sounds great, only to get a file not found error. Images are just as bad. Use link checking software which you can find on shareware sites, or use a one off free check at the Web Site Garage.

Feedback:

Developing methods for users to interact with your site is essential for creating a good web site. User feedback is a very important to improving your site. As a minimum provide your e-mail address so that users can provide you their comments, suggestions and opinions. Make sure this is included on each page.

Encourage Bookmarks. Add a note to your pages reminding visitors to bookmark your site. It increases the chances that your visitors will be back.

© I am the website administrator of the The Wandle Industrial Museum (http://www.wandle.org). Established in 1983 by local people determined to ensure that the history of the valley was no longer neglected but enhanced for the benefit of the community.

Different Kinds of Website - Which Suits You?

2005-09-30T00:42:00.000-07:00

By John Simms

Often the best type of website for you to launch for your business depends on the on the nature of your business, your corporate goals, the stage of development of your business and the resources you have at your disposal. Here are some types of websites to give you an idea of what you might consider looking for.

Static Websites – Brochureware

Most small businesses start out with a small, “static” website.

In order for the business to update their static website, they will have to contact their website development company and request that the changes be made. It is for this reason that they are not updated very often and remain “static” for a long period of time.

A static website can, however, feed off dynamic content from other websites by syndicating content. Such content often includes the latest weather, news headlines, exchange rates, etc.

A static website mainly serves to provide a business with basic online presence.

Dynamic, Database-Driven Websites

Today, most successful websites are dynamic, meaning the content changes regularly without necessarily feeding content from other bigger websites (as in the case of many static websites). Dynamic websites are usually maintained by members of the business using a Content Management System – a web-based software application that allows them to update their content without having to learn anything about web programming.

Corporate Style Websites

This is the next step up from a static website, where the business can update the website content themselves without having to get hold of the web design company.

It is not necessarily more expensive to launch a dynamic website than a static website. In the long-run it will in fact be cheaper if you intend to update regularly (which in itself is a good Internet Marketing habit)

Many businesses publish press releases, photo galleries, project portfolios and other things more relevant to the nature of their business. Online enquiries can also be stored in their back-end as a post to being sent to their email address.
Many mainstream dynamic websites are a mixed hybrid of the following types of websites:

E-Tailers or E-Commerce Websites

E-Retailers or E-Tailers are websites that allow visitors to purchase products online.

The website owner uses a back-end to add or remove products and their properties, process orders, analyse sales and more.

These kinds of websites have become more popular in recent years as the online shopping industry has grown quite considerably (Internationally, at least).

In South Africa, however, many businesses are hesitant to implement online transactions into their website strategy as it can be expensive to implement the necessary security measures. This often discourages businesses as they are uncertain on whether or not they will see significant returns.

An alternative to a Shopping Cart System is to implement a Quotation System. This means the visitor adds all the items they are interested in to a “quotation basket” and once done, they submit it to the company and are contacted by a sales representative to complete the transaction.

Information Driven Websites

Eg. Website directories, article directories, a Short-Story/Poetry submission website, etc.

These websites mainly derive revenue from selling advertising space on their website.
The information is generated by people that visit the website and submit content – the website is self-generating and the content follows current trends and interests.

Although the owners of the website do not have to produce the focus-content, they do need to be able to control the type of content that is submitted – they need to implement measure that will prevent spammers from flooding their website with unwanted content. They also need people to moderate the content that is generated on the website.

Community Websites

Eg. Job Search Websites, Online Dating websites, Discussion Boards, Special-Interest Portals

These websites usually cater for certain types of Internet users. Their main source of revenue may be advertising or offering different levels of memberships with different benefits (e.g “Gold Membership”)

The website almost becomes type of social being in itself by interacting with the member on a very personal level. For example, after submitting a post to a discussion board, the website will email the member to inform them when they have received a reply. The website and the member, in a sense, form a virtual relationship.

The membership registration process is usually automated allowing the website owner to concentrate on selling advertising space and monitoring performance.

They do however need to moderate what members do on the website in the case of chat rooms and forums (eg. To stop users from swearing, advertising for free, promoting hate speech, etc)

Remember that the best type of website for you to launch for your business depends on the on the nature of your business, your corporate goals, the stage of development of your business and the resources you have at your disposal.

By John Simms of Eiledon Solutions Web Design & Development

Top Tips to Search Engine Friendly Website Design

2005-09-30T00:40:00.000-07:00

By Mitsu Mehta

•Avoid use of flash animations, graphics, java objects and dynamic contents. Search engine spider can’t understand the text written on the images and flash objects when you are want to get your website index with content.

•Always have 200-500 words of content on the home page rather then having animated flash movies if your main source of traffic is search engine. Use CSS to setup a page structure ins such way that spider gets the content first when they try to crawl you website/pages.

•Page structure should be created in such way to feed H1 and body content right after the tags. You can make use of CSS to create such kind of designs to control look and feel of websites.

•Avoid deep table structure and use

•Website site should be W3C compatible you can make use of online W3C validation service to know your website is meeting all W3C standards. (http://validator.w3.org/)

•Create alternate textual navigation if you are planning to making use of images in your navigation systems.

•Define H1, H2, H3 with appropriate content and heading. You can use CSS to control the look and feel of your website.

•Avoid writing down heavy Java Script code in you tags because scripting functions can contain loops which can be a spider trap. tag contains important information like Title, Description, Keywords, Robot tags so try keep it clean with useful tags.

•Create alternate navigation using anchor text if your website is JS menu drive or contains flash menus.

•Put relevant and fresh content using appropriate keywords, you natural way of writing keyword rich content rather then keyword stiffing.

•Avoid use of hidden text, access keyword stuffing in ALT and Title tags.

•Create flat directory structure rather the having deep directory structure. Place all the important files at root level.

•Avoid using frames as spider has difficulty in index websites using frames

•If you are using CMS systems make sure it is search engine friendly.

•Convert dynamic URL’s into search engine safe URL’s using various tools based on your hosting server because for big web portals it is not possible to create static pages.

•Avoid broken links, duplicate content, redirect and other spam techniques to artificially increase the search engine rankings.

•Create sitemap with links to important pages as sitemap act as alternate access point to website.

•Better is to create content rich information pages rather then doorway pages.

•Always check for broken links on your website using various utilities and online link checker provided by W3C. (http://validator.w3.org/)

•Utilize online spider simulator and Lynx viewer to know how it will present to search engine spiders. (http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html, http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php)

•Avoid JS Popup for displaying keyword rich content as spider can’t understand JS popup links.

•Spider friendly navigation structure by avoiding JS Menu, image maps if you can’t avoid this put anchor text based navigation at bottom of every page.

Considering above guidelines will be helpful to avoid spider traps and improve website rankings in search engines by

Contact http://www.seoseo.com for free technical evaluation of your website.

Website Design – User or SEO Friendly? Find the Balance!

2005-09-30T00:36:00.000-07:00

By Julia Ramyalg

Search engines robots (or spiders, crawlers) and “live” users see a Website in a different way, and sometimes it happens that your Website looks very user-friendly but it’s absolutely inappropriate for SE. If you start doing search engine optimization (SEO) for the Website you may find it to be a very hard and thankless task – the SEO-ed site looks boring and looses its charm and unique style. How to keep the balance? I will give you 5 tips that will help you to make your site friendly both for users and search engines.

Tip 1.

Text content

In SEO text content is the main factor and you must give it the best place on your home page. What is the best place? Remember how a spider follows the page – it starts from meta tags collecting necessary information about the page from content of tag head and then index the content of tag body. It has only few seconds to spider the code so the text content must be placed in the fist 1/3 of the code to be indexed well until the robot quits the page and follows its further way.

Usually HTML page has table structure and many Website designers like to place image banner in the header of the page, then horizontal or vertical menu comes, and only then text section appears. It’s wrong structure and it must be changed if you want your site to be SEO friendly.

I would recommend you this way:

If you use “horizontal” structure for your site:

1. Place all page content in the table.

3. In the next row you can place image banner, Flash header, slide show, etc, i.e. graphical element that must attract attention of users.

4. In the next row you can place horizontal navigation bar (menu)

5. In the next row place main text content along with images, charts, boxes, etc.

If you use “vertical” structure for your site:

1. Place all page content in the table.

2. In the first left column of the table place 2-3 sentences of the user-friendly text with main keywords.

3. In the next column you can place logo, image, Flash slide show, etc.

4. Then you can place navigation bar, main text content, images, boxes, etc.

I have given you simple examples how to balance text content for users and robots. You can try your own options basing on the general idea.

Tip 2.

Images

Images at your Website are needed for users to attract their attention and give them better understanding of the site theme. However search engines also pay attention to images, namely to their names and tag alt.

So it’s rationally to name image of a car car.gif or car-spare-parts.jpeg than something like bfbfjdjdj.gif or 12345.jpeg. But don’t be over-diligent naming all of the images car.gif or car-dealers.jpeg. It will be considered as spamming! Use common sense and name images according to their content but with relation to your keywords. Also remember that Google Images and other similar search engines also index the images and show them in the search results, so keep the naming rational and appropriate and it will give good results to your Website.

The same thing is about using text in alt tag. Simple placing of all your keywords in alts of the images can only be considered as spamming and your site can be penalized. Use normal short phrases that will give users better understanding of what your site is about if they have difficulty with viewing images, and place your main keywords in the phrases. Make it look normal and rational. For example, you can use this text in alt for car.gif ”Click to know more about new and used cars from the best car dealers ”

Tip 3.

Title and description

Most users don’t pay attention to your Website title (shown in the title bar of browser) while visiting it. But they do when they search information in search engines and go through the search results – your site is shown there with its title and description by which users decide is it worth visiting. That’s why the title and description must reflect theme and content of your site 100% correctly and be understandable, catching, and promising for users.

But what’s about search engines? I think it is not secret that content of the tag title plays the greatest role when search engines sort your site among other search results. Having certain keywords in the title gives your site better position for these keywords. But it’s not correct to just place your keywords in the title using or even not using commas. It’s a kind of art to find balance between wish to be #1 in search engines and fear to be caught for spamming.

I would recommend you this tactics:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

2. Decide which keywords are main for your Website – this depends on how competitive a keyword is, i.e. how many sites appear in search results for this term. If competition is too high and you feel that you can’t devote all your efforts and money to climbing up in search results I would recommend you to select less competitive keywords to be main, otherwise it will be only wasting of your time, money, and efforts without visible results. If you think that you can afford fighting in this SEO game to win the first prize – top position in search engine, great, go ahead to start your promotion campaign – how exactly – it’s theme of another article.

(taken from Overture’s database for June 2005)

1479805 car new

1269118 car used

1041861 car part

371108 car dealer

292644 car sale

As you see, all these keywords start from “car” so it must be the first word in the title. Then “attach” there all other words in decreasing order of popularity but trying to keep the title readable, understandable, catching, and promising for users. Yes, I know, it’s not easy. You can even spend all the day thinking of this dilemma. But don’t give up and finally you will invent the best solution that will bring success to your site. So what we can use for our example:

“Car new & used, car part by dealer for sale”

You can see that Google, for example, shows and takes into account only the first 6-8 words of the title so there is no sense to make it longer.

Do the same thing for description – write 2-3 short sentences that fully describe your Website for users and contain your main keywords.

You may ask what to do with the rest keywords? Leave them in meta tags, add them to text content – they will play their role. Also you can optimize another site pages for these keywords – using them in the title, description, and so on.

Tip 4.

Link structure

If you define Google as the main search engine for your site you must know about Page Rank.

Important quote:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query “

Source: http://www.google.com/intl/en/technology/

So the aim of your SEO it to make the link structure of your site getting high Page Rank for the home page. Practically, try to place only really important links (internal as well as external) at your home page and link to it from all other pages of your site.

However don’t forget to make other important sections of your site accessible from the home page because users will not waste their time finding page “Prices” or “Contact Us” browsing your entire Website. They will just quit it and go to another one. Make navigation menu linked to main and important pages of your site and create site map with link structure of the site where links to the rest site pages will be placed.

If you don’t give privilege to Google you can breathe with relief, however also try to follow the above-mentioned rule.

Tip 5.

Dynamic or static content?

For different sites different type of programming language is needed and it’s not correct to say which one type of content is better. Both.

For users there is no big difference between static and dynamic content except that the first looks more simple and easy, for example, sitename.com/new-cars-prices.html than the second one looks like sitename.com/index.php?cPath=33&osCsid=8e4a0606a249204c2a7a4162cf222e98

But there is another thing with search engines.

Important quote:

“Search engine robots follow standard links with slashes, but dynamic pages, generated from databases or content management systems, have dynamic URLs with question marks (?) and other command punctuation such as &, %, + and $…

…Some public search engines and most site and intranet search engines will index URLs with dynamic URLS, but others will not.

…The simplest solution is to generate static pages from your dynamic data and store them in the file system, linking to them using simple URLs. Site visitors and robots can access these files easily. This also removes a load from your back end database, as it does not have to gather content every time someone wants to view a page. This process is particularly appropriate for Websites or sections with archival data, such as journal back issues, old press releases, information on obsolete products, and so on.

For rapidly-changing information, such as news, product pages with inventory, special offers, or web conferencing, you should set up automatic conversion system. Most servers have a filter that can translate incoming URLs with slashes to internal URLs with question marks -- this is called URL rewriting.

For either system, you must make sure that of the rewritten pages has at least one incoming link. Search engine robots will follow these links, and index your page…”

Source: http://www.searchtools.com/robots/goodurls.html

So don’t be afraid to use dynamic content if you really need it but do necessary actions to make it accessible for indexing by robots.

As you can see, the tips are quite simple and rather give you general idea of what you should do or shouldn’t than explain you step-by-step “How-to-climb-the-top-of-search-engines”. All sites are unique and there is no universal solution. But your patience, attention, willing to learn and try will finally yield and bring your site success.

Julia Ramyalg

IT-Inventors

http://www.it-inventors.com

IT-Inventors com is full service offshore web design company that offers you quality services at affordable price $10/hr: site design concept creation, design implementation, programming, SEO, site promotion.

Visit http://www.it-inventors.com to order the web site you need

Growing Your Site With Content!

2005-09-30T00:35:00.000-07:00

By Anthony Jewell

I think alot of people still miss out why you have a website. Depending on what your site is about usually depends on how you tackle the subject of your site. If you are reading this article you are probably wanting to or already have aimed your site in the direction of commerce. Which simply means that you want to create and generate a revenue off it, probably through advertising. What you may be missing is even though you want a revenue site, you may not know how to achieve it so that visitors keep coming back. Well isn't that the most important part of a commerce creating website. If visitors don't come back then your revenue is probably sitting at $0.59 if you are lucky. For others it is $0.00.

So what keeps people coming back to your site day after day. Alot of companies and sites forget that it is your content. After the initial click to visit your website and a front page inspection, it is truly your content that I am after. Trust me on this one. If the same information I viewed on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday is still there on Thursday, then your site is probably of no interest to me. Depending on how good your content is and how often you update it will determine your success in having people return to your website. Just like if you are going to the movies. If Monday you go to see Star Wars, then Tuesday you see Star Wars and Wednesday you see Star Wars, then you will be pretty bored if you go back Thursday to see Star Wars(unless you are a huge fan). The truth is you probably won't be going back to the theatre because you have already seen the movie or in this case the content three times already.

So the trick to it is adding new content to your website each and every day. If every time I come to your website there is something for me to read or explore then I will keep coming back. There are so many free sites out there for content especially ones that allow you to add articles to your website free of charge, that you can offer many great resources via articles for your visitors. If you view my short bio in this article(usually at the bottom) you can visit our site for free content that you can add to your site as well.

Remember if the content is good then people will come back. If the content is updated everyday and is a resource to people then they will tell their friends. This will send additional visitors to your website which will lead to an increase in participation on your site but also an increase of revenue.

Anthony Jewell has over 6 Years experience in the Web & Graphics World. You can visit my business and join in conversation at our forum at http://www.logo2d.com/forum & http://www.logo2d.com

Good Web Design

2005-09-30T00:33:00.000-07:00

By Vaidehi Ghag

Too many web designers get confused about what type of site they're creating -- witness the site that was up for a long time . If you're creating a site that's for a media company (movie, music, etc.), fashion company, art school sites where there's no accountability for the bottom line, then it's ok to use "wild and crazy" design techniques. But remember, "It's a temporary thing." This type of design is not supposed to be serious and last forever. Have fun.

But if you want your website to look reasonable and is functional, devote your energies to keyword rich content, site maps, privacy policies and the other standards that seem to be missing from a lot of websites. The things that the Search Engines like to see and will reward with higher rankings. A ‘crawler’ can’t see fancy flash gizmos or premium quality images over 100 kb each.

If you're creating a real web site for a real company, you have to choose a design that's not quite as exciting. Something more responsible and restrained. Something dependable. Something you'd marry

It would have to be to keep it clean and simple. There is nothing worse than a cluttered looking website and there is nothing that will repel visitors more quickly than a slow loading website. Take a look at a few of the ‘TOP’ Internet based company’s websites like Adobe.com. The largest image on their Home page is 6 Kb. There is no Flash, no music. Even Microsoft.com has one small, unobtrusive ‘flash’ component in the bottom left corner and their largest image is 18 Kb.

Many private Internet users are using ‘56kbps dial up modem’ connections (according to research firm Instat-MDR). So, by building a website that is only accessible in a reasonable amount of time to DSL users, you are effectively disqualifying yourself from visits by 80 percent of the people likely to be interested in your product or service. They will not wait.

The Number 1 rule that every web designer should follow is to create a fast loading web site. You might have a great design but very few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load. While designing a web site always think about how long it will take to load.

Minimize the use of images - Images do enhance a page but don't make 80% of your web site only images. Instead break it down as much as possible to simple HTML. Very often simple designs are the best. For web design source files visit my site http://www.davbindu.com/

Optimize images for the web - Once you have decided on the images that you need on your site, make sure that it is optimized for the web. They should be in the gif or jpeg format. You can also minimize the size of the image by choosing the number of colors you need, from the color palette. The less the colors you choose, the less the size of the image.

Use Tables creatively - You can get some great looking designs by using tables creatively . Tables load very fast because it is just HTML code. Tables can be used in the homepage, menus or anywhere you like.

Cut down the use of animated gifs - Animated gifs take a long time to load and can also be very irritating. But since they catch your attention you could use small animated gifs to draw a visitor's attention to a particular section of your site.Or design simple icons icons that add a little color and draw the attention of a visitor.

Use background images instead of big images whenever possible - Use background images whenever possible. This is usually a very useful tip for headers and footers. Instead of using an image of width 580 which is a uniform design you can use just a part of that as a background fill. This reduces the size of the web page as the image is small.

Try out CSS Styles - Have fun with CSS styles to get some cool text effects. Again, a CSS Style is simple HTML code so it loads very fast. You can create cool rollovers using CSS Styles.

Use Flash sparingly - There seems to be a lot of hype about Flash but I recommend that you minimize the use of Flash on a site. Don't make entire sites using Flash. It may look great but it takes hours to load and can really put off visitors. If you do want to use Flash use it within an HTML site and make sure it loads fast.

Keep checking your load time - Last but not least, before you decide on the final design of your web site, check its load time on NetMechanic. This site gives you a free analysis of your web site which is extremely useful.

This information is collected from number of sites and modified and reused, I will remain grateful to the respective original authors. Thus it is no way copyrighted and if you want, you can reuse these articles in your newsletter, web site or ebook. You don't need to take my permission for re-publishing these articles, as long as you display the resource box at the end of each article.

Mrs. Vaidehi Ghag is Web Designer in mahar - a unique Industrial online Business Directory.

http://www.davbindu.com/

7 Effective Homepage Tips that Will Have Your Visitors Begging for More!

2005-09-30T00:31:00.000-07:00

By Anthony Jewell

The truth is how you present your website will determine how customers view you and your product. This can directly translate into how effective your website actually is and whether or not you get alot of sales or just a few. Think of it this way. Whenever you go into a store you usually always go in from the front entrance, not the side or the back, but the front. Just like when people visit your website, they probably always come in from the home page and go around your site. Sometimes they may come in from another link to one of your subpage but trust me they will jump on your front page to check it out and rightly so.

The front page is where all of the best information should be. Now this is not to say that your subpages as useless and that there shouldn't be valuable information on them. I am just saying that the main page should contain timbits of all the valuable information located throughout your site. Usually your front page is the main attraction and includes features and elements that your subpages won't have. It is almost like a "wow page" full of rich content.

Here are some tips on how to impress your visitors as soon as they get to your site:

Tip Number 1: Offer something to the visitor as soon as they get to your site:

-This is important to really grab a visitors attention. Some things you may want to put at the top or near the top of your site are free offers like "free ebook" or "free domain" ect...

Tip Number 2: Give them content that is updated daily:
-Make sure you have content on your front page that is updated daily. This will not only give them something to look forward to every day but it will show that your site is updated often and gives them a reason to keep coming back.

Tip Number 3: Showcase new and featured product:
-Showcasing products on the front page will immediately get visitors interested on what you are offering. It will help show them what your site is about as well as it will make them want to browse more of your e-store.

Tip Number 4: Add highlights from other parts of your website:

Add little bits of info from your subpages to give them a view of what your site contains. For example if your site has an article section post a few new articles each day.

Tip Number 5: Offer sales and discounts on your front page:

Offering discounts and coupons will definitely get people interested in what you are selling. Saving money and getting a good deal is always a good reason to look around and purchase something off of your site. Make sure the sales can be seen clearly and do have an expiration date that you stick to.

Tip Number 6: Add content that is only specific for your front page:-Another great thing to do is offer content that can only be found on your front page. This will give your visitors even more content to choose from without having to view it on every page. Some things you may just have on the front page are tips, news headlines or article samples.

Tip Number 7: Don't post full stories or articles on the front page but timbits of them so they click through your site:

-Whenever you are posting articles or stories on the front page make sure to post only a sample of the article. Include a "click here for more" link so that they can view the whole article. This will interest them more will have them going to new parts of your website. It will also help keep your front page from being cluttered.

Anthony Jewell has over 6 Years experience in the Web & Graphics World. You can visit my business and join in conversation at our forum at http://www.logo2d.com/forum & http://www.logo2d.com

Simple Steps To Proper Web Design

2005-09-02T07:46:00.000-07:00

By John Kovacs

Over the course of the last decade, the Internet has grown beyond all expectations. Each and everyday there is a new website that is being developed. The biggest challenge a new website will face is getting viewers to stay on their site long enough and to attain high search results with search engines.

One of the factors that could help you address these issues is having a website with good web design. The importance of knowing proper web design can very well determine where your site is listed in search results and how long a visitor stays on your site.

Proper web design is not a difficult task, it is just a matter of designing your website from a viewers point of view. This article will give you suggestions on proper web design to enhance your search results with search engines and capturing a higher interest from your visitors.

What Your Site Is About

First off, it is vital that your home page explains in detail the purpose of your website. Did you ever go to a website that was filled with a lot of links, graphics or banners, but you really didn’t have a clue of what their website was all about? If a person has to search from page to page just to understand what information your website really offers, the chances are they will move onto another site. Don’t keep them second-guessing, it's important that you are very specific on your home page, letting your viewers know up-front your websites main purpose.

Font Size/Style

When creating your website keep in mind not all people have the same eyesight. It is best to use nothing less than10 point, with12 point being the most recommended. Keep all pages in your website consistent with the same font size and style (this of course is in exception to titles and sub-titles).

Text Colors

Make reading your pages easy by always using a dark text with a light background. Using a light colored text against a light background can make it difficult for your readers to read the content. There are a few sites that reverse this process by using a light text on dark background, which is found acceptable in some cases, but you are better off using dark on light for your overall content.

Paragraphs and Spacing

To make reading your web pages easy for your viewers, do not use long paragraphs on your web pages. Try to keep your paragraphs to only 6 to 7 lines with proper spacing between each one. Try to implement sub-titles to break up several paragraphs, as this creates easier reading and is more attention getting.

Content

Does your website provide more useful content than advertisements? Providing viewers with very little content is a common mistake many webmasters make when they develop their website. I can’t begin to tell you how many websites I’ve seen that may only have a couple paragraphs of what I call useful content, and the rest being advertisements, sales pitches, links, banners, etc.

If you are going to take the time to develop and invest in a website, you need to focus on providing your viewers with informative information. Search engines favor sites that have useful content, not to mention you will capture a stronger interest from your viewers.

Page Size

Try to keep each of your pages no more than four pages in length. The reasons for this is that no one likes to spend a lot of the time scrolling just to read the entire content. If you have a lot of content, break it into separate pages. You can put in a link of “continue”, “next”, or “go to page #” at the bottom of each page.

Navigation Links

Nothing can be more frustrating than trying to figure out how to maneuver around ones website. Most any person (including myself) will leave a website as fast as they came in if they find it difficult to get from page to page.

Make it easy for your viewers to navigate around your website by putting navigation links on all of your pages. It is advised that all navigation links follow the same pattern on each page so as not to confuse your viewer. Setting your navigation links on the either side and also on the top or bottom is highly recommended.

Page Load Time

Did you ever click on a link to a website and found you had to wait 20 seconds or longer for the website to open? I don’t know about you, but if I have to wait too long for a website to open, I will click off of it and go to another website.

This problem is caused by a Webmaster having too many graphics or animations on their website. Large graphics and animations will definitely slow the load time to your website. Keep in mind the majority of Internet users are still using dial-up for their Internet connection, so the time it takes for a website to open with a lot of graphics, can seem like eternity to them.

To avoid this problem do not use too many graphics on your website and try to resize the ones you want to keep. The ideal is to set your pages to load within ten seconds to avoid losing visitors.

Setting The Right Resolution

Setting the right resolution when creating your web pages can save you from visitors leaving your site rather quickly. The most important thing to understand is that the majority of all PC’s are set at a 800 x 600 resolution. The problem here is, if a internet user with these settings goes on a website that was created with a higher resolution, the user will end up scrolling left to right in order to view all of the web page.

Even though there are ways around this by implementing tables into your web page, you are better off creating all your web pages so they can be viewed on PC’s with a lower resolution.

Contact Information

If you don’t have a link that is accessible to a contacts page, most people will not purchase anything from you.

It is highly recommended to place links that are plainly visible on all of your web pages that go to a separate contacts page. This page should give your viewers a way to contact you with any questions, concerns or comments. This helps ensure support and trust in doing business with you.

Pop Ups

This can be the most annoying feature a website can have in my opinion. Pop ups are used to get the viewers attention to either sign up for something or purchase their products. Although I understand the basis to pop ups and what they are meant to achieve, I feel there are other ways to capture your visitors attention that should get you the same results.

The most effective way to capture your visitors interest is having solid content on your website with informative information, as mentioned earlier. With that being said, you can implement title links in between some of your paragraphs, which can take your visitors to separate pages on "special promotions", "newsletters" or "products". On these pages, you can list the same message you would have in your pop up. This is far more acceptable since the viewer is making the choice to click on the link.

If you feel your website needs to use pop ups, use a pop under instead. This form of pop up only comes up when a person leaves your website and is far less annoying.

Site Map

A site map is a separate page that list a complete directory to your entire website. You can relate to it like what a table of contents is to a book. Having a site map on your website helps the viewer maneuver through your site without confusion or second-guessing where to find something. Most search engines favor sites with site maps, which in turn will improve your search rankings, as well as placement.

Privacy Policy

With the ever increasing problems with Spam on the Internet, a privacy policy is a crucial element to your website. You are letting your viewers know that any information they supply you with, is held in the strictest confidence and that you will not share this information with any other third party. You are instilling trust to all who do business with you.

Update Your Site Often

This is a valid step you want to take seriously. Updating your site with new content gives your viewers a reason to revisit your website. Search engines love sites that update their site often, which will definitely increase your search engine rankings.

It can be an added benefit to add a section on your home page that tells your viewers when your site was last updated, the type of changes that were made and a link to each update.

Updating your site once a week or every other week should work very well for you.

----------------------------------------

John Kovacs is the CEO and founder of “A Home Business Opportunity”. His website mainly focuses on supplying free marketing tips, resources and support for home startup businesses and Internet marketing. To get a step-by-step guide in building an online business, visit http://www.ahomebusinessopportunity.net.

How to Design Website Which Google Likes

2005-09-02T07:44:00.000-07:00

By Ramdayal Yadav

Are you going to design or redesign new website or thinking for it, then first read below given points, which google likes in a website, Google Information for Webmasters.

There are more than 80 factors of your website that are taken into consideration when determining the ranking of your website, Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site.

Basic principles:

1) Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

2) Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

3) Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

4) Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Design and Content Guidelines

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

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

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

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

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

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

7) Check for broken links and correct HTML.

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

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

Specific recommendations

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.

Don't send automated queries to Google.

Don't load pages with irrelevant words.

Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

For more details please visit below given links:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/index.html

http://www.google.com/webmasters/facts.html

http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html

http://www.google.com/webmasters/bot.html

http://www.google.com/webmasters/remove.html

Ramdayal Yadav, is Chief SEO in http://www.maharashtradirectory.com/

This is unique Industrial online Business Directoy. For more articles on search engine positioning visit my site - http://www.3seo.com/

How to Build Your Own Website - More Steps

2005-09-02T07:39:00.000-07:00

By Faraj Balousha

To build a website, there are four methods to choose from:

First method:
Get a professional designer to build the site for you:

It is expensive in creation process, site maintenance and development.

Second method:
Designing the site with free website hosting:

In this case, just sign in the website that offers this service, and start building your own website.

Free Hosting Sites:
http://www.geocities.yahoo.com/
http://www.angelfire.com
http://www.tripod.com
http://www.freeservers.com

Disadvantages of this method (Free Web Hosting):
• Small size-Limited web page space
• Can't create interactive features (message boards, online ordering, etc.)
• Advertisements-May have banners and/or pop ads on your homepage
• Long and hard to remember web address (instead of yourdomain.com)
• No branded email addresses (you@yourdomain.com)
• Weak technical support-Poor help and support options
• May not be free forever
• No seriousness to the site

So it is better to choose a cheap Hosting sites with reasonable prices, you will get a better quality and a higher credibility.

Third method:
Professional Web Hosting:

Design the site by a web page designer program (computer software) and use one of the hosting sites.

Web Page designer programs:
There is a lot of computer software available to help you build and manage your website, you may use one or more of them:
1. Microsoft FrontPage
2. Macromedia Dreamweaver/Fireworks Studio
3. Adobe GoLive/Adobe ImageStyler
4. Flash & Swish

FrontPage program is the famous and most important one.

Sites to learn Front Page:
http://www.fgcu.edu/support/office2000/frontpage/
http://www.bhsu.edu/university_comm/web_services/FP_tutorials.html
http://www.electricteacher.com/tutorial2.htm

Sites for Domain Name:
• Yahoo - http://www.yahoo.com/
• Godaddy - http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/default.asp
• EV1Servers - http://ev1servers.net/english/index.asp
• Stargate - http://stargate.com/
• Actnowdomains - http://actnowdomains.com/

Sites For Web Hosting:

• Yahoo - http://www.yahoo.com/
• Powweb - http://powweb.com/
• Ev1servers - http://ev1servers.net/english/index.asp
• Stargate - http://stargate.com/
• UCVHost - http://ucvhost.com/
• Servermatrix - http://servermatrix.com/
• Infinology- http://infinology.com/

Because this method needs to learn a new program with the knowledge of HTML, so it is not our recommended method.

Fourth method: (recommended method)
Build the site with SiteBuilder and choose the Hosting package:

This method is the easiest and fastest way to create a website without any previous knowledge of web site building and without any HTML experience.
You can start right now and build your website immediately.

If you can point and click with a mouse, then you can build your own website right now!

Web Hosting with Site Builder:
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/index.php

The Yahoo! SiteBuilder (as an example) opens with a Welcome Screen that provides links to built-in tutorials titled “Getting Started with Yahoo! SiteBuilder”

The Getting Started Tutorial covers subjects like:
• How to Start a New Page
• How to Add Text
• How to create tables
• How to Place Images
• How to add links
• How to use templates
• How to publish and upload web pages
• and much more!

More Site Builders:
• Actnowdomains- http://www.actnowdomains.com
• Site Build It.- http://buildit.sitesell.com/main/home.html
• EasyHost - http://www.easyhost.com/
• Fasthosts -http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/
• Interland - http://www.interland.com/
• BlueVoda - http://www.bluevoda.com/
• SiteRightNow - www.SiteRightNow.com
• ipowerweb - http://www.ipowerweb.com/
• CoffeeCup- http://www.coffeecup.com/bigcup/

Enjoy!

Faraj Balousha
Civil Engineer, Architect, Webmaster
Sketch-Plus Inc.,
http://www.sketch-plus.com/
http://www.creating-website-stores.com/

The Secrets to Successfully Learning Basic HTML

2005-09-02T07:37:00.000-07:00

By Colleen Chard

If you'd like to create/maintain a website, having some HTML knowledge is necessary in order to create a standard page on the web. Learning the HTML basics is easy and should take less than an hour.

First you'll need some type of software/editor to create your html pages. Here's a few to try out (or not) and see which you feel most comfortable with.

Editors for Hand Coding:

(http://www.notepad.org) Notepad - This easy-to-use HTML editor is FREE (for Windows version 2.0 and above). If you are interested in learning how to code by hand then this editor is highly recommended. It is not cluttered with tons of features and is handy for all scripting languages, html, perl, php, etc.

Advanced Source Code Editors:

These editors are similar to Notepad by allowing you to create your webpage via hand coding, but they help to speed up the process of coding by hand with features such as syntax highlighting, spell checking, global find/replace, code libraries, code snippets, file explorers, page previews, and much more. Ideal for all scripting languages.

(http://www.alleycode.com) AlleyCode - This award winning HTML editor is fast and comes with many great features. You can view your progress in real time using it's Synchro View feature. Another great editor if you want to learn to code by hand, comes with handy code snippets. Supports all scripting languages. Alleycode is FREE!

(http://www.evrsoft.com/download.shtml) 1stPage - This html editor comes packed with many features you won't even find in the high-priced editors, and it's free. This editor is perfect for everyone, from novice to expert. Some of it's features include, 400+ javascripts, 15 dhtml scripts, 17 perl scripts, 6 html scripts, 2 cgi scripts.

(http://www.macromedia.com/software/homesite) Macromedia HomeSite - $99 (Free 30-day trial). HomeSite provides a lean, code-only editor for web development. Advanced coding features enable you to instantly create and modify HTML, CFML, JSP, and XHTML tags, while enhanced productivity tools allow you to validate, reuse, navigate, and format code more easily.

WYSIWYG: (What You See Is What You Get)
I do not personally recommend using these. Reason being that the code can be messy, unnecessary tags can get put in, and most importantly, the code will NOT be valid. Valid code is important for a properly functioning, SEO-friendly webpage. Once you learn how to hand code you can use these editors to save time and just go over the source code and clean it up to be sure it's valid.

WYSIWYG is a type of editor/software which allows the user to see the web page as it's being created. In other words, you can drag and drop images exactly where you want them, place text where you want it and not really have to deal with the code side of creating a web page.

(http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver) DreamWeaver 8 - Free to try; $399 to buy. Generally known as the best of the WYSIWYG editors. Comes with an easy to use interface, expanded CSS support, background FTP.

(http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX010858021033.aspx) FrontPage 2003 - 30 Day Free Trial, $199 to buy. While being a popular choice and commonly used, FrontPage is also known to produce bloated, messy, invalid code, you're best not to use this program. Features include the ability to upload your web site without requiring an FTP program, hit counters, feedback forms, and more.

(http://www.adobe.com/products/golive/main.html) GoLive - $399. Adobe® GoLive® CS2 software lets you unlock the power of CSS with intuitive visual tools such as prebuilt CSS objects that you can drag and drop to build sophisticated sites. Jump-start your designs by easily converting Adobe InDesign® layouts into Web pages. Or, design Web and mobile content in an advanced, standards-based coding environment.

To learn HTML it's best to make use of the tutorials offered at such sites as (http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp) W3Schools and (http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/authoring/html_basics) WebMonkey. That's how I learned. Also be sure to check out these excellent HTML resources, (http://www.websitetips.com/html) Website Tips and (http://www.htmlgoodies.com) HTML Goodies. To do the HTML tutorials I would advise using Notepad or one of the advanced source code editors listed above.

Colleen Chard is a professional web designer based in the greater Toronto, Ontario Canada area. She has been designing websites since 2001 and runs her own online business Kalina Web Designs, http://www.kalinawebdesigns.com. Colleen is also the webmaster of many other web sites including Directory Source, http://www.directorysource.info, and Apex Templates, http://www.apextemplates.com.

Why is a Logo so Important to Your Business?

2005-09-02T07:34:00.000-07:00

By Anthony Jewell

Well, a logo for your business. Why is it important? Does it matter what it looks like? Is Yours Professional?

These are some good questions to ask when you are considering to get a logo design or already have a logo for your business. See a logo speaks volume about your company, it right off the bat tells your "future possible client" if you are reliable and instils trust in them. Although how good your service is matters, how you present your company is what will win you their trust and in the end win them as a client.

Even though in the end of everything, how good your service is will decide on if you are successful. The image of your company tells alot in a little way. Your logo says to clients a few different things:

1. Are these guys professional?

2. Do they seem to care about their business(which in turns means do you care about your clients)?

3. Do they seem to know what they are doing?

4. Does their business seem to be one I can trust to do the job right?

What makes a good logo you may ask? Well it comes down to a few things. Design, Colors and if it gives Your Business a clear Professional Image.

The design can differ from something as simple as the Microsoft text to represent your business, something as unique and colorful as the ebay logo or a symbol such as the GE(general electric) symbol. What makes the design so important is that it creates an image, that when seen is unique to your business and makes clients recognize your company automatically. As seen in the examples of the Microsoft, eBay or GE logos, the design can be simple or complex, just as long as it is unique.

Colors are an important factor in representing what business you are in. If you are in Finances or Banking you mainly see colors such as blue, green, black and sometimes gold. Although all colors can be used, in a way certain colors are associated better with different industries. Just look at fast food and junk food, they tend to go with brighter blues, reds, yellows and oranges which seems to make you want to eat more(hmmmm).

A professional image can be as simple as just a text logo with a different color letter in it to give it uniqueness, or a logo with a symbol to represent the company. Making it professional is what is important. The quality(meaning the texture of the logo is important) such as smooth curves and smooth text, all add to the quality of the logo. Having jagged edges or un-readable text can really hurt the quality of the logo which in turns can be negative to the image of the business.

So remember when purchasing a logo to keep it clean and clear, make it unique to your business and keep it professional!

----------------------------------------------------
Anthony Jewell has over 6 Years experience in the Web & Graphics World. You can visit my business at http://www.logo2d.com

Best Web Design And Free Web Promotion Tips

2005-08-29T04:08:00.000-07:00

By Steve Hill

This article gives free tips on how to find a cheap web designer and free tips on website promotion.

Cheap web design services.

You do not have to spend thousands of pounds to have an internet prescence. In my opinion you should only have to pay between £50 and £100 to have a website built. The websites at the bottom of this page only cost me £42.50 each! The amount of competition in the internet web design sector means that there are some great deals available.

You can find these cheap web design companies by looking on internet auction websites, internet search engines or in the Yellow Pages.

Website promotion free tips.

Everyone would like an increase in traffic to their website or an increase in their PR rating. In general the higher the page rank you have the more visitors you are likely to get.

To increase this page rank it is important to build up the number of backward links your website has. You can do this by e-mailing other websites preferably in the same business sector as your own and asking if they would be willing to swap links with your site.

Writing articles like the one you are reading here is another way of obtaining backward links. By submitting these articles to article websites, other webmasters are then able to use your article on their website, thus giving you an extra link. This is because you are able to add your information and web address in the author bio at the bottom of the page.

You may also want to consider google adwords. This is a form of pay per click where you pay to appear on the right side of the search results in the paid advertising section of the google search engine for a specific key phrase. Always remember not to spend more on the advertising than you are likely to earn from the website.

If you would like to earn extra money from your website you may want to consider google adsense. This is where google put ads onto your website. When your visitors click on the ads you get paid.

Stephen Hill has a number of websites including:

http://www.chi-form-tai.co.uk

http://www.free-self-hypnosis.co.uk

Why Your Site Should be Developed with CSS and Semantic Markup

2005-08-29T04:05:00.000-07:00

By James Kendall

Why your site should be developed with CSS and semantic markup

One thing that I have learned in over a decade developing web sites is that the Net is continually changing, and to keep up you need to change with it. One of the more recent developments in web design is the use of CSS and semantic markup. CSS and semantic web design has several benefits: clarity in code, browser and other web-enabled devices compatibility, seperation of content and presentation, smaller burden on bandwith, and better visibility to search engines.

Back in the day, we designed sites with tables and hacked those tables into doing things that they were never meant to do. The table tag was designed to display tabular data, not as a way to render the layout of a website. Unfortunately, a better alternative did not exist, so we used tables. This made for inefficient, slow loading sites with code that was very hard to read and maintain. Wikipedia defines sematic markup like this:

Sematic pages: supply information for Web search engines using web crawlers. This could be machine-readable information about the human-readable content of the document (such as the creator, title, description, etc., of the document) or it could be purely metadata representing a set of facts (such as resources and services elsewhere in the site). (Note that anything that can be identified with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) can be described, so the semantic web can reason about people, places, ideas, cats etc.)

These days, hip designers and developers use CSS extensively to create beautiful, fully standards compliant sites. CSS-based layout allows us to develop sites that will degrade effectively--that is that they will be viewable on all types of devices such as PDAs, cell phones, T.V.s--and will work correctly on devices that dont even exist yet as long as they are standards compliant.

Most importantly, developing sites with CSS allows us to effectively separate content and presentation. Have you ever looked at the source code of HTML pages that were created with a table-based layout and wondered what the heck is going on here? You see lots of opening and closing of tables and table rows all mixed together with textual content and graphics. With a clean, CSS-based layout you can create pages that are easily understood by looking at the source, making them easier to understand, maintain, and update. Look at the source of my company site http://www.vp3media.com and then look at the source code of this site that uses a tables based layout: http://webservices.org/. Big difference, huh?

If you have a site with high traffic, you can significantly reduce the amount of bandwdth used by transitioning from a table-based site to a CSS-based layout. If a visitor to your site doesnt have to load all of the code needed to render those tables and spacer gifs, you are transmiting less data.

CSS also offers search engine optimization benefits over tables. If you have a tables based business site that relys on Internet traffic to turn a profit or aquire new clients you will see real advantages by switching to CSS. When a search engine spiders your tables-based site, they retrieve a large amount of content that has nothing to do with you business. When search engines spiders a clean CSS-based site, the majority of content retrieved will be textual content that describes your business. The ratio of content-to-code is higher with CSS-based layouts.

Weve all seen search engine descriptions that dont make any sense; thats because search engine spiders use a top down method for retrieving information. Whatever is topmost in your document, the search engines are going to think is the most important part of the document, and therefore should be used as the description. Since we seperate content and presentation with CSS, we can put the most important information at the top of a document no matter where it is actually displayed on the page. Try that with tables!

I hope this article gives you an overview of why it is important to transition from your current tables-based layout to a fully valid CSS implementation. If you dont have a web site, but are planning on launching one in the near future, make sure you tell your developers you want a CSS-based implementation. If you need help moving from your current tables-based site to a CSS-based one, please feel free to contact me at vp3media@gmail.com or call me toll free at 1-877-320-4349 and Ill be happy to discuss your site with you.

James Kendall has been developing websites for over a decade and has founded and co-founded several companies concerned with web development since 1994. Currently he runs VP3Media and focuses on one on one interaction with select clients.

Should You Bother Learning HTML to Build Webpages?

2005-08-29T04:02:00.000-07:00

By Leslie Pinczi

The most popular method to build webpages today is to use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) software. Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver are prime examples of WYSIWYG software. Both programs allow you to create webpages as though you were creating a document with your favourite word processing software like Microsoft Word or WordPerfect. Its as simple as entering paragraphs, headings and inserting clipart or images.

WYSIWYG software like those listed above are prefect for beginner webpage builders who want webpages constructed quickly without having to learn HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language).

All webpages are brought to life using HTML codes, regardless what webpage building software is used. WYSIWYG programs simply create the HTML codes as you construct a webpage (in the
background, without you knowing), so you don't need to understand them.

This is without a doubt the biggest advantage over any other type of webpage building programs. It means that if you can press keys on a keyboard, you have what is required to create your very own webpage!

However, most WYSIWYG programs don't give you absolute, total control over webpage design (ie, exactly the way you want the page to look). There are design limitations.

For example, you may want to place headings, sub headings and a navigation menu in a particular arrangement on the webpage, but no matter how many times you try, the program won't permit
such placement or position them correctly. This is one big disadvantage of WYSIWYG programs if you desire a custom look to all your webpages.

Knowledge of HTML, however, can assist you to overcome such design shortfalls in WYSIWYG programs. How is this possible? Let me explain.

If you understand HTML codes, then you understand why webpages appear the way they do in a web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. This is powerful stuff
because the moment you change/modify HTML codes, the webpage will take on a new design/appearance.

And don't forget that HTML codes are exact, giving you total freedom over how everything appears on the webpage. Most WYSIWYG programs allow you to view and modify the HTML codes. As you can
see, knowledge of HTML is beneficial.

The downside to HTML is the learning curve. It takes time to understand how HTML works and why, but once you know, using HTML to create totally custom designed webpages is easy. For the
beginner, HTML can be challenging, but don't despair because there are HTML tutorials available that teach you basic and advanced HTML in a matter of days!

So the question is - Should you bother learning HTML to build webpages? The answer - yes and no.

It is obvious that WYSIWYG software speeds up production of webpage development regardless of your knowledge on how to build webpages. However, to further refine and tune your webpages
exactly to your liking, it is usually necessary to add and modify HTML codes. So yes, HTML is worthwhile learning if you are unsatisfied with the webpages produced by WYSIWYG software.

There is little point learning HTML if you are 100% satisfied with the webpages made with WYSIWYG software.

One thing is certain. Using WYSIWYG software and learning HTML codes is the answer for those of us who want webpages made exactly to our requirements. Learning HTML is not as hard as
you think. To get started, simply search any major search engine like Google, Yahoo or MSN using the search phrase "html tutorials", its that easy!

Les Pinczi is the creator of interactive HTML learning software to help you learn how to build a web page in hours!

Effective Website Design

2005-08-29T03:59:00.000-07:00

By Ted Prodromou

In this era of ultra-sophisticated internet marketing and web design, there is no excuse for an e-business to suffer with an ineffective website. Whether your goal is to present a basic business website that briefly introduces and describes your company and product, or you endeavor to develop a fully-functioning cash-cow storefront, there is a wide array of design choices to cater to all of your needs. Your website should fit your business like a well-tailored Armani suit. It should reflect exactly who you are and at the same time, instill confidence in the potential buyer that your business is solid, stable and reliable.

Your website is only effective if it also quickly moves the user from visiting to inquiring to buying your product or service. It is possible to create your website in-house. But in order to achieve the crucial balance between the eye-catching graphics and copywriting needed to best represent your company, and the super-efficient communication and purchase processing needed to catch every sale possibility, a web-design professional is your most time efficient option.

A good webdevelopment firm can construct your entire website for you. Once you provide them with details about your business needs and website desires, they do the work in a much shorter time because they have already acquired an arsenal of expertise in the internet marketing field. Since time is always of the essence in business, a fast turn-around time is a major advantage.

If your website is already up and running, but not bringing the increased customers or profits hoped for, Internet Marketing professionals can update and streamline your site. In the quickly evolving world of internet marketing, new website products and services are appearing all of the time. A good internet marketing firm prides itself in knowing the most up-to-date and state-of-the-art products and processes. When a good internet marketing expert works their magic, you will see an almost immediate boost in the efficiency of your site to attract customers and keep them.

Ted Prodromou spent over 20 years in the computer industry working for IBM, Digital, and Cellular One. Today he's the owner of Valiss IT, an internet marketing firm that provides small business coaching and marketing help. He’s also a certified personal and professional coach.

Ted has created and led many coaching workshops and today is helping small businesses automate their marketing with his latest coaching program, "Attract Clients While You Sleep". For more information visit http://www.valiss.com/specials.

If you would like to download his free report, "How To Attract Clients While You Sleep" go to http://www.valiss.com.

You are free to distribute this article, providing it remains unchanged and with the resource / bio box attached.

Why Do Images Disappear from a Webpage?

2005-06-24T05:19:00.000-07:00

By George Chamoun

In learning webpage design, I encountered many problems that took lots of practice to resolve. Although, I was building web pages using Microsoft Frontpage on my home computer, I used to face lots of issues after uploading the webpage to my website.

One major problem was the disappearance of an image file from the webpage. When I created the webpage on my home computer, it looked exactly the way I planned it. Both the text and images showed on the webpage.

When I uploaded the webpage my web server space, they images showed as the letter X in the middle of a blank frame.

After lots of searches, I found out that the problem can only be fixed by modifying the HTML of the web page having the problem.

The HTML code I had to change was very simple and straight forward, when locating the code related to the image.

Whether the webpage has one or more image, you use the same method to modify the code. You just have to fix one at a time.

The rule for an image to appear correctly, is to save the images in the same directory as the webpage where the image is supposed to appear.

Whether you create a webpage on your home computer or your web server, the same rule applies.

When you upload the webpage to the web server, the website looks at the webpage an sees the image source as the hard disk of your computer. This is why it can't display it. The image source should be in the directory on the website.

Here is the solution to this problem:

Every image file on a webpage is embedded in the IMG tag, and the exact location of the image file shows as a value for the SRC attribute. For example, SRC = "image.jpg" is one of the format that an image appears in.

Correcting the SRC value, will correct the problem that causes the images to show as the letter X. The SRC tag attribute means the source location of the image file. When the webpage was designed on your home computer, the source value was your computer hard disk.

In summary, before you upload a webpage with picture, you should change the Html code of the image.

All what you need to change is the SRC value from your hard disk to your website directory.

For example: Change this code SRC="C:image.jpg" to SRC="index.html" if the webpage happens to be your home page. If the page was not the home page, you can just replace index.html with the name of the page.

George Chamoun, Web designer

http://www.HowToUseHtml.com/?062205

Can a Webpage Created Without HTML?

2005-06-22T21:28:00.000-07:00

By George Chamoun

The HTML editor is usually a webpage design software that has a GUI(graphic user interface) which makes it easier to design a webpage using the File Menus. This is good for the non-programmers and non-technical people.

There are lots of software for web page design, like MS Frontpage, Dreamweaver which are widely used. however, there are lots of web page design software you can buy.

I prefer Ms Frontpage because I learned it and got it for free when I took my web design certificate at Education direct school.

There is another way to edit and build web pages beside using a software. If you are a programmer, and know how to code HTML, you can use any text editor like notepad to edit or build a webpage.

Just open a notepad window, and type the html code, and save it as .html file instead of .txt extension. This is it, you created a webpage.

Please note as the webpage becomes more complicated and has many files of different types, building a webpage from raw html code will be a daunting task. Even if you are a programming, and know how to write with HTML code, it well take lots of effort, time, and aggravation to build a webpage of little complexity.

So, in your case, it is a wise decision to buy a software with graphic interface in order to learn faster and be more productive.

Even with a software, it will take a while and lots of practice to be comfortable with building web pages.

As a beginner, there is an excellent solution to building your own web pages ,without knowing any HTML codes, and without even buying any software I was mentioning before.

Here is the solution:

Some web hosting service providers offer with your web hosting account, what is called as web page templates.

Usually the cost is very reasonable, and many times you can pick a hosting package that includes web page templates.

That only costs couple dollars per month unless your web hosting provider is charges more than most web hosts providers.

A webpage / website template is a wizard like application where you fill in text, images, files in few steps and when you click finish, you web page will be ready.

George Chamoun, Web designer
http://www.HowToUseHtml.com/?062105

How to Hire a Web Designer/Programmer for Your Website

2005-06-19T23:41:00.000-07:00

By Thomson Chemmanoor

Hire a designer or a programmer for your website is a daunting for any business entrepreneur. Remember that you’re the important part of a design process. It is your decision makes the final outcome or success of a website. Your website is a one which works better and sells your products and have good feel for the visitors.

Why hire a designer or a programmer?

You might ask this question yourself when there are 100’s of easy to build software on the internet. But building a website yourself and a professional designer makes a lot of difference. The designer put in years of expertise in building your website. He knows all the web standards as well as a professional look after it is done. Apart from that business owners don’t find time and patience in maintaining and promoting the site. Since the business person is occupied with this own business needs. What are the important aspects while choosing a website designer/programmer?

1) Check the credentials of the designer, is he reliable or will the designer will leave half way of your project. Check with the designer previous employer or clients. They could give you a good feedback on it.

2) Choose the designer carefully going through the previous work or portfolio. Don’t go ahead with the designer unless seen the designer portfolio. Viewing the portfolio you will get an idea what kind of quality and professionalism you can expect from him.

3) Next step after you are satisfied with the designer is asking for a proposal from him. Ask the designer is there any kind of terms and conditions before starting the project. If so make sure does that work for you too. Some designer may ask for a upfront for the project usually it is 25-40% of the entire cost of the project. Ask the designer what mode of payment he would prefer.

4) Once the terms and conditions are fixed then go ahead and ask for a prototype of the website.

5) Once the designer comes up with the prototype ask for revision unless you get satisfied and think this is what you where looking for.

6) Finalize the website and go ahead upload on to the server.

Follow these steps and increase your chances of successfully hiring a web designer/ web programmer who meets your needs and those of your project.

This article was written by Thomson Joseph a freelance website designer and website promotion expert websites - http://www.website-promotion-expert.com, http://www.digitallabz.com/hire-a-designer.html, digitallabzinfo@yahoo.com

Successful Flash Tips

2005-06-16T22:00:00.000-07:00

By Nathan Sire

Ever browse across a website that took ten million years to load or required a road map to find the navigation bar? True, Flash Technology might impress your clients till their eyes fall out. However, Flash Technology requires a skillful balance between gaudy and elegant. We’ve composed some advice on how to make use of Flash Technology without turning your mainstream prospects away.

Navigation Bars

Unless your website tests prospects on their IQ, don’t require a user to jump through hoops, just to find the menu. Not finding the menu within the first three seconds will prove deadly on your sales conversion ratios. Why, you ask? One reason, most all other websites shorten users’ attention spans by providing quick content and navigation. If your website takes longer than the average attention span, to find anything, traffic will click through to the next website. How do I know? Well, I’ve clicked through to the next website on many occasions and someone lost my sale.

Hybrid Versus Traditional

Traditional Flash websites work great for certain businesses (full flash). These types of websites include full Flash tabs without HTML. The entire interface relies on Flash. Hybrid Flash websites use a combination of Flash and HTML. Hybrid websites work better for SEO and Marketing. Traditional work better for artistic websites targeting select and numbered clients. The best choice really depends on your business. You must know your target audience. A traditional flash website will not work well when selling hosting packages to mass numbers. When in doubt, choose a hybrid design. The artistic effect might not rate as high but you won’t loose any market attention.

Intros

The best flash intro is a short flash intro. Flash intros work effectively by burning an image into the users’ minds. They serve as quick attention grabbers to pull someone into the website. Long and lengthy introductions may look nice but they take too long to load. Long intros will deter some visitors away from your website. The perfect example of an effective introduction can be found at (http://www.ericnordstrom.net). It answers the questions of what and who in the first few seconds. It also auto-forwards the visitor to the main content page after completion. Also be sure to include a skip button for returning visitors.

Conclusion

Now you know what elements to seek when you build your first flash website. Always keep the menu system a click away. Research your target audience to examine the advantages of a traditional full flash website. Skip the intros unless you keep it short and sweet. Follow these general guidelines and your website will be a success.

Copyright 2005 Nathan Sire

Nathan Drew Sire, President of Captain Media, services the web design/development market. He's been developing code since the age of eight. You can read more about his company at http://www.captainmedia.com or contact him at info@captainmedia.com