Tag Archives: Website Design

Best Designed Websites

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Best Designed WebsitesWe just met with a company who has a really nice web site. It is professionally done, conveys all of the information that is needed about the company, all pages seem to work and they have someone who maintains the site from a 3rd party company.  In our judgement it might qualify as one of the best designed websites, except for one aspect which was the reason they asked to meet with me. They do not have any tracking information at all on their site so they have no idea of how many hits they are getting each day or month for that matter and they have no information about who is visiting their site. They might be missing leads and potential customers. Every web site should have some form of tracking either visible or invisible to gather this kind of valuable information.

Best Designed Websites – Tracking

There are many reasons to have some kind of a stat counter on a web site. Even just basic information such as how much traffic they are receiving will help convince management that the site is worthwhile spending advertising $ on. What browsers are being used. What search engines are being used to find this web site. Where are the visitors coming from and are they returning. How long do they stay on the site? Which pages do they spend time on and how are they moving about the site? All of these questions and more can be easily answered. Use a simple tracking code placed on every page of the site.

Best Designed Websites – SEO

Know how many visitors you are receiving. Focus on bringing more traffic to your web site and be able to track it. When you make changes you will be able to see just how much impact the change has. This is extremely important if you are attempting to demonstrate results for your management team. It help justify the money and time that is being spent.

SEO or search engine optimization is all about the art of having content that the search engines index. The best designed websites must have this attribute in order to garner traffic from real customers. Don’t forget that the best designed web sites also containing tracking tools as well.

For more information  about this topic as well as designing a web site for your company, call us today. Click here of more posts about this subject.

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Web Design Ideas

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Web Design IdeasDeveloping a web site from scratch is really not required these days unless you are really want to have something unique and different. If you do, be prepared to spend lots of money and time getting the web site just right. There are lots of web design ideas available with templates to use that are already written. However many people find that using an existing template where you only need to configure and add content is the best web design idea.

A template is just that. It is a pre-designed set of web pages that can be configured to some extent. Once you add your own content including images, it becomes your own uniquely designed web site. As a result it sets you apart from all others. The message is that it is all about the original content including images and videos if you choose to add them. The template just gives you somewhere to start.

Web Design Ideas – Use A Content Management System

We use a template which will pre-config your pages. Use a content management system to manage all of your content. Editing, storage as well as a presentation to search engines and browsers. This site uses WordPress. It is a very popular CMS system, easy to use, and set up. Web site owners can focus on content. They do not need to have much in the way of computer skills.

WordPress has thousands of themes and plugins. They help you achieve whatever objectives you are looking for without having to re-invent the software. Simply select your theme or template, select and configure any plugins you want to use. You are ready to begin adding new content.

Web Design Ideas – Write your Own Content

We find small business owners like the idea of being able to add a few pages. They can make changes without having to call their web site designer. They do not need to pay for changes that they want to make. This feature can be both a time saver as well as an expense saver as well.

Some web designers will charge for every change made. This can cause web site owners to avoid updating their content. If they can write their own content, add pages and posts they have a great deal more flexibility. A content management system does this for them without their being a need to have a programming background.

Focus on the content and let the IT designers focus on the inner workings of the web site which should be minimal once the site is up and running.

For more details about web design, click here.

Cool Web Design

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Cool Web DesignDoes Cool Web Design Work

Fancy websites look great. They may even be considered cool. But does a cool Web design really work in terms of attracting clients and completing sales.? The bottom line for any company is whether an investment generates additional business. Designing and developing a website is really no different. The amount of money and time you spend developing your website needs to generate the customer demand that you’re looking for. It must meet the overall objectives of your company. All web sites need to be indexed by search engines. They need to rank high enough to be seen by people searching for your topic. And they need to be able to convert the reader to an interested customer. A tall order that goes far beyond what might be considered to be cool.

What About Search Engine Traffic

The writer believes that a cool website is not necessarily the answer. Design the website so that the search engines can find it. They need to index it for the search terms that relate to your companies services and products. The cool website with lots of graphics may not achieve those results. The search engines cannot properly index your website when there are lots of graphics.

Focus on search engine optimization or SEO as it is commonly referred to. This means having lots of original high-quality content that describes the services and products that you provide from your company. The search engines will index this content. They return it in the search results to people who are looking for these kinds of services and products.

You may also decide to have a cool looking website with lots of graphics. But don’t forgo the SEO approach to ensure the search engines will properly index your content. Proper indexing will deliver those results to people who are searching for the services and products that you sell.

Continuous Updates

Another common mistake is to forget about your website. After all it is online and available to customers to look at. This is so wrong.

Continuously update existing content, add new content, and keep it interesting for your readers and customers. If you do not follow this practice you will find that less and less traffic is directed to your website.

Add new content on a weekly basis. Try updating existing content. Focus on the older content to maintain its currency. Keep it related to your company’s products and services. The search engines love this. Maintain and update your website on a regular basis. They will reward this effort by improving the indexing of your content in better search results. This usually means more customers and more sales which is what every company is looking for!

For more web design details, click here.

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Web Development

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Web DevelopmentWeb development Set Your Objectives

All of the posts on this website are intended for use by business managers and owners of small businesses. The first objective of web development is actually to develop the objectives for your website. What are you trying to accomplish by having a website? Are you providing information to your customers? Is your web site to be interactive? Do you actually complete sales using your website? Can customers contact you through your web site? How often will you need to update this website? Who will keep it current and will you have someone in your company provide this effort or will you contract it out to an IT contractor?

While some of these questions may seem basic, they have a huge impact on the amount of web development that will be undertaken and the overall design. As your company expands and grows so will your website. You may start off with a basic informational website and contact generation website and then later on expand to actually be able to take orders from your customers online.

Finally the answers to your questions will help to determine how large a budget you will need to set aside to support your web development and to also keep it current and up to date.

Define Your Goals for Web Development

Once you have set the objectives for your website, the next step is to set specific goals. These goals should be set in line with the amount of time it will take to develop your website. Factor in the cost of development and your budget. Finally don’t forget to set aside a budget for ongoing support and maintenance. Don’t forget the additional development that you may need from time to time.

An outdated web site can turn customers off. They may just go to another if the information you are providing is not current and up to date.

Web Development

Decide on Degree of Outsourcing for your website. Will you hire resources with the requisite skills in IT and website development? Or will you hire an outsourcing firm to develop your website and maintain and support it over the long-term?

These decisions will depend on the amount of control that you want to have. Web development, budget, and availability of the expertise that you need to maintain your website are factors to consider.

You may also want to have a conversation with someone knowledgeable in the business of developing web sites. Web development can be kept pretty straightforward without a lot of bells and whistles to avoid blowing the budget.

For more on web site design discussions, click here.

Web developer for small business

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Web developer for small businessWe offer small business web sites for customers who want to write their own content and just need someone to set the infrastructure up for them so they can get started. Many customers prefer this approach because they want to retain control over their content and the look and the feel of the web site. We have the perfect inexpensive suite of services that will match this need. Just check out our services on the top right hand side of the page and click one of the links.

On the other hand if you need more support and really would like to have someone set up your web site and also add your content for you following guidelines supplied by you, we can do that as well for your business. We are a web developer for small business and can provide these services as well.

We may need to understand your business, obtain pictures of your products etc and descriptions of your services. This is still a basic blog since it is really only providing information to people who land on your site and probably will include a call to action suggesting that they get in touch with your business team for more detailed information, products, quotes or to set up an appointment

Attracting Customers to Your Site

Once you have a site set up, the next question is how do people find you online? There are many ways. Most business owners employ several kinds of advertising methods in addition to having a web site.

This includes placing your web sites URL on everything. Include business cards, advertisements on radio, TV or the newspaper as well as flyers etc. Placing your websites URL on all invoices is another method, and any emails that you send out.

More and more customers are using their smart phones to search for products. They also use tablets and iPads. They use one of the search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo to search for various topics. If your web site does not rank well on the index that the search engines establish, these potential customers are never going to find you. Your web page will be ranked well down the list on pages of results that will never be looked at.

How Can a Web Developer Help to Search Engine Optimize Your Site?

There are lots of companies out there advertising all kinds of services and results. From twitter followers to Facebook friends etc. The only real answer to being indexed well is to have high quality content. Content that provides the customer with what he or she is looking for. The content also must discuss the topics that people search for as well.

For example we are a provider of basic web sites that give small business owners and opportunity to manage their own web site. They do not need to make a huge investment in time or money. Some people will search for web site developers. However this page probably would not rank well since we do not use that term very much in the post.

This post is focused on web developer for small business. Hopefully the search engines will pick that up and rank this page well when a search for this term is made. Then the customer has an option to select our link or not from among the top ten results provided.

This is an additional service that we can provide to you in addition to a basic web site for your business . We can bring many more potential customers to your business which can be converted into paying customers. For more information about our service and web developer needs for small business, call us or send an email requesting additional information.

For more about website design, click here.

Design Business Web Site

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Small Business Web Sites to match your budget

Small Business Web Sites to match your budget

Designing a business web site can be relatively easy with today’s online tools and processes. Chose the domain name. This is the name of your website that you will provide users, customers and acquaintances. This website name is commonly referred to as the URL. It is the name of your online Company website. Then you need storage space and a content management system or CMS.

Storage Space or Web Hosting

Obtain storage space on a server located somewhere in what today is called the cloud. There are many companies that provide storage space. They can be located anywhere in the world. All you need is the IP address of the server which you will use when you are setting up your URL.

Obtain a Domain Name

Once you have your storage space and address you can then point your domain name towards the server. It will provide the storage that you have reserved. You also need to make sure that there is something on the server to respond to customers or browsers of your web site.

Now you have a domain name that is pointing to a server that has no information on it. The next step to design a business web site is to install a content management system. This system manages all of your data including text, images, and any charts, etc. that you might be using on your website.

A typical content management system is WordPress. WordPress is a very popular content management system used by millions of websites around the world. It is user-friendly, easy to install, and once set up is extremely easy to update content and to add new content for your readers.

Design Business Web Site Services

We offer all of these services for you and will install and build your website to your design. Once the website including the content management system is installed and the first few pages created. Business owners have the option of updating their own content at their convenience or having us provide and develop additional content for them.

We like to use information that they provide in terms of pictures, images, videos, and text from your company. This helps ensure that everything is accurate and portrays the image that you’re looking for regarding your online presence.

As we mentioned business owners can update their own content or have us do it for them.  These content management systems are easy to use once set up. There is no need to have a lot of IT knowledge. For more information about creating a business website, maintaining a business website please send us an email or give us a call to discuss in more detail.

For small business ideas and suggestions, click here.

Basic small business website strategy

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small business website strategyAll websites, regardless of whether they are for large companies or small businesses should always have a set of objectives. They should have a strategy for achieving those objectives. The objective should be geared towards whatever it is that they’re trying to achieve with the website. It should support your objectives to increase sales or to drive business to the company.

One area the web developer should pay particular attention to is the quality of the content, the freshness of the content, and the ability for the search engines to index their content.

We have all encountered websites where the content is almost next to useless. These have been written just to obtain search engine results. But they do not offer anything to the consumer or anyone searching on the Internet for a particular topic.

The search engines are trying to de-index these websites and this is the main reason why a website should have excellent content and why the content should be kept fresh.

Old content can quickly become out of date and as far as the search engines are concerned will be given a lower index rating as a result. In addition, if this content is about your products or services, business owners will want to ensure that the content is kept up-to-date and currently reflects the services and products that you offer.

We have developed the following strategy for keeping our content up-to-date on our own websites. Our websites are principally aimed at providing information to the consumer and therefore we recognize the value of that content is kept up-to-date and accurately reflecting current issues as well as information that consumers are looking for. Here’s our strategy.

Small Business Website Strategy – New Content

Depending on the subject of the website and reader interest, new content will be added at least twice a month and in some cases once a week to provide readers with new information about the subjects they are interested in. This also tells the search engines that new content is available to be indexed for consumers conducting searches on these particular topics on a regular basis.

Update Content

Older content should be reviewed and updated on regular basis to keep it current and fresh. There are several ways to do this. Our decision has been to focus on older content that is short duration. We also focus on older content that has not been touched for some time.

Posts are sorted based on size from smallest to largest. The smallest post is updated by adding more content. We increase it in size compared to the next smallest post. On average our posts will become larger overtime. At the same time, all punctuation and grammatical errors are corrected.

Tweak Content

Some of our posts already pretty good and just need to be updated. We want to show that they are still current to the search engine crawlers that crawl websites every second of every minute of every day. All posts are sorted based on the last time that they were updated. We then update the oldest post. We may add a few comments or improve the content of the post in some manner.

All of this work is aimed at keeping our website current. We are following these steps typically once a week or once every two weeks depending on the website.

Web Site Designer

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Web Site DesignerWebsite design is a combination of technical capability, content creation, and artistic ability. We will examine each of these areas and give you our opinion on what each entails and how much time or money you should consider spending on each when you are a small business operator and just getting started. Most small business owners just want to have a website that advertises their business, provides contact information, and tells customers what services and products they offer. There can be much more to a website as we will discuss, and website designers need to know the details of SEO.

Technical Capability

Technically, your website needs to work and deliver content to the reader and perform whatever functions you build into it, i.e., contact forms, email, ordering, and cash management, to name a few. There needs to be a domain name that resembles as much as possible the name of your company or the business that you are in. It should also have a country reference. If you are in the US, you probably want a .com URL; if you are in Canada, you probably want a .ca URL. Next, you need to arrange for hosting. This is where your content will be saved and referenced when someone goes to your link.

The next major element is some sort of content management system. This system should make it easy for the nonprogrammer to upload content and to arrange their pages and posts so that readers can view them. It should also have several widgets and templates available so that you can customize your website along with several pictures or videos about your products, your services, and your company. We use WordPress for our content management system, which allows us to set up your website and then turn it over to the customer if desired to add their content. We can add the content for you as well if needed.

Website Designer – Content Creation

Your website needs content for several reasons. First and foremost, a business needs to tell readers what services or products they are offering. It is your statement about what you can provide to the readers and an encouragement for them to drop by your store or call you to discuss the services that you might provide to them. Secondly, this is where you also talk about who you are, some information about your company and how to contact you. For most companies and small businesses, this is all you need unless you want to pursue two other elements.

One of these is to monetize your site, and by this, we mean to allow your customers to place purchase capability on your website so that customers can place an order and pay for it on your website. This functionality takes you to another level of the website. Something like adding PayPal is relatively easy to do, while adding other payment methods, inventory control, etc., will take more time and effort.

The second major item of content to consider is increasing the probability that the search engines will index you properly for all of the typical search terms that customers might use when searching for your products and services. For example, if you are selling widget X, and your company website does not mention widget X anywhere on the site or with a combination of words that might be used, consumers searching for this term will never come to your site because you are not search engine optimized.

We can help you with Search Engine Optimization or SEO!

Website Designer – Artistic Ability

Finally, the last item is artistic ability. There are a lot of differing opinions about this area. Some people feel that websites need to be elegant with lots of pictures, etc., while others feel that you just need the facts. The bottom line is that it should be pleasing to the eye, and a little color does help. Business owners can spend thousands of dollars on a website, making it fancy and colorful; however, do you get your ROI for doing this? We do not think so, and that is why we do not promote spending a great deal of money on this sort of thing.

If you need a small business website set up for you, call us today or send us an email, and we will get you going with your small business website within a day or two at very reasonable prices.

For more ideas about what to consider in web design, click here.

Small Business Domain

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Small Business DomainSetting up a small business domain and company website does not have to be complicated or expensive.

Business owners have a relatively small budget for online services like websites.  There are really three elements that need to be focused on when you are developing your website and which many small business owners do not want to be involved with simply because they do not have the time.  The first is to obtain a domain name. This is the address or URL that you type into your browser to find the website.  The second service that is required is a place to host your website.  Your domain name will be pointed at this address.  The address represents a server operating somewhere on the Internet which will provide and upload your content to customers that are browsing your small business website.

Small Business Domain – Content Management System

A content management system is a next component that is required in order for you to introduce content onto your website and deliver the content to your customers.  Many content management systems are available however we use a content management system called WordPress for our customers and also for ourselves.  This Web engine or content management system is a great tool for people who are not interested in developing their own HTML code and do not want to spend a lot of time trying to configure their own web pages.

WordPress is much like Microsoft Word in some perspectives with spelling checks and grammar identification and correction.  Many different widgets can be added to provide additional functionality specific to the needs of your website and your company.  Spelling checks, formatting, statistics, and many others can be added.

Small Business Domain – Let Us Build Your Web Site For You

Our company uses WordPress and in fact, this blog is being driven by a WordPress installation.  Your domain name and small business website can also be installed inexpensively with a content management system such as WordPress. Within a few hours, you can be up and running with basic information.  We can also develop and enter content for you. Which includes text as well as images and videos are also possible.

Once the website is up and running, your team can make their own updates. Or arrange for a member of our team to do the updates for you. Many web site owners like this approach as another means of managing their costs. This approach provides then with the flexibility they need to manage their content and their costs.

Give us a call or check out some of our pricing and options and let us build your website for you.

For more posts about setting up small business web sites, click here.

Small Business Web Page Hosting

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Small Business Web Page HostingAfter talking to a number of small business owners, we have found that many of them would like to have a web site. They want one that they can control and do their own updates. One that does not have a huge expense associated with hosting service, web designer costs and so on. They are operating on a tight budget. They need a web page hosting solution that does not cost them a lot of money. It must be easy to update. They just do not have the time to develop the skills they need. Skills to arrange for hosting or to arrange to learn HTML or some other arcane language. But they want to be able to add their own updates. They want to post some of their own content without having to pay a web site manager a fee for doing this.

Small Business Web Page Hosting Solution

This is where our service can really help our customers. Clients can achieve these objectives. For a minimal fee on an annual basis, we can provide you with a location to host all of your content. We can set you up with a service that allows you to post your own content. If you are familiar with any of the traditional word processing engines such as Microsoft word for example you can use our service. It is very easy to use and post your own content including pictures and even short videos.

We will set you up with five pages that are generic in nature. Or we can customize to your business, and provide you with a login id and password. With some initial instruction you are ready to use your own web site to provide information to your customers. It is very easy and one of our customers has just done this and is ecstatic.  Click here to view his site.

If you would like more information about this service and pricing contact us using the contact page on this site.

Content Writing for a Business Web Page

Not everyone has the time or the desire to do even what we just described above. Some business owners feel that their time is better spent focusing on the core business and have someone preparing and uploading content to their website for them. They provide the general content which is then cleaned up and uploaded to their web hosting site. We can manage the site for you.

This package of services is a bit more expensive. But still much less than what larger web design companies are charging. Click here to view our services and let us know if there are any additional questions that you may have.

Your site can be up and running in less than 24 hours. If you already have your domain name, it can be pointed at our hosting service. Redirect of the IP addresses sometimes takes 24 hours to kick in. But then your customers will be able to view your products and services online.

Check out our services and let us know how we can help you get your business web page hosting service online!