Web Design Development Articles

I don’t get angry easily but I’ll tell you what makes my blood boil - irresponsible, under qualified, even clueless web designers. Many web designers are talented, skilled and reasonably priced and have the best interests of their clients at heart. But unfortunately there are too many who don’t.

Week after week small business owners call or e-mail me wondering why their expensive website is generating no traffic or leads and not showing up in the search engines.

When I look at their website I often see a site that looks pretty, but is useless. So how do you avoid falling into the same trap?

Here is what you need to know:

1) Ask the web designer to create your website in a Content Management System like Joomla or WordPress. This will allow you to easily make frequent changes to your site yourself without having to pay $60 or more per hour for every added link or paragraph. Those days are long gone. If the designer balks at this suggestion, run.

2) Ask if they do keyword research to determine what keyword phrases people who want your type of service are searching for. If they don’t you can certainly do it yourself or out source it cheaply. Check Elance.com for a great selection of freelancers.

3) Ask if they do Search Engine Optimization. If so, what is the cost? If they don’t, run. If they are too expensive, shop around. You can do it yourself with a little effort.

4) Do the copywriting yourself or provide an outline and have a professional copywriter do it. The headlines and content need to be focused on customer benefits and they need to contain your keyword phrases. Your headline and content will determine whether visitors leave or stay. Avoid phrases like “welcome” and “we do this” and “we do that”.

5) Ask your designer to go easy on using Java script or Flash as Google can’t recognize or read either.

6) Do not create an “enter” or “intro” page. It will increase your rate of abandonment and the search engines won’t like it. Every extra click discourages visitors.

7) It’s crucial that you have an e-mail marketing program and put an opt-in box on every key page of your site. Ask visitors to sign up for your mailing list and give them something of value to encourage them to comply. This is how you convert visitors to leads. Ask your designer if they will put the opt-in boxes on your site for you.

Check references and find out how long they’ve been in business and how reliable they are. Do they have a group of designers or are they solo? You want someone who will respond when you need their help in an emergency, not someone who ignores you for days. You will need excellent customer service since your business is at stake.

9) Do not let your web designer register your domain name or host your website unless you have direct access to your domain and hosting accounts and they are in your name. You don’t want to be “held hostage” should you need to change designers. You’ll need direct access anyway for a number of reasons. You shouldn’t pay more than $10 per year for a domain, and for a simple site, your hosting costs should be no more than $10 to $12 a month.

10) Shop around. Don’t just hire the first person you’re referred to since the referrer may not be aware of some of these pitfalls.

Following these 10 tips will save you hundreds of wasted dollars and will help you create a website that sells.

Once you have registered for clickbank and CJ (if you have not done so, please do so immediately). There you will be given your affiliate links - your best friends other than qualified traffic. These links are the links which links the affiliate products and services to YOU, and trace the commissions (if sales are made) to your account.

The thing is, newbies usually try to promote the link directly to people, by direct email or pay-per-click campaigns such as PPC. These approach now are not as effective as before, and they seem ‘hard selling’ with little customer interaction.

If this happens, you’d likely lose the sale. Most of the time, if you put up the link, there’s only a slim 1-2% chance of people buying, the remaining 98-99% will just ‘browse’ and leave, leaving you to pay for the cost of the PPC click (also known as paid advertising). Email links are usually ignored unless the people you mail already know you.

The trick now is to create a ‘browse-through’ page where interested people will scour around to pick-up information that they’re interested in (these are ‘warm’ leads) and you give them an ‘offer’ (which can be anything i.e. free ebook, or free ezines etc - i will share more of this later) by ’signing up’ for the freebies. By doing that, you will build your list, personal to the page they were interested in. This starts a you-them relationship, and you can start building friendship and networking with them. Let’s start with free websites - they’re called blogs.

Before we see why it is beneficial to use Joomla designing, let us have a look at what is Joomla? Joomla is a free open source Content Management System (CMS) that helps in managing the contents of your website. It enables to control the presentation of a particular website giving it a professional look.

Joomla offers so many advanced features to a developer or for that matter even to a person who is new to Joomla. It is very easy to understand and provides first grade templates giving your website a completely professional outcome in no time.

One of the best advantages of Joomla is that they eliminate the possibility of static in the contents of the website. A Joomla designed website collects contents from a stored database which makes the website management quite dynamic in nature.

Joomla websites use CSS layouts which mean there is a lot of flexibility available to the contents of the website. It provides a kind of breathing space for the contents by adding column spacing or ‘gutter’. This is why a website powered by Joomla has wide pages.

It is important to have a very creative and dynamic website if you want to flourish in the online industry. By using Joomla designing you can get all the web designing tips and tools that help you create an extra ordinary website with all the advanced features.

More over, Joomla designed websites are easy to maintain and update. And best of all Joomla application is free!

Is Joomla futuristic?

Yes, it is absolutely the CMS of the future. It is one of the most popular CMS used today. It is widely used by people with no knowledge of web designing to high tech professional developers. Joomla started back in the year 2000. Eight years down the line, Joomla managed to get over 200,000 community users and contributors. Therefore the future of Joomla definitely looks bright.

For a web designing company, it is necessary to develop superior quality and cost effective designing solutions. Web design companies make the website keeping in mind the algorithm of search engines and use the latest and new technology available to them. They select bold and adventurous websites designs synonymous to originality and great innovation.

Their web designing services should include:

* Analyzing the business goals and request for proposal creation
* Creating storyboards
* Planning and drafting of SEO content
* Taking the pictures of the products and carefully presenting them as images
* Graphic designing
* Designing of flash sites, introductions and including animation wherever required.
* Proper HTML coding and Java scripting (keeping in mind the needs of the search engines)
Once they design the site, it is completely checked for any flaws. It is seen that the site designed is easy to use and business friendly. Some of the quality parameters checked by them are:
* Easy-navigation
* Overall consistency
* Content quality

All this is done within designed time framework and budget. To make sure that the site works for your business, a good web designing company promote the site and see that easily one can update the site. It is seen that search engine optimization techniques adopted by them help in increasing the web traffic to your web site.

Hence, the site made them should help in increasing the traffic to the site and improve your business. For more information on how to select the right one for developing your e business, visit developmentindia.com

There’s a new, innovative, business revolution hitting the Internet, and those companies that are jumping on board are seeing enough success that they dedicate the majority of their marketing budget towards its fulfillment.

Pray tell, Max!

You don’t have to twist my arm.

The new, hip wave is to develop landing pages for each of your products, or services. In short, you build pages that are filled with sharp imagery, succinct messages, and dynamic calls to action that you can define your marketing efforts around. These pages are in place to do one thing, and one thing only: drive the potential customer to enact the call to action. They contain hardly any actual verbiage, are built with direct marketing in mind utilizing SEO techniques, and those that are smartly executed result in conversion.

What Makes a Landing Page so Special?

Research into what makes some marketing efforts more effectively than others has returned very valuable information, particularly in the location of hot spots, or warm spots, psychological implications of imagery, method of reading and flow, and much more. The results are fantastically beneficial to you because they’re easy to follow:

1. Western readers automatically direct their eye to the top left of the screen. This makes that area prime real estate, and you should treat it as such. Put your company name there, or the primary message you wish to deliver with the page. Just remember that whatever is there is the first thing that the individual is going to see, and with only 3-5 seconds to capture your audience’s attention, you’ve got to use that space appropriately.
2. The Western reader scans from left to right. So, from the top left corner of your screen, you’ll immediately go to the top right. Again, prime real estate. Most people hit this section within the first 2 seconds of visiting the site. Put your promise there, or back up your first message. Either way, you want to make sure that whatever is there continues to draw the customer in.
3. From here, the reader is going to instinctively want to dart back to the left again, but you can help them get there quicker by placing a nice image of a nice young lady promoting your message. Why a young lady? Because research shows that all audiences are more accepting of an attractive young lady and their eye is drawn to it. You can really control the page here by having that image direct the customer to your call to action through posture, where the eyes are looking, or the flow of the image’s action.
4. If you’re to have movement on your page it should be simple, not distracting, and directed towards your call to action, or message. I’m not usually an advocate for movement on your page, but in this case, used correctly, it can be a powerful tool.

That’s it really. Anything else that you put on the page should fall beneath the natural break of a standard screen size, and I guarantee you that it is all fluff. Your landing page should, within 3-5 seconds, draw the customer into your call to action, and that should be to either fill out a contact form, purchase something, or call you. Work this out correctly, and you’ve gold in your pocket. Huzzah!

Developing websites involves a knowledge of programs and languages that can be involved, complex, and not all that entertaining. But sometimes a program comes along that’s just as fun as it functional.

Flash is that type of program.

Flash allows a person to make many different types of applications, from websites to games, with a small learning curve.

Flash is first and foremost animation software. Used in conjunction with vector design programs and other graphic programs, flash animations are found throughout the World Wide Web.

The program utilizes several tools, including a timeline to create animations. The timeline is the most important tool of all as it’s what makes an animation an animation. The canvas is the next most important as that’s where the animation will be designed.

The animation runs only as many frames as the person who’s creating it designates on the timeline. The framerate can be determined and manipulated by the animator for faster animation or slower animation. For instance, if I wanted a ball to move across the canvas and my frame rate was 16 frames per second. Then if I animated the ball over 16 frames it would take one second for the ball to reach the other side.

Confusing maybe at first, but once a person starts it becomes second nature relatively quickly. What becomes difficult is the coding process.

Remember the ball moving across the page, perhaps if a person mousse over the ball, it stops and changes colors. A person can’t simply design that on the canvas and hope it works, they need coding that will recognize when that situation occurs.

Flash coding is called ActionScript. It’s not too dissimilar from other coding languages and can be picked up rather easily. It, like other languages, is strict and even the smallest error (such as forgetting a period) will force the script to fail to run.

The scripting is the biggest component when setting up flash to be a website on the internet. Flash is easily integrated into HTML sites and HTML is easily integrated into flash, they work together pretty well. Many websites designed in flash will have several mouse-over events, mouse-click events, and mouse-unclick events. Those events, in addition to complex (and high quality) animations are what make Flash sites so intriguing.

However in order to view Flash a person must download the flash player onto their PC. The download is short and that’s what makes it a first-choice over competitors such as quicktime, Acrobat Reader, and Java.

Fortunately, a savvy programmer will know how to work around the problem of a Flash component being unable to load because the person doesn’t have the player. There’s not enough space to describe the process here, but a quick search will yield necessary results.

Knowledge of HTML and CSS for basic websites will help greatly when making a site with Flash. Although, it’s entirely possible to build one without HTML and simply use Flash and its actionscript language. This method isn’t recommended and roadblocks will cause frustration for programmers and users alike.

First Things First

If you are an employee it’s easy to get confused about consultant or freelance rates. The thing to remember is freelancers can only charge for the time they are actively working for a client. However, they are not necessarily active for a client for 40 hours a week, 52 weeks of the year. Therefore their rates have to take into account all the time they are not billing a client and their running costs. It’s all explained below.

Why Have Freelancers and Consultants?

Freelancers play a vital role in the economy. Without freelancers companies would have to hire and train all their own staff. Can you imagine hiring a member of staff to carry out a specific specialised task that only needs doing once or twice a year?

How Day Rates Work

Companies providing services in many industries such as web design, SEO, engineering etc base their charges on day rates. These can be the source of confusion or contention for the companies who need to hire firms using day rates as the headline rate can seem high.

Often, when evaluating rates, people will take the headline day rate, multiply it by 261 (the number of weekdays in a year) and assume they are being ripped off. For example, a day rate of £325.00 is made to look like a salary of - 261 x £325 = £85k! Nice money if you can get it.

In fact this is a nonsense. In simple terms day rates are calculated thus.

Number of weekdays in a year = 261

Less - 25 Holidays

Less - 8  Bank Holidays

Less - 5 days allowance for being ill

Less - 24 days of non billable time

Less - 10 days for marketing and business development

Total - 72 days

Total billable working days in a year = 261 - 72 = 189 Days

Now the per person costs for running the business

£500 - advertising

£500 - Hardware and Software

£1000 - Servers etc

£100 - Affiliation costs (professional bodies etc)

£2000 - Client visits etc

£150 - Insurances etc

£500 - Accountancy fees etc

£2000 - Phone/Office etc

Total = £6750.00

This equates to a daily overhead of £35.71 (overhead divided by billable days)

Now the required salary including Employers NIC etc

A well qualified and experienced consultant salary = £40k (£44475.52 with NIC etc)

This gives a day rate of £235.32 (salary divided by billable days)

Next comes profit and 20% is an accepted level of profit = £54.21

Now add it all up - £35.71 + £235.32 + £54.21 = £325.24

So the day rate of £325 gives the consultant a salary of £40k and the company a profit of £10k, not what you might call earth shattering and  this assumes the company don’t get thrown a curve ball.

In part 1 of this article I discussed 5 critical points for any internet home based business owner to making a squeeze page that sells like crazy whether it’s a subscriber list you’re trying to build or a product your trying to sell.

Here are the 5 main points I discussed: define your purpose clearly, use a single page for a related keyword set, make your headline with the benefits included, K.I.S.S. your webpage design - (Keep It Simple Sweetheart), and use catch phrases in your sales copy. See part 1 for the full explanation. Here are the last 4 tips:

1. Make sure it all flows

As an internet home based business owner it drives me up the wall when I read a sales page and there is one thought that seems to train wreck itself into another thought. You want to make sure you are walking your visitors by the hand through your sales copy. It helps tremendously to read and re-read your squeeze page over and over and over. This way you can stop a collision from occurring with your thoughts.

2. Spread the call to action around

Think of this in terms of a spreader you would use to fertilize your grass. When you walk in a row it throws the seeds in multiple locations in front, to the left, and the right. Well, in an internet home based business the same applies to your squeeze page. I suggest using a “join now”, “sign me up’, or “buy now”, link or button in the middle and the end of your page.

Another prominent spot to place the call to action is in the “p.s.” Think of this as the “last call” opportunity to hook, line, and sink your potential visitor.

If your squeeze page copy is compelling enough it can actually pull potential subscribers and/or buyers in the middle of the page. People are different and you never know how little or how much it takes to convert someone.

3. Create urgency in the reader’s mind

One-time only offers work great for upsells and even initial sales in any internet home based business. Another tactic is to create a bundle offer. Whichever route you take be sure to follow through with it. If you say it’ll be around for 2 days be sure to stick to that. If you don’t, you stand a good chance of losing credibility.

Be sure to flat out tell the visitor that you will be taking the offer down in 2 days and that they need to act now or else they’ll miss out.

You could even raise the price every 15 or 20 sales. This will create a jolt of urgency in the visitor and will cause them to hesitate at passing up your offer because it may be even more expensive the next time around.

4. Provide a photo of yourself

“Say cheese!” I recommend this to any internet home based business owner. Having your picture on the web page builds a significant amount of trust with your visitor. It shows them that you actually exist and that you understand the value of your product and that you’re willing to “show up” for it.

Follow these 4 simple tips and you’re bound to have great success in your internet home based business. Writing squeeze pages doesn’t have to be hard. Follow these principles and it won’t be long until you’re able to enjoy new subscribers and sales.

You might not realize it but color has a huge impact on our perception of everyday life. Think of your mood on a sunny day compared to a cloudy day. How you feel in a yellow sweater compared to black. Different colors generate different emotions in people. Marketers have been using colors for years to derive certain emotions from customers.

Color combinations on business websites can have a greater impact than you realize. Great business web design with appropriate colors can work for your business or against it. So where do you begin? What colors will help and what colors will hurt the business web design of your website? What colors produce what emotions and how can you use them to your benefit.

Yellow: joy, happiness, optimism, intelligence

Blue: peaceful, calming, harmonious, confidence

Red: strength, anger, aggression, power

Black: modernity, elegance, mystery, style

Grey: stability, wisdom, respect, humility

Orange: energy, enthusiasm, happiness, balance

Purple: enlightenment, nobility, spirituality, creativity

Who are your customers and what are they looking for? With all business web design you must determine who you want to visit your site before you develop it. You must determine what mind set your customer is in to determine what colors you would like to use on your business website. Will the colors you choose frighten your customer away with a headache or invite and comfort them into a long visit on your business website.

Once you choose the colors most appropriate for your business website, how will you use them? The most successful business websites have their text in black on a white background. Think of the readability of your content. You want the visitor to your business website to be able to easily read the information you have posted or you would not have posted it. Colored text and colored backgrounds can be more difficult to read and may push away visitors to your business website.

As always, there are exceptions to the rule. If you have certain keywords you want to stand out highlighting them with a complementary color might be a good idea. This will help catch your visitors attention. You only have three seconds to catch the attention of a visitor to your site. Time is money in the business world and most website visitors will scan articles before they take the time to read the whole text. Highlighting keywords in complementary colors may increase the chances catching a visitors attention. Once you have caught that visitors attention your ideally, will turn them into a customer.

With the Internet playing such a large role in business marketing, it’s not surprising that it contains a world of untapped opportunities. One popular way to advertise a fitness business is by developing a fitness membership site.

More and more people are becoming increasingly concerned about fitness and health matters, making it a great time to hook into a fitness membership site. There are millions of individuals constantly linked to the internet. The use of the internet is growing rapidly across the world. With such a large audience at your fingertips, it makes great business sense to start some type of paid content site.

This is a revenue model that should be a part of your fitness business. It can provide current and prospective clients with a variety of information. Those interested in fitness often research products and services online, eager to learn about new developments. A fitness membership site can be set up in a variety of ways, including members only, membership preferred, subscription, or monthly access. When members are required to pay a fee, it results in a steady stream of money. Use your site to secure yourself a dependable source of income that lasts month after month.

Before pursuing a fitness membership site, it is important to design a site plan. Think about the content you would like to feature on your site, along with applicable fees, disclaimers, and legal statements. Creating a plan for your site will help to mold and define your ideas, along with your intentions and goals. Your business plan is the road map to your future; it plans the course you will follow to be successful.

To develop a fitness membership site, you will need to research the various types of software and programs required. Indispensable tools include a website, hosting account, and third party services to help you run your site. These will all be available through membership management software, which automatically completes the administrative aspects of the site. Using such a system can greatly reduce the amount of work associated with a fitness membership site.

To begin exploring software, search the term “fitness membership site” online. Pay special attention to their inclusions and exclusions. Choose one with a sound support system, reference tools, and a forum that allows you to ask questions and receive advice from system developers or fitness peers. By connecting with others who are in a similar situation, you will learn the ins and outs of a site faster than expected.

Also be sure to pay close attention to the needs of your clients. Your site will be one in a sea of many, so you need that extra little something to make yourself stand out from the crowd.

Starting a site that offers memberships can be rewarding and lucrative. Ensure its success by following these strategies and enjoying the benefits it brings.