Posts Tagged ‘web design’
A website is just like a canvas – unless and until you fill it with the right colors and promote it in the right way to the right people, it will never make a successful painting! This is why a great web design or a well-planned search engine optimization strategy is so important for your website to stand apart from the host of existent online websites. It is also important to have top-quality graphic design (such as logos, etc.) to help your company climb a step higher than what your rivals, offering the same range of products, have been able to achieve. Building a great brand image through great web design and graphic design services and retaining what has been achieved through SEO services is what defines success online today. Lots of online portals offer these services as a one-stop store, though the quality and genuine authenticity of the services are often subjects of wary inspection by prospective clients.
A creative, out-of-the-box web design is what seems to be the first step towards creating a globally successful website. Without the basic design of the site being effective and influential, lead generation and sales is a distant dream. Web design should always be done with a great deal of professional help. This too, differs in quality or specific service type based on the region or company being sought for help.
Strategic and well-executed SEO services will not only help you gain better visibility but will also make the investment made in the designing of your website worthwhile. From basic mail marketing to long-term link exchange and content optimization techniques, the scope of search engine optimization is vast and detailed. What you need is some professional help. Online one-stop service portals such as Dynofusion Design can help you execute precise internet marketing strategies on great lead generating web designs created only for you!
So before you start thinking of an online website for your business, thoroughly search for the best professional design and marketing services to hire! Without these, your website is as good as a dead duck!
If you’re just starting to build your website now is the best time to start planning your search engine optimization and search engine marketing strategy. The best time to introduce the SEO planning of a website is when the web design is ready and the site is ready to be launched but there is no content yet for the site. Just before the site launches is the time to bring in an SEO consultant to provide some SEO services . After the design of the website is done an SEO consultant can give you suggestions about what keywords and key phrases you need to add into the site HTML as Meta tags and where those tags should go. As soon as the site is tagged and the design and navigation has been tested it’s time to add in content. Having SEO content on your site from the start will give your web site a huge advantage over older websites that might already have a bit of a following but haven’t had any SEO services by a professional SEO consultant.
If you have an existing site that is due for an overhaul or a design revamping then you should also consult a professional SEO consultant before the site is redone to make sure you can have a good idea of what SEO services that you need. Cosmetic work on the site is so important that your site doesn’t look outdated but changing up the content on the site will be very important. Most of the traffic that websites get comes from searches done by people who use Google or another search engine to look for website dealing with a particular topic.
You want your site to be at the top of or at least near the top every search that is done by a search engine for the topic that your site is about. In order to achieve that you need an SEO professional to write great search engine optimized content before the site launches. If your existing site has had the same content on it for over six months you should get an SEO professional to write new content. Changing the content is a great search engine marketing strategy to gain new web site traffic and improve your search engine ranking.
When it comes to your business website design, careful attention should be paid to every detail to make sure it performs well to serve its purpose. Here are five crucial rules of thumb to observe to make sure that your website performs up to that standard.
1) Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you first arrive at a website. They normally have a beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.
2) Don’t include too many banners
Eye tracking studies indicate that, while such banners might distract visitors to a website, modern visitors are accomplished at not noticing the content that the banners contain. Unless your business plan is advertising, the last thing you want to do with your visitors’ time on your site is to direct their attention away from your content (and the action that the content is designed to achieve).
3) Make sure your site navigation is intuitive
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.
4) Provide a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!
5) Avoid using audio on your site
If you are determined to have sound automatically load, be sure that it a) makes a genuine contribution toward meeting your objectives, b) allows the site’s visitors to control and volume levels and c) is not on a page on which all of their attention needs to be focused upon reading the exquisite copy. If your audio does not meet all of these criteria, err on the side of caution and disable it.
Your http://www.99sites.us/>Internet business will benefit from attention to details such as these.
Maybe you are a new Internet marketer who doesn’t match my previous level of ignorance. I often think, “If I had only known then what I know now.” By “then,” I mean my early year or two in my adventure into the jungle of Internet business. I could fill an entire book with the stupid mistakes I made due to ignorance. It’s a bit embarassing.
Occasionally I try to keep new online marketers from copying my mistakes. Tips that if I had known them at the time I began my first Internet business venture I could have started making a decent income sooner, could have spent less time by doing it the right way the first time and wouldn’t have to tell embarassing stories about myself now. I hope you find these useful.
My advice for today is this: Assume that any page of your website is likely to be a landing page.
You see, I believed that every visitor to my websites would come first to my home page. Those prospects would diligently read every well-crafted word, and then they would use that information to thoroughly explore the rest of the site in the order that I happened to find logical.
If I had been smart enough to hire a professional to explain to me how my prospects would actually discover my site and move around it, my sites would have been designed very differently. I guess I should have either hired a consultant or used an online marketer to professionally design a web site for me that could have met my expectations much sooner.
Here are some things that would have saved me a great deal of time and money in the long run:
* Understand that search engines do not view the Internet as a collection of websites; instead they see a collection of individual pages
* Recognize that each page on a web site should be created with the goal of achieving the ultimate purpose of the site (obtaining the desired action on the part of the visitor)
* Track real human beings to see how they move through my website, which is often very different from the way that I expected that they would
* (And this one is most directly related to the tip…)Know that collectively, for most business sites, the “inside” pages of a site receive more traffic than the home page
* Recognize that an aesthetically pleasing page is not the same as a productive page
* We should all “bite the bullet” and spend some money wisely in the early stages of our business development, because that will lead to greater income sooner than if we behave as the iconic Mr. Scrooge
I actually love the process of designing the architecture of business websites, now that I actually understand it, so I probably would still not do what I recommend to you: Hire a professional Internet marketer to build yours. But, when I build my first site, I needed to learn so much more before I moved on to the fun part–fun part for me, at least. However there are lots of things that I should have outsourced (and that I now do) when I was first beginning.
In the cut and thrust, ever competitive market that is web design, there is always a good deal to be had. This is especially the case in the current financial climate as the recession has meant that many people are “tightening their belts” so to speak. The web design service industry has felt the full force of the credit crunch in the same way that many other business sectors have. As a consumer you can turn this to your own advantage by ensuring that as well as having a website designed and built that you also have six months of web promotion thrown in for free.
Now I am not a web designer; I actually run stuttering cure speech courses here in the UK and I also help people who have a low self-esteem to be able to increase self-confidence.
Some of the readers of this article may feel that it is some what cheeky to request this free web promotion service however my attitude is quite simple “If you do not ask you do not get”.
Attempting to buy a car which is something that my dad did a couple of weeks ago takes you through a similar process. He had read about how badly the car dealers are doing and decided to bag himself a bargain. He knew the car he wanted and stated that he was only willing to pay a certain price, a price which was well below the car dealer’s asking price. He went around a number of car garages and put in his offer, eight of the dealerships turned down his offer but the ninth accepted it.
The point that I am trying to get across here is that the majority of web designers will not be happy to offer you a deal on these terms however there will be at least one person or company that will. It is important to ensure however that the person who accepts to build you a website and is happy to throw in some web promotion for free is capable of producing the goods and isn’t just some fly by night novice.
OK, so you have come round to the idea that you need an internet prescence. You have started to come to terms that the internet is the future of advertising. The old favourites of paper based business directories, newspaper adverts and media advertising may soon be a thing of the past. We all have to move with the times if we are to continue to succeed.
What is often scary for the new website owners are all of the initial costs involved with setting up a site. I will never forget just how expensive I thought it was when I had my first website built nearly ten years ago. It was based on the subject of speech therapy for stammering and I was investing in this new site at a time when I did not have a great deal of money. I have to say that it has proven to be one of the best investments that I have ever made. The website certainly enabled a lot of people to find out about the stuttering therapy service that I offer.
The initial costs of setting up a website include paying for the design, the domain and the web hosting. Then there are the ongoing costs of web promotion; there is of course no point in having a top notch website if nobody ever visits it.
So how can we ensure that we receive a web design service at an affordable price? Well as in many businesses it is not what you, it is who you know. It is a good idea to ask your friends and colleagues if they know of any professional web designers, especially if these friends or colleagues already have a website. This way you may be able to secure a deal on “mates rates”.
A second idea is to search for freelance web designers rather than going to a web design agency. Many up and coming web designers start up on their own on a self-employed basis and are normally happy to offer a discount whilst they are building up their portfolio.
I don’t know if every web marketer is similar to me. “I wish I had known then what I know now,” I frequently lament. By “then,” I mean my early year or two in my adventure into the jungle of online business. I could easily fill a large book with significant things that I didn’t know how to do but that I attempted regardless. In truth, I could fill a multi-volume set. It’s a bit embarassing.
Occasionally I try to keep new marketers from repeating my foibles. I identify one or two simple realities of the online business world about which I had been ignorant and that cost me a lot of money, a lot of wasted energy or, usually, both. I hope you find these useful.
Here is today’s life-changing recommendation: Every page on a website is a landing page.
You see, I believed that every visitor to my websites would come first to my home page. Those prospects would diligently read every well-crafted word, and then they would use that information to thoroughly explore the rest of the site in an order that I happened to find logical.
If I had found an expert who would teach me how web users actually locate my website and how they behave once they get there, my websites wouldn’t have looked the way they did those early attempts. The sites may not have been as aesthetically pleasing, but they might have earned a respectable income. I guess I should have either hired a consultant or had someone with Internet marketing experience professionally design a web site for me that could have met my expectations much sooner.
My business would have reached a decent level of success much sooner if I had known these things:
* Most people find their destinations by using search engines
* Search engines don’t really care about entire web sites; they think of the web as a huge collection of independent pages
* Each individual page on your site and mine should be authored in a way that it contributes to the websites main purpose (sell, obtain leads, whatever)
* Having tracking software that would allow me to diagnose how real people move through my site’s pages
* More quickly discovering that, cumulatively, the interior pages of my website receive more first time visits than my home page
* Distinguishing between a pretty website and a productive website
* Learning that spending some money early on can earn a lot more money down the road–and sooner rather than later
I truly enjoy building websites, so that is not something that I would have wanted to have outsourced. Meanwhile, there were plenty of other tasks that I could have had done professionally to allow me more time for my learning.
There are many tools available to a webmaster to analyse website traffic, some free like Google’s Analytics that will allow them to monitor the number of visitors, see what pages have been accessed and the length of time visitors have spent accessing the website and a whole lot more.
However, despite the vast amount of detailed information that can be collected what will always be missing is information that will tell the webmaster what the visitor was thinking. Did they dislike the website? Was the layout easy to understand or confusing? Was the website easy to use and did they find the information they wanted?
A website may be generating sales but why are there some people that are visiting the website and not buying anything? Was it because they didn’t like what the product or service were or was it that they couldn’t find what it was that they wanted?
Using web based surveys webmasters have a simple and accurate method of answering these types of questions. Direct feedback from the website visitors means that there is no longer the need to guess, just ask the visitors how they found the site and if they found what they were looking for.
With an online survey webmasters can find out:-
- How often do people visit the website?
- How did they find the website?
- Are they accessing the website for business or pleasure?
- Were they able to find the information they were looking for?
- How easy did they find navigating the website?
- Would they recommend the website?
A good website survey will be concise and will collate information that once analyzed will provide valuable information to help improve the website.
An alternative to a traditional survey would be to embed one or two survey questions within the website after specific procedures. For example, ask visitors at the end of the registration process if they found the procedure quick and easy; or after ordering an item ask if they found the ordering procedure and payment methods straightforward. To ensure that the questions don’t become annoying to regular visitors the website can be programmed so that the questions are only asked once per registered user.
Website surveys take the mystery out of working out what visitors think of a website and using Online Survey Software they are quick and easy to design and once implemented will really become the webmaster’s assistant.
To see a sample website survey please follow the link: Sample Website Survey
Web design tip number one – Use black text on a white background.
Web design that converts visitors into customers must make sure that any sections of text greater than 2 lines uses dark text, preferably black text on a white background. For blocks of text in your web design you need to forget about fancy font colours and dark backgrounds in your attempt to achieve visual appeal. Your web design should stick with the basics of making your text easy to read on the screen.
The web design reasons for it include…
In order for you to be able to sell to your potential customers.
- It is important to make it easy for people to absorb the information on your web site. This is done with a clean well designed structure andand colours.
- Research indicates that having more than a 15% background tint will negatively impact on the effectiveness of your sales message.
- Your web design needs to be all about conversion and less about the branding.
Small business will benefit from the simplicity of selecting a dark text on a white background for main body copy section on their sites. It will be the most effective and least expensive strategy in most situations.
Web design tip number two – Research your keywords.
Research of the most commonly searched keyphrases used to find your product or service is a critical step. Then once you know what they you need to make sure that these keywords occur on your website.
Being found in the search engines is the best way to grow your business sales.
Web design is often a less about the design, and more about the copy, because if the copy does not contain the frequently searched for keywords/phrases, then you are never going to get in front of a customer. So make sure that you know which keywords you should be being found for and place these strategically in your text throughout the site.
Tip Three – Make your web site visually appealing.
Some graphic designers may be worried that black text on a white background is inconsisitent with making your web site visually appealling.
The truth is that your web site needs to be found in the major search engines and for your information to be clearly communicated (i.e. easily read). But you must also at all times present your information in a professional manner to engender the customer trust required in order to purchase from you for request information from you.
By the following of these three simple rules above in your business, you will benefit from more sales leads, signups and sales conversions from your web design.
There are many tools available to a webmaster to analyse website traffic allowing them to monitor the number of visitors, see what pages have been accessed and even the length of time each visitor spends accessing the website.
However, despite the vast amount of detailed information that can be collected what will always be missing is information that will tell the webmaster what the visitor was thinking. Did they like or dislike the site? Was the layout easy to understand or just plain confusing? Was the website easy to use and did they find the information they wanted?
A website may be generating sales but why are there some people that are visiting the website and not buying anything? Was it because they didn’t like what the product or service were or was it that they couldn’t find what it was that they wanted?
Web based surveys provide webmasters with an accurate method of answering these types of questions. Direct feedback from the website visitor is straight from the horse’s mouth, no longer is there the need to guess, simply ask each visitor how they found the site and if they were able to find what they were looking for.
With an online survey webmasters can find out:-
- How often do people visit the website?
- How did they discover the website?
- Is it for business or pleasure that they are interested in the website?
- Did they find the information they were looking for?
- How easy was it for them to navigate the website?
- Would they be willing to recommend the website to others?
A good website survey will be concise and will collate information that once analyzed will provide valuable information to help improve the website.
An alternative to a traditional survey would be to embed one or two survey questions within the website after specific procedures. For example at the end of the registration process the visitor can be asked if they found the procedure quick and easy; after ordering an item they could be asked if they found the ordering procedure and payment methods to their liking. To ensure that the questions don’t become repetitive to regular visitors the website can be programmed so that the questions are only asked once per registered user.
Website surveys take the mystery out of working out what visitors think of a website and using Online Survey Software they are quick and easy to design and once implemented will really become the webmaster’s assistant.
To see a sample website survey please follow the link: Sample Website Survey