Archive for August, 2009
SEO Website Design – Getting it Right the First Time
Posted by rians in General Interest on August 18th, 2009
When Website design first started no real attention was paid to search engine optimization seo. Website designers knew html or an html design program such as Front Page or Dreamweaver. A good designer also had an eye for layout, colors, etc. Search Engine Optimization was little known and less understood. Since the site has been designed much smaller and the Internet, you still have a chance to be discovered, even if you paid little attention to search engine marketing.
This is no longer true. The number of websites available on the web and the amount of competition they provide is mind boggling. This is true for most subjects and areas of business.
For example, last night for fun and I enter the ice MSN, Google and Yahoo the name of my old boarding school, the Institute Seleznyov Laos Rosenberg. Even though the name is in German and I typed it into English language version of these three search engines my search pulled up 99,700 results in MSN, 35,500 results in Google and 276,000 results in Yahoo. Strange, but true. You can imagine how many results show up if you type in something like paving stones, get a new mortgage, or diet secrets. If you would like to know its paving stones, called on the 665,000 Google. Get a new mortgage produces 477,000,000 results in Yahoo and type diet secrets into Bing.com and you will get 13,600,000 results. Competition now!
If you provide services or products in a smaller geographical area was found in the user the opportunity to significantly improve search. Nature is not only a reduction in competition, but there are still opportunities for other business or professional services, such as you have not yet realized the amazing power of Internet advertising.
Succeeding with search engine optimization and getting high rankings in the natural listings for your local business is not difficult. Just need a site to optimize the growth of out-and-out design with nature. This is most easily done if the structure and content into the site from the beginning. This is SEO services Website Design.
Ways To Improve Sales Through Your Website
Posted by rians in General Interest on August 18th, 2009
Anyone who has been marketing online knows that the lifeblood of a business is the traffic of a site. More visitors equal more sales. However, here are some ways that you can tweak your sites with to improve sales without the need to get more visitors.
The first method is to weave in your personal touch in your sales message. Nobody wants to be sold to by a total stranger, but many people will buy what their close friends recommend to them. If you can convince your audience that you are a personal friend who has their best interest at heart, they will be convinced to buy your products. Remember to speak to an individual in your salesletter, not to your whole audience.
The second method is to publish testimonials and comments from your customers. A good idea would be to publish both good and bad comments; that way prospects will be really convinced that these testimonials are real. When prospects see testimonials on your website, they will have the confidence to buy from you because human beings follow the herd mentality; when others have bought and proven it authentic, they will jump on the bandwagon and buy too.
Use visual representations for the problems and solutions that your product offers. Not everyone will read your text copy from the head to the tail, but most people will pay attention to images on your website.
Offer quality bonuses to accompany the product. When you offer bonuses that complement your product, your prospects will feel it’s a very good deal and it would be stupid to miss it. Be sure to state the monetary value of your bonuses so that people will be even more compelled to grab your good bargain.
Lastly, ask for the sale! Many people entice their prospects with the benefits of their product, sell to them with stories of how it has solved many problems, even offered killer bonuses but forget to ask for the sale. Give a clear instruction on how to buy your product (e.g. “click the button to buy now!”).
Ben Brooks Web Design is here to help you to build the exact website you require. With a personable team who are fully committed to creating websites to your exact specifications at a price that suits you…
Web Design Elements You Should Avoid Having on Your Site
Posted by rians in General Interest on August 18th, 2009
As a web designer, you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience. It doesn’t matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world — if your website is poorly done you won’t be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.
When I’m talking about a “good design”, I’m not only talking about a good graphical design. A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components which contribute to a good website design — accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design.
Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I’ve come across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it’s high time to take serious action!
1) Background music
Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and everytime a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I’d just turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, they just add to the visitors burden when viewing your site — users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed.
2) Extra large/small text size
As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics — user accessibility is one big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it’s illegible you won’t be selling anything!
3) Popup windows
Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just close them on instinct everytime each one manages to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and, well, pops up on my screen. Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor’s screen. Your website loses its function immediately!
In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it’s meant to do effectively. Don’t let some minor mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally!
Ben Brooks Web Design is here to help you to build the exact website you require. With a personable team who are fully committed to creating websites to your exact specifications at a price that suits you…
Some SEO Tricks You Should Never Use On Your Website
Posted by rians in General Interest on August 11th, 2009
There has been many changes on the internet since it first all started. You used to be able to do all kinds of little tricks that would improve your rankings. But as with all good things that are easy, it comes to an end. In the many updates of search engines a lot of websites have been slapped into the sandbox. To not end up in the same sinking boat as many of website owners we will go over the things you should know before you do try to promote your website.
-
Do not hide any text. Webmasters used to use this trick to get their sites higher in the search engines, however this is extremely taboo and is the fastest way to get your site banned from the search engines.
-
Cloaking your website for visitors to see one thing and the search engine bots to see another thing.
-
Utilizing duplicate content on your website. This is an easy way to get nowhere. {Duplicate content will not be indexed by the search engines, because in theory it has already been indexed and there is no need for it again}.
-
Linking in a bad neighborhood. Recipocal links don’t really have the clout that they used to, so it is best to only get links that are high quality that dont link to gambling or porn sites.
Lets go ahead and face the fact that you can’t beat Google, the best thing to do is to play by the rules, provide good quality content and hope for the best. If you are interested in learning ways to get more traffic then head over to our site at Orlando Web Design.
Is It Better To Hire A Web Design Firm Or Do It Yourself
Posted by rians in General Interest on August 11th, 2009
Ther are a number of different programs out there that will let you do web design out off the box. There are non-software based products out there where you make the website solely online. Some of these online website makers are Weebly.com and Tripod.com. It can be difficult to know when to hire a firm and when you can design it yourself. The first thing you will need to do to figure this out is to take a look at the size of your project. Are you going to be selling a physical product or an information product? Knowing this before you go into a project, will help you to eliminate possiblities before you waste too much on it. If you plan on starting an e-commerce store then you will have to consider using shopping cart websites like Magento, Xcart, Zencart or SugarCRM. If you do the opposite and do an information product then you might be able to just get by, by using a specialized template.
Now that you have figured out what is going to be needed to get your website up and running, it is now time to jump into picking the software to use to make some of your images and graphics. It is not easy to just start making graphics if you have never done it before. A good easy program to download that will help you a lot is GIMP.
Now that you have a good idea to what it takes to make your own website is to figure out if it is going to be worth it to you to spend the actual time to make it happen. Knowing what you charge on an hourly rate is first thing, then multiply that by 20 and see if what it would cost you in your own sweat equity is going to be worth it. You might find out that after you add up your total hours to complete your site at your hourly rate, it might be better to hire someone else to do the process. To find a company that can give you the attention needed and actually develop your website in the way you want is going to take some time on your part. A good starting ground to finding a company that can do your project is to look around your own town or city. Make sure that after you check out their homepages you take a look at their portfolios. Next best step would be to look at some of the companies that they have made websites for in the past. What you are trying to find out is how they handled the clients needs. Once you have discovered some companies that you like the next best step is to get a sit down meeting with them. Basically you want to do business with people you like.
If you would like to learn more about web design firms take a look at our website at Orlando web design.
Creating a Basic Web Design Template
Posted by rians in General Interest on August 11th, 2009
A “template” is simply a design format which you can apply to all (or most) of the pages in your web site. The first advantage of using a “template” system is that it allows you to make your most important design decisions at the beginning, and then just focus on content. The second advantage is that it allows you to quickly create new pages based on your standard design. The disadvantage is that many template-based websites look homogenized and seem to lack a unique character. Designers who sell templates tend to use the same formats over and over again, insert the same generic images, and use the same techniques. Just as important, templates are often not ready-to-go right out of the box. They almost always need modification, and often modifying a professionally prepared template is difficult because the designer will have used techniques you may not fully understand or are specific to the tools he or she used to create it. So it is preferable not to think of a web template as the kind of thing you buy from an online template store. Rather just think of it as a basic page format that can be used over and over again. The best template is therefore one that uses “standard” techniques that can be modified without the use of specialized tools or programs (like Front Page or Dreamweaver). Creating a Basic Template If you are not familiar with web design, try working with a “bare bones” template to begin with. There are two ways you can go. You can work with basic html and tables, or you can create your basic template with CSS. Since CSS is rapidly becoming the new standard, it is probably better to begin with CSS — especially if you have not yet become used to constructing web pages with tables. CSS stands for “Cascading Style Sheets”, but at the beginning it is not important to understand what that means. What is important is to understand that CSS allows you to create a set of formatting parameters in a “style sheet” (a seperate file) which you then can very easily apply to your individual pages. In other words, you seperate the “style” from the “content”. A simple style sheet can contain just three or four design elements. Here is an example which you are free to copy (right click and “Save target as” to a location on your hard drive, then change its name to “sample-1.css”.) St Louis Web Development Company not only offers great designs but great rates as well. You will be assured of quality result with st louis web development company. St Louis Web Development Company not only values quality but it values its customers as well.
How can you avail innumerable free Website Templates
Posted by rians in General Interest on August 11th, 2009
It has been observed that majority of them have the websites online.In case you do not have a website as on now, it is quit obvious that you will find developing your web presence something that is much more that your skill and experience.When internet was new, to create a website, you needed a thorough knowledge about HTML tags, but this scenario has changed dramatically and you can access various Website Templates available on the internet free of cost.For creating a site you only need to download the template to your computer, then if need do some alterations fore designing and lastly the place in which your website is to be hosted you need to upload it to that server.
Majority of the free templates provider sites offer these templates in return of the link which link backs to their website.These links are hardly noticeable and are placed at the end of the page so there is issue in keeping them.Removing the link back to their site (also known as a “backlink”) would likely violate the terms for using the template, so make sure you give the original site the proper credit for the design you’re using.In case you are adopting free templates, you will not have to pay anything for the backlink but a very good benefit of it is that you will be able to take the advantage of their distinct and interesting designs for free.Make sure you fully read and understand the terms of use before you publish your content using a free website template.
You will find number of websites having ample of templates to be downloaded and therefore for the convenient of their visitors, these websites organize their designs into various groups. With Affiliate Classroom, you can know which different categories of template designs are offered by different websites. Many offer a “most popular” category where you can find all of the most frequently downloaded templates.The other aspects are the ones that spate the layouts through the number of columns on the page, few of them will search for the designs on the basis of the types and some also allow you to find the design on the basis of the color you want.Many of the website templates for free you’ll find on the internet use CSS (cascading style sheets) for their formatting.That means if you’d like to change the fonts, font sizes, colors, column widths and so forth, you’ll have to edit the style sheet in order for the changes to appear on your site.
One of the great things about style sheets is that you only need make the change in one place and the modifications you made will show up on all pages within your site.You can then have a hassle free editing.Even if you do not understand cascading style sheets, you can use the templates as they are without having to edit the style sheet.On the internet, there are many site offering free website templates.You will not have to waste time in designing the layout and do not have to spend anything, if you are using free website templates.
Strategies to get free targeted traffic
Posted by rians in General Interest on August 6th, 2009
All website owners know that there is always room for more traffic. Are you sure that more traffic is the answer to all your problems? The answer is that you don’t want more traffic, you want to get more targeted traffic. Bandwidth costs money and you don’t want it to be wasted on tire kickers do you? Lets delve into getting the TARGETED traffic that you need.
Some great ways to get this traffic is to be guest writer on an authority blog. Doing this will be an all around win for everyone. In everyone I am referring to you, the blog webmaster and the readers of that blog. The blog webmaster wins because getting new and interesting content day in and day out is pretty hard. The person writing a.k.a. – you win because you will be in front of your target audience establishing yourself as an authority. Another bonus for you is that you can get some link juice that will be good for your SEO. When you get a link from a blog with a good page rank you will in turn get some of the link juice from them. The readers win because they are getting fresh content and hearing something from a different angle.
One other way that you can get a lot of traffic is to get active in some forums. Some people think that posting in forums is a wasted effort, however this is not the case. Usually it will take some time to get to be able to use a link in your signature, but it is worth the wait. But being able to actually get links this way is actually so easy once it is setup. It would be a good idea to post something that answers someones question that is knowledgeable.
Another way to get some free traffic toyour website is to post comments on high trafficed blogs. This can be difficult at times because you will want to be one of the first persons to respond with a comment. To do this correctly you have to be online right when the new post is made. To accomplish this use a reader that will update of when new posts are made online.
From these tips you should be able to pull in some more traffic. I didn’t say that this was going to be super simple but with a little bit of effort you should be able to do it correctly and get the traffic your website needs. If you have more questions about getting traffic head on over to the our blog at Orlando Web Design.