Website design and website development don’t just involve building websites for the client’s or for your business. Web design calls for something broader and greater. For a professional website there must be a certain degree of professionalism visible on the web pages. This is possible through effective web development and quality website design.
There are essential pre-requisites for the web development process in order that your website looks professional and user friendly.
1. The website must have sufficient quality content that must be appealing. In case you provide links for downloading, the time taken to download must be small and the procedure easy. The web design must ensure that the background, font, etc must be identical for all the web pages. colors used must be matching and visible.
2. Links on your website must function properly and the web development must be done in a manner that the graphics are clear and a sitemap is provided for easy navigation. The graphics must be used judiciously and the loading time must be small at the web development stage.
3. The content of the website must be updated regularly and the keywords must produce magical results. The website design and the presentation of the content must be done in a clear and formatted manner.
4. The web design must carry contact information and must respond to the visitor queries or feedback efficiently. Web design must be accessible from different browsers and free membership is a must at the promotion stage.
5. The website development must encourage visitor movement through the pages of your website with refreshing content, little or no flashes, pop-ups and animations, little registration and clean HTML.
These are the key things to keep in mind before the web design process. Web development must be done in a way that certain things are kept in mind.
Brower (Netscape Navigator, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc) compatibility is a must for any website
Bullets and numbering blended with animations distract.
Excessive graphics and pop-ups can kill your website
Advertising in excess can lead to a deterioration in quality
Lack of crawler compatibility can harm your SEO
Huge font takes time to adjust with the human eye
Tables and tools must be used effectively
Hence, website development process is indispensable and research must be carried out before finalizing the website design and content. Several times the web design can shoot back to the business if it is not taken care of while web development. Similarly, foreign phrases, heavyweight words, jargons, technical wonders, etc can also kill user interest in your business website. To be professional in your approach, the website design must be simple and the basics must need to be borne in mind.
Only then can your web development strategy create magic. Web design aspects when dealt with professionalism require minimum efforts and maximize your results. This is because sticking to the basics works best in your favour. Hence, website design and web development processes can make or mar your website depending on the professionalism the website development process utilizes.
Website Design for a Professional Website
Is Site Rubix the Best of the Best Website Builder Programs You’re Looking For?
The pain and frustration of giving birth to a website promoting your affiliate products can be so great it can make you quit affiliate marketing altogether!
FTP software, HTML codes, the banners, the videos, and other media you need to post to your website — it can be a never-ending maze if it’s your first time building your affiliate marketing website.
Your website may not see daylight.
It’s of little wonder why user-friendly website builders like Site Rubix are popping out of the net like mushrooms.
The sad part is — most of the user-friendly website builders out there sacrifice functionality and features for user-friendliness! And that isn’t very helpful after all. You and I. and everyone who makes a living on the internet, needs a one of the best website builder programs that combine ease-of-use and jam-packed features that take our websites to the next level.
And Site Rubix claims to be one of the best website builder programs of that kind.
Checking out the eye-dropping Wealthy Affiliate website (they’re the creators of Site Rubix by the way), you can be easily convinced that this is the best website builder programs around.
BUT let’s be objective here. People on the net make tons of money by making excellent first impressions only to fall short on the actual delivery. Let’s not fall for that trap and check out of Site Rubix is indeed the best website builder program it claims to be:
Why Site Rubix Is The Best Website Builder Program Factor 1
Convenient drag and drop function.
And it should be of little wonder why this comes first on our list. If you’re taking 5 days just to build a one-paged website, this will change the way you work with your websites. You can create websites with Site Rubix like you’re copying and pasting a block of text.
Just drag the components you want to have on your website and drop them where you want and need them to be.
Why Site Rubix Is The Best Website Builder Program Factor 2
Build unlimited websites.
Dominate any niche or market just with the sheer number of websites you can create. Combine that with the fact that these websites created through Site Rubix are all professionally designed and easy on the eyes…you’ll surely make a killing online whether you’re monetizing through adsense, adwords, or as an online merchant.
Why Site Rubix Is The Best Website Builder Program Factor 3
Includes web hosting!
You’ve heard that right. And Site Rubix’ webhosting service lives at par with the biggest web hosting names like Yahoo and GoDaddy. You can host up to 3 domain names without even paying an additional dime for it.
Here’s a simple list to wrap things up and give you an idea why Site Rubix stands out even from the best website builder programs around:
- Media Management (Screenshots, Images, Videos)
- Personalized Site, Media, & Current Events Dashboard
- Built in FTP Program for easy File Transfer to a Web Server
- Video & Text Help Tutorials
- Simple Component, Page & Site Duplication
- Template Swapping
- Banner / Header Swapping
- Dynamic, Dragable Menus
- Simple Page Layout Insertion
- Site Management / Page Management
Membership at Wealthy Affiliate offers you a business in a box. You get a research center with keywords, Rapid Writer to write your articles and then there is Site Rubix to build your website. Join thousand of people who are making money through their membership of Wealthy Affiliate as they learn and earn!!
Link Popularity - Google Seo Magic
Link Popularity is very important for ranking high on search engines, is the total number of qualified web sites linking to your web site.Having links pointing to your web site from any other relevant, high-ranking, popular pages (not your own web site) can greatly increase your site’s link popularity rating.Link Popularity is also important for a high keyword search engines page ranking.
Search engines are resistant to manipulation and they are finding a legitimate way to measure the importance of a site.Search engines, like Google check the title bar and the text. If the words in the title bar do not match what is in the text, your site can be marked as irrelevant.
Search engines view each link to your webpage as a vote for your site. The more votes you earn, the higher your site will appear in search results.Building link popularity is the most difficult and time consuming process of search engine optimization (SEO) but it is essential for keyword ranking.
Placing links to your website on other webpages is a great way to increase traffic to your website. But you must use only reliable link popularity service to take care of your traffic needs.Keywords also play a significant role in generating links for you.
Article submission is the one of the most important roll to get good inbound links for your internal pages.Press releases, articles, and quality directories all provide excellent opportunities for strong incoming links to your website. Google seems to be rapidly becoming the most popular search engine, usually even more than Yahoo..Link Building and increasing link popularity are some of the most important SEO factors to achieving top website placement in the major search engines (Google, Live, ASK and Yahoo).
Free traffic can be obtained by search through a directory (Yahoo, Looksmart and DMOZ) or from organic search results. Search engines rank websites using very complicated mathematical equations (known as algorithms). Google’s algorithm, for example, is rumored to have over 500 million variables.
Forum posting can be a good way to get traffic to your website,Article marketing is also an effective way to increase traffic immediately.
If you want more traffic to your site, let me recommend a great program called Google Seo Magic
Four powerful features of Javascript programming language
2) Can be used on client side as well as on server side: As javascript has access to Document object model of browser, you can actually change the structure of web pages at runtime. Due to this, javascript can be used to add different effects to webpages. On the other hand, javascript could be used on the server side as well. For example, in Alfresco which is a popular open source enterprise content management system, javascript is used in creating webscripts. This makes adding custom tasks to alfresco quite simple.
3) Functional programming language: In javascript, function could be assigned to variables just like any other data types. Not only that, but a function can accept another function as a parameter and can also return a function. You can have functions with no name as well. Clearly, this gives you the ability to code in functional programming style.
4) Support for objects: Javascript is an object oriented language. However, the way javascript handles objects and inheritance is bit different from conventional object oriented programming languages like Java. Due to this, javascript supports most of the object oriented concepts while being simple to learn and use.
These are some of the features that give javascript an ability to handle simple as well as complex tasks. Due to this, javascript has remained as the most popular programming language for a long time. It is also a good language for people who want to learn computer programming as it supports object oriented as well as function concepts and to use it, you just need a browser and a text editor.
Making Your Website Load Faster - A Few Tips
Your web pages have great content, a nice design. So why aren’t people clicking through to other parts of the site? In many cases, the problem is the load time. People are abandoning your site for the simple reason that it just takes too long for the thing to load!
How Fast Does It Need to Be?
Fast load times are extremely important: usability studies say users rate them as one of the most important things about a website. Users would much rather use a quick-loading site of average quality than a great site that loads slowly. You’ve no doubt done this yourself at some point.
What’s the limit? Ten seconds according to certain studies. These studies say that over a third of users will leave a website that doesn’t load within that time. You’re probably thinking that in the age of broadband, download speeds don’t matter. But remember that in the US, over half of all Internet users are still using slow dial-up connections (if you are, you have my sympathy). Other countries don’t have quite as many dial-up connections left, but broadband is certainly nowhere near universal.
So, you need to pay attention to the size and download speed of your site. Those 10 seconds on a 56k dial-up connection correspond to about 70KB in page size. That means that your HTML and graphics should add up to 70KB as an absolute limit. That’s quite a stringent requirement, and makes every byte count.
Reduce Graphics.
The first thing you need to do is keep the number of graphics to a minimum. Don’t have graphics for things where text or CSS would do, or where they don’t enhance your information or design significantly. You should consider the web to be a text medium, and justify every graphic.
Compress Your Graphics.
Once you’ve removed the unnecessary graphics, you might consider compressing the ones that remain. Try turning up the JPEG compression higher, or reducing the number of colors. You might try using a GIF, if your graphics don’t have very many different colors.
If you can’t compress the graphics any smaller, you could always resize your graphics to make them smaller!
Clean Up Your HTML.
You’d be surprised just how bloated HTML code can get with unnecessary tags, especially if you use a WYSIWYG editor, or design your site using tables. Design your site using CSS as much as you can, and use HTML Tidy (or another HTML cleaning program) to clean up your HTML. Don’t ignore the extra bandwidth taken by CSS, though, and try to keep that as small as possible too.
In many cases, a simple cleaning-up process can reduce the download size by as much as half - it’s especially effective for pages that contain long articles because of the number of unnecessary tags many editors insert at the start of new paragraphs.
Switch Web Hosts.
Sometimes, despite all your efforts, your site still loads slowly. In these cases, your web host may be to blame. Test from a few different connections and computers to make sure. Try testing the speeds by putting up a completely different page. If it’s consistently bad, then it may be time to move hosts. First email your host about the problem and give them a week or so to fix it, as they may just be having short-term problems.
When you’re switching hosts for speed, look around at sites that are already fast. Find out who they’re hosted by and do a search for Outhosted by [host's name] (with the quote marks).Then, you can check out several sites hosted by that particular host to check out speed.
Why Every Business Needs a Website
Websites are unquestionably the most overlooked means of marketing for local, owner-operated businesses. It is a verifiable truth that every business owner NEEDS a website. In this article, I will explain why every business needs a website and how a business owner can go about obtaining one.
A website is the most important thing that you can invest in to guarantee that your business competes and thrives among the many competitors inhabiting your particular market. An online presence is the most efficient and economical way to reach more people who are seeking exactly what you provide. Furthermore, it will ensure that your business will accrue the profits it should. Possessing an online store, if you are selling products, is the smartest and easiest way to conduct business across the globe. Anyone can acquire a website and it is strikingly affordable compared to other marketing techniques like costly advertising, Yellow Page listings and the list goes on and on.
In today’s market, running a small business of any kind has never been so competitive. Even specialty markets can have an abundance of competitors in the immediate vicinity. By having an online presence, you earn respect, create a sturdy foundation, enable enhanced communication, and reach a larger customer-base. The possibilities of success escalate once you have a website!!!
It is very likely that you have encountered your competitors online. You observe their nice website that reaches many more consumers than businesses who are lacking the one thing that we should never be without - A WEBSITE.
It is much easier to have someone visit your website, than to drive to your store to see what you have to offer. Everything they need to know can be conveniently located on your website and even a way to purchase the product (which is optional of course, but extremely recommended).
Now that you understand the importance of having an online presence, here are a few things that you should consider:
Constructing Your Website
A properly developed website permits your prospective consumers to gather the information they require from the solitude of their own home. There are a few questions that you should ask yourself when deciding on what content to include on your web site. For example, what questions are frequently asked about your product or service? And how, precisely, is the best way to explain that question on your website to clarify it to a potential consumer? This is the information that needs to be accessible on your new website. If you have a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page, directions, how-to’s, etc…, then customer phone calls will be minimal compared to not having an informative website. Let the website give customers’ everything they need to know about your product, how to order, and all other information that may be relevant to your product or service.
Target Market
Visualize yourself as a customer and study all the information on the site. Investigate all the content, its relevancy and importance. Furthermore, ensure that it is attractive enough to catch the attention of visitors who might have inadvertently entered your website. Your target market is any person willing to purchase your product or service. The website should have appropriate information and be regularly maintained for optimal performance.
Visual Aids
There should be visual aids on your site that visually explains your product or service. If you are an artist and are selling your artwork, then you should have photographs of your artwork so prospective buyers can observe what you have to offer. Endeavor to construct the site to be an eye-catching, fun and interesting site that will attract visitors’ attention. A visually appealing website will be more successful than an amateur site because visitors will be more attracted and, consequently, become more interested in your product or service because you have caught their “eye”. For a few examples of professional, artistic websites, please visit americreations.com.
Competing in Today’s Market
To stay on top of an ever-growing market, most business owners try to keep tabs on their competitors and employ professional marketing specialists. By doing so, they ensure that their business will stay competitive and retain the customer-base. Search Engines generate about 95% of all visitors to websites. Your marketing focus should be directed towards optimizing your site with the search engines to increase your keyword rankings. As your keywords begin increase in rank, then you will notice that your traffic will begin to increase.
Benefits of Having an Online Store
Ebay isn’t the only venture that thrives on the internet. Small business owners are finally discovering the power of the worldwide web. Do you have a product that can be shipped? If so, you are the perfect person to obtain an online store. A website can handle everything from attracting potential customers to your product, to accepting credit card payments directly from your website, and to answer all of your customer’s questions about shipping times, prices and information about the product. Having a website can also reduce printing costs normally associated with store catalogs, brochures, postcards, and the countless other methods of advertising from the past.
A website promotes a professional image for any business. Customers anticipate businesses to already have a website and more customers are reaching for their mouse to explore a business service or product prior to purchasing. A website can even help a home business acquire and maintain a professional image.
Having an online presence by acquiring a website is a lucrative approach to promote your business. Websites do not cost a lot of money to develop and will definitely be worth the small investment. A small business owner could easily spend thousands a year just to be in the local Yellow Pages. Bearing in mind that you have the chance to reach millions of prospective consumers, getting a website is a profitable method of reaching your target market.
How to Start an Internet Business without Capital
There are vital steps to follow to make sure that your web site is effective.
* Content, content, content. Whatever your web site is about, you need to choose something that you know something about, no matter what it is, you need to provide something of interest for your visitors to read.
* Keywords. Once you have established the theme of your new web site, you need to do some research into the important words associated with your subject. If your subject is Manchester United, you need to think about what people might search for to find about their favourite team.
* Name your site, this is known as the URL. The bit that starts with wwww. This should wherever possible contain one of the keywords that you have found. Choosing a single real word is unlikely to be available!
* Find a place to store your web site. This will be on a server and may be offered by your ISP and from one of the sources below.
* Write your content. This should incorporate at least one of the keywords on each page that you write.
* Publish onto the internet. You will possibly need a programme to load what you have written but we recommend some free ones here.
* Optimise your content. This is the process of making the web site as attractive as possible to the search engines.
* Finally, for now, submit your site to the search engines so they ‘crawl’ over it and make it available to everyone who is searching.
Content.
Whatever floats your boat is what you should really write about. You are more likely to make money on the internet if you share the pearls of wisdom you know, or can find out about, than trying something which seems profitable but you know next to nothing about.
Your keywords - Vital.
Most people don’t do this until the end. WRONG. You need to find profitable keywords before you start. Wordtracker has a 7 day Free Wordtracker Trial and is the recommended paid service by pretty much everyone who knows what they are doing on the internet. The best keyword should be, if at all possible, incorporated into your site name. For example if you have a site about recycling old books, then maybe www.used-school-books.com might work.
Name that site
If you can find a keyword with great popularity and is also available then that is your site name, if not try and get something relevant to what you are doing. Your name may be great but unless it is a brand, it is not likely to be found on the interweb! There is a Wordtracker Keyword Research Guide (Download) here, for your bed time reading.
Hosting your site
First port of call is your ISP, check out their pricing and reputation. BUT you can get all the work done for you by choosing to have your web site built and hosted. This is particularly useful, if you don’t know much about creating a web site and want experts to do it. Here you get professional design, hosting, in fact pretty much everything you need to get started on a budget, without sacrificing quality. We can’t emphasise enough how valuable this can be to sub contract the ‘labour’ building a perfect website so you can concentrate on the content.
Publish your site Some hosts of web sites provide their own means of publishing. If not, there are other free ones around, our particular favourite is filezilla
Optimise = Search Engine Optimisation OK, now the fun starts. Your web site needs to be ‘attractive’ to the search engines such as Google and Yahoo. So everything has to be in the right place, the right order and the right number of times. Without a doubt the only serious way to optimise your web site is to use Axandra. Go to the SEO page for more information.
5 Ways to Keep Visitors Coming Back
When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers. All of which are visitors of your website. As the conversations between the visitors build up over time, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.
2) You should start a web log or (blog)
You should keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. Doing this keeps your visitors coming back to see if you have posted anything new. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to your visitors that there is also a real life person behind you’re your website.
3) You should carry out polls or surveys
Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep your visitors interested to find out about the results.
4) You should hold puzzles, quizzes and games
Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.
5) You should update your site frequently with fresh content
Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something new to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!
by Tiffanie Angelo
The Good and Bad Things about Flash Based Web Designing
Flash based websites are being widely used all across the web world by web designing agencies for creation of websites and this is predicted to increase in numbers too. But there have also been a number of disputed discussions on the usability and applicability of these flash based web desiging. Here are some of them which will tell us how useful or how unnecessary are these Flash based websites.
Lets begin with some Good aspects of Flash Based websites- Flash action scripts have the ability to make websites interactive and lively. Many designers have done flash web designing for websites in order to make them more user friendly, interactive feedback forums to flash games, all can be added in the websites to make them appear human.
One advantage of flash web designing is that it does away with the fear of browser compatibility. Several web designers face the problem of browser compatibility, what looks good in one browser sa IE, might just clutter the look of the website in other websites like Firefox or Opera. But if your website is created in flash it shall be visible in any browser provided you have installed the flash player on to your machine.
As we all know, it is better to express ideas and thoughts across to people if they are rightly expressed. And this conveying of expressions is possible only with flash. The creatively constructed flash animations make message exchange easier.
Now for some drawbacks of flash web designing a website created in flash will be visible on a computer only if it has a flash player installed. If parts of your web designing is done in flash and the remaining are in HTML, and you do not have a flash player installed, then the sections on flash will appear blank. Many websites provide an option to download flash onto your website, but that again is an additional wastage of time.
One major drawback of flash websites is the inability of the search engines to read flash content. The search engine crawlers are designed to read only text matters, places where the web designing firms have used flash to show articles will go unread by the search engines. This results in incomplete optimization of the websites.
Flash files are huge in size, hence take a longer time to downloading. This might result in your visitor getting impatient and moving out of your website, finding it nonfunctional.
10 Tips for Planning an Outstanding Website
When faced with the daunting task of planning what to include on your website and how to write the copy, here are a few tips that will make the task easier for you.
1. Visitor Friendly
The main thing to keep in mind is that your website needs to be visitor friendly. What this means is that your customer must be able to find what they are looking for easily and quickly. And that means great navigational system. Most websites either display their navigation bar on the left or at the top. And since most people are used to this type of navigation, it’s best to stick with it. It also helps to include your navigation bar at the bottom of each page to save your visitors from having to scroll back to the top.
2. Search Engine Friendly
Search engines try to list sites that contain good content, so you need keywords and phrases on your pages that best describe your service and products. For example, if you are a florist, use the words such as florist, online florist, virtual florist, wedding florist, florist in Sydney, florist on line, flowers, floral, bouquets, floral arrangements etc as many times as possible to ensure high search engine ranking. To find out what keywords your customers may be searching check out:
inventory.overture.com www.wordtracker.com
Once you decide on the keywords, use them in (a) Your website’s domain name (b) The title of your page - This is displayed in the top bar of your browser window (c) The heading of your home page (d) The first paragraph of your home page (e) Meta tags - Keywords, page title, description (f) Titles of your graphics
Whilst it is important to use keywords as much as possible, it is also important you use them only if they are relevant and do not sound awkward. If you spam your keywords you may be penalised or even banned by some search engines.
3. Informational vs On-line Store
One of the first decisions you need to make is what type of website to have. Will it be informational only or will it be an on-line store or a combination of both? An informational website is like having an on-line brochure. It does not sell products directly to customers, but rather provides details of your business, its products and services and occasionally features a printable order form.
The other type of website is an on-line store. It is a virtual salesperson who potentially never stops providing presales information to your prospects - and then making sales to them.
4. Create a Plan
Before you start thinking about what to write on each page of your website, it is important that you create a plan, which lists all the pages you wish to include. Below is a list of the most commonly used pages:
- (Home Page (First Page)
- Products / Services
- Contact Us
- Pricing
- Testimonials / Product Reviews / Before & After
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Response form such as “Subscribe” or “Enquiry” form
- On-line Magazine or Newsletter
- Resources/Articles
- About Us
- Guarantee
- Survey
- Events Calendar
- Search My Website Feature
- Return/Refund Policy
- Privacy Policy
- Site Map
- Copyright Information
- Links
- Media Information
- News
- On-line store
5. Cross-sell / Up-sell as part of your content
If a customer is looking for a particular product, offer them details of related products. By recommending other products, your customers will learn what else is available and in many cases it will translate to additional sales for you.
A company that does this exceptionally well is Amazon - www.amazon.com. Search for a particular book and you will find information on what other people who ordered this book also bought.
Make it as easy as possible for customers to complete an order by providing clear instructions. Ensure delivery costs are outlined before a customer begins the ordering process.
6. Focus on the customer and their needs
Rather than trying to “sell your business”, let your prospects know how your product/service is going to benefit them. Emphasize the benefits and solve problems. Make this the focus of everything you write on every page of your site. Don’t try to sell visitors your products or service, help them.
7. Remind your visitors
Remind your visitors they can print out your content. They may browse around your website while it’s printing.
8. Use headlines and sub-headlines to grab visitor’s attention
9. Offer value
Offer bonuses, free trials, discounts and prizes. List the dollar value beside each bonus. People will feel they’re getting a good deal and it will increase the value of your product.
10. Spell check and grammar check your website
Ensure there are no spelling or grammatical errors. Check that all links are working and graphics displaying correctly.
If you are still struggling with where to start, visit your supplier’s or competitor’s websites. Be careful that if you use copy from their site that you do not infringe copyright laws. If in doubt, contact the author or copyright owner and ask for permission.
Your ultimate goal is to turn a visitor into a customer. On your website, this is done by providing premium content. Each page should be its own mini site. As you have no control over how a visitor enters your website, it is important they are able to easily work out what your business offers and navigate to other pages within your site.
