So, after you have considered your options and decided you are not in the mood to make a website template, you have decided to take the easy way and purchase one. There are a bazillion sites on the web that have them for sale or free, some are packed in to bundles of different sizes from as few as 10 to bundles in the hundreds. These lovely packs have one thing in common; they all want you to BUY! Sure, you can buy them, but do they come with instruction booklets? I think not. Once you buy them, you are on your own my friend. None of them will tell you how to create your perfect site for your little niche. So how to choose a professional website templates? Here are some tips.
Nicely made does not always mean professional! Moreover, like in the rest of the world, looks are not everything! You will have other concerns like functionality, content and search engine optimization. Make sure the templates you are looking at have everything else that has been mentioned above.
- Look at the theme of the template you are considering, most have a general theme. The can look great to you. Nevertheless, will your customers love it? Take a couple hours to research colors and how they apply to the sites. Hot Pink says HEY, Blue is cool, think about the presentation and what you want to say to your customers. Notice, how sections are separated and the colors used, how does it grab your attention?
- A professional website designer uses colors to the advantage of the products and customers they are trying to reach. If the colorful additives on the site are decorative only, it is not a professional site. Snappy colors make the site. They attract the eye to the places that need attention. The colors should show off the theme of the site. Pictures, flash presentation and all the information on the site is optimized for the user. If they take an hour to load then surfers will not stick around for the finished product even if it is totally presentable when fully loaded. What you need is a fast loading, search engine optimized template that makes the customers come back for more!
Therefore, when you are shopping for your template, check carefully and make sure you do your research thoroughly if you are not into making your own. And make sure you are satisfied with it before you publish it to the Internet!
In the world of web design today, there are many different types of web design, from those built using website templates and ‘build your own’ site building applications to complex content managed and e-commerce web designs such as those used by big brand names like Amazon, eBay and Tesco. Which one is better ? And how can we make a good web design ?
Some companies, even some big name companies, have unprofessional looking and badly designed websites. Some have amazing looking websites but because of their high graphical content and minimal text content can take an age to load, are not user friendly and do not provide what the visitor wants.
Good Website DesignThough many aspects of website design differ from site to site, many things remain the same throughout the majority of websites on the internet. Most notably is the navigation or menu.
The way in which a website’s menu works and looks is very important, as ultimately, visitors to a website are looking for certain criteria that will make them either stay and interact or leave. This ability for a website to keep visitors interested is sometimes referred to as stickiness. Visitors want an attractive visually exciting experience, but perhaps more importantly, they want ‘ease of use’.
Website usability is a key factor for websites that want their visitors to stick around, make an enquiry and ultimately complete a transaction and order a product or service.
Easy to Use Web Design
Internet users tend to prefer easy to use websites, because they do not want to have to learn how to use a website every time they find a new one. They should be able to use a website after only a few seconds of looking around a homepage, any more and they will leave and browse elsewhere.
The need for fast user interaction is vital and therefore having a fast loading website is also important for a website to succeed. Even with faster internet connections such as broadband, internet users don’t want to wait around.
Just imagine, if you go to a shop on the high street and are totally ignored by shop assistants at the counter for 5 minutes, even after you have made it clear you want help. There is a correlation here to how an internet user may feel, when they arrive at a website that has been poorly designed, is difficult to use, unfriendly and slow to load.
Making sure that a website has been well thought out and designed with the user in mind, displays a company’s unique selling points within easily recognisable eye catching calls for action and has a clear, easy to use menu is key to its success.
Flash Web Design
With recent web design advancements, such as the introduction of Flash animation and high definition video content, impressive websites have been produced to take advantage of much higher levels of visual effects and interaction. However with this ‘high end’ web design, comes a price, more often than not, web designs which rely heavily upon Flash content are often ridiculously slow to load. They often have a progress bar, which slowly goes across the web browser to signify when the website will finish loading.
This is much like the progress bars that you may be familiar with if you use video editing or 3D rendering software, or if you use games consoles where they are displayed whilst you wait for games to load.
Internet users on the whole do not want to wait 3 - 5 minutes for a web page to load even if it does feature high resolution images, animation or video. They want fast informative content rich websites. If they wanted to watch an animation or video they would watch TV.
Good Flash Web Design
This is not to say that Flash animation is all bad news and shouldn’t be used in web design. If used subtly and in small amounts it can make a website more visually appealing without slowing the load time down too much. Suitable uses for Flash animation in web design are things such as; Flash banner advertisements, Flash video and interactive Flash forms for online questionnaires or business presentations.
Using Flash for a whole website design however, is not such a good idea. It slows the user’s experience down because they have to wait for elements of it to load. Also, sites totally developed in Flash tend to use unfamiliar menu structures and features. This can confuse visitors who just want to quickly interact with the website and not be amazed by the way the menu animates.
Just because you can do these things in Flash, it doesn’t mean they have any real working value in the real world. They may look pretty, but if they are not functional and only irritate the visitor then they have no real value.
Flash Web Design & SEO
Another argument against using Flash to create a whole website is that it dramatically reduces the effectiveness of your websites’ Search Engine Optimisation. Flash web designs are made up of one main file within a web page which search engines find difficult to index. This is because the text within them is usually graphical text and therefore is not usually accessible by search engines.
Some recent developments allow some text to be displayed for search engines in Flash websites, but this is nowhere near as effective as text content within traditional HTML based websites.
Don’t Write Off Flash in Web Design
Although Flash does have its limitations it also has its good points if used correctly. For instance; Flash animation is usually smaller in file size than traditional gif animation and because of the way it is made the animation flows smoother than gif animation too.
Having said this, I would recommend only using Flash in small areas within a site to compliment other imagery that makes up the overall design.
Finding a balance between minimal graphical elements, imagery, Flash and good quality informative text is the key to a successful user friendly website. This isn’t to say that web design needs be boring. By working with quality web design companies there’s no reason why you couldn’t have a visually exciting, well designed, easy to use and successful website.
Visually Stimulating Web Design
When visitors first arrive at a website, they want to be impressed and engaged with what the website has to offer. This will be determined by the ways in which the web designer has laid out the website’s content text, images and features.
Arranging elements such as imagery, text, graphics, flash and video in such a way as to keep the visitor interested in the website is the key to good web design. If a website has poor design and doesn’t grab the attention of the visitor in the first few seconds, then it may well be dismissed as just another average website. This ultimately means the visitor will go elsewhere to spend their time and, more importantly, money.
Good Web Design Layout
A lot of time and money is spent making sure that the right elements of websites are positioned in the right places. Companies spend large amounts of money conducting research into how internet users use their websites.
This type of research shows where their visitors’ eyes concentrate the most, which elements of the website they click on first and generally how they interact and use their websites.
Most internet users will look primarily from the top left either across the page, or down the left hand side of the web page through an internet browser via a computer, mobile phone or TV set.
I would hazard a guess, that they are looking for the company’s name or logo, their main selling points or slogans and then what the website has to offer in terms of what is featured in the menu. After which their eyes are probably drawn across the page content and over to the right hand side. Successful web design usually takes this into consideration and will ultimately affect the way a website looks.
There are of course rather famous exceptions to this rule for instance one rather well known search engine has a web design which is quite different. The main focus and core functionality in their web design is located right in the centre of the page. This however, isn’t any ordinary website with tens or even hundreds of pages of products and services to display, its main focus is its recognisable logo and of course its search box. It does however feature a small minimal menu across the top of the web design, which flows from left to right. So even they have taken onboard some of the research undertaken into internet users’ habits.
If you go looking at websites after reading this article, I can guarantee that most of the web designs you’ll see, will have a left hand menu and a defined header bar with a company logo and slogan across it.
Related Articles :
Tips to Great Web Design
SEO Web Design and Site Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is a process where a website is optimized to get better ranks in search results in popular search engines. When you search for any topic or matter depending on a specific keyword it actually searches for its database & show the result. But when it comes to a webmaster you want your site to be one of the first ones the user will see.
Here come the effective search engine mechanisms by which the web designer can make sure that it is well noticed. Search engine works through the better understanding of algorithm which are the results governs & helps the search engines to rank the respective sites.
Search engine optimization (SEO) should be considered a critical element of any Internet marketing strategy. This is important because there is so much which can be gained from SEO in terms of Internet marketing and advertising. Failure to optimize your website for search engines can result in a considerable loss in terms of free advertising which is essentially gained from ranking well with search engines. This article will provide insight into what SEO is and will explain why Internet marketing requires at least some degree of SEO.
SEO optimization is a strategy in which a website is designed to obtain favorable search engine rankings from popular search engines. This may be achieved in a variety of different ways and optimal SEO strategies combine a variety of different strategies to complete one well orchestrated SEO campaign. There are several elements to consider when attempting optimizing your website for search engines. This may include keyword density, prominence, META tags, titles and inbound links. Keyword density is one of the most common SEO strategies and essentially involves using relevant keywords often in the content of a website to demonstrate the relevance of these keywords to the website. This is important because search engines are likely to reward websites with optimal keyword densities with favorable search engine rankings in an effort to provide Internet users with the most relevant websites for particular search terms. The prominence of keywords should also be considered. This includes how close the keywords are placed to the beginning of the website. The common mistake with this strategy is to believe the first opportunity to incorporate keywords is in the first line of visible text on the webpage. This is not true because search engines crawl the code of a website as opposed to the visible content on the website. This means there are multiple opportunities to incorporate relevant keywords long before the actual visible content on the website. This might include the code for the title as well as the META tags. Business owners who realize the potential for incorporating keyword into the code gain an advantage over competitors who only incorporate keywords into the content on their website.
Another area of concern which is very important for those who are interested in SEO is inbound links. Inbound links are essentially links which reside on other websites and direct traffic to your website. These links are considered important because many search engines place a value on inbound links because they are essentially an example of one website recommending another website. However, when obtaining inbound links it is important to do so from other websites which rank well with search engines because many search engines consider the rank of the original website when determining the value of the inbound link.
Now that we have briefly explained some of the main concept of SEO, we will illustrate why it is important to optimize your website in the first place. SEO is so important because most Internet users highly value the results of search engines and are likely to only visit to ranking websites when they search for a particular keyword. Internet users trust search engines to serve the most relevant content first and are therefore not likely to visit websites which do not fall on the first or second page of search results. This means websites which rank well essentially are receiving a great deal of free advertising from search engines that place their website in a key position. Website owners who do not invest time into optimizing their websites miss out on a great deal of potential web traffic.
Related Articles :
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The Importance of Backlink in SEO
SEO for Small Business
Social bookmarking is the habit or practice of saving bookmarks to a web site and "tagging". Social bookmarking sites are a popular way to store, classify, share and search links. Social bookmarking started as a method for Internet users to keep bookmarks that can easily be accessed online and shared with other users in the Web. These bookmarks are given tags to label as well as organize them and the tags illustrate a glimpse of the main content for easier access.
Social bookmarking is a grassroots process that allows users to establish the value of a specific web page, article, podcast, or video. By bookmarking an item, individuals are casting a vote to endorse that specific resource. The idea is that social bookmarking gives a resource credibility; the more users who bookmark a specific item, the more valuable the resource is considered to be. Social bookmarking is all about the collective voice. Most of the social bookmarking networks increase the profile of items that receive a lot of bookmarks. It probably won't be long before the major search engines begin to include social bookmarks as a part of their ranking algorithms.
Once you become a part of a social bookmarking site, you become a member of that community. You and all the other users are there for the same thing and you can help each other out in finding sites that will benefit all of you. It also makes searching the Web so much easier and quicker. Another great thing is that once you're part of a site, you can access it from any computer and any browser. That way, you're never limited in seeing the social bookmarks you've been waiting for.
So, the question, "Should you give any attention to social bookmarking?" And the answer is, make your site worthy of bookmarking. Bookmarks appear to web spiders as links to your page, and that makes them very valuable SEO tools. For some search engines, the more bookmarks that lead back to your site, the more "votes" you get! Links which are bookmarked by lots of users on social bookmarking web sites are effectively been "voted for" In fact Google has already started to feature StumbleUpon Reviews in its search results.
Nowadays, Social Bookmarking services are the most popular source for webmasters to drive visitors and traffic to their websites. Social Bookmarking let's the users to save and manage their favorite bookmarks online on internet. It has been made in such a way that users can tag them with keywords and share them with others and watch their bookmarks. Also, you are able to keep the bookmarks private and share them with your friends and family only.
This all started in the year 2003, when Del.icio.us launched the Social Bookmarking Concept so that people can enjoy their bookmarks online. But, now there are so many sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Technorati, reddit and Raidx.co.uk that offer social bookmarking services. These sites feature the most popular and recently submitted bookmarks. Social bookmarking has now become a popular tool to webmasters for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Social bookmarking can easily make your website popular and produce more traffic. That's why webmasters take more interest in social bookmarking sites to have maximum social bookmarks of their websites so that people can visit them more.
The Challenges of Social Bookmarking for Businesses
Like any kind of social media marketing, social bookmarking is low-cost, at least in terms of money. Where the "costs" escalate is in time. To do social bookmarking right, you need time to evaluate the various sites, add your bookmarks, comment on them, and interact with other users who share your interests. It is a big job.
If you do a search for the top social bookmarking sites, you'll get a huge list, like the one published on ebizMBA. So which ones do you choose? Delicious is one of the biggest, but would it be better to go for a smaller site, like furl or faves.com? Is it better to use all three, plus some social news sites, like Digg or Reddit?
Once you have made that decision, you need to decide how and when you will create the content you want to bookmark. Blogs, articles - what is the right amount of content and how often do you need to create it? You can really only answer that question by looking at social bookmarking as part of your overall social media marketing plan.
Social bookmarking and social media marketing are powerful marketing tools. To make the most of them you need to devote a lot of attention to the sites and create content regularly. You also need a comprehensive social media marketing plan that incorporates all of your content initiatives and your efforts to create bookmarks that direct people to that content.
Several tips about social bookmarking :
Webmasters should always offer links to popular bookmarking websites so the viewers are easily able to bookmark their favorite websites and web pages. If you search Google for social bookmarking scripts you will find many scripts that are available for websites which permits users to bookmark your website easily.
In order to get your website bookmark by other members of the social bookmarking sites, you must also bookmark your own websites and ask your friends and family members to bookmark it. You must register an account with all popular social bookmarking websites and bookmark all your web pages with appropriate keywords and titles.
On bookmarking sites, you can also exchange links with many websites that are relevant to your sites niche. Many webmasters bookmark your websites if you bookmark their websites. However, nowadays social bookmarking sites don't allow you to exchange your bookmarks with other webmasters but you can still find your own ways. Participate in the social bookmarking websites and create a huge friend's list. Many times people visits their friend's profile and bookmarks the websites if they like it. Also, you can ask the members of your friend's list to view your newly created pages and they might bookmark them. Commenting on other's bookmarks will help you to increase your profile as well as your websites popularity.
Bookmark yours as well as other similar web pages because, when the traffic on the websites you have bookmarked goes high, yours will also increase at the same time. Similarly, if the link value of all the pages you have bookmarked goes high, the link-value of your websites also increases.
On the web-site side, be sure to include the code snippets provided by social bookmarking organizations that allow users to tag your site easily. Then, maintain it all. Don't just forget your account completely. If you do, eventually it will disappear and all the advantage of having one will go as well. Instead, continue using social bookmarking. Over time, the rewards will be increased traffic to your web site.
The last and very important tip is that your website should contain unique and fresh content. This is because, if your content is good and impressive, then only the visitors will bookmark it or else they will never return to your website again. May be you have done extensive search engine optimization or have created hundreds of bookmarks, but if your website don't have unique and good content there will no further bookmarks and traffic on your website. Remember that Content is the key to Success.
Work on the above social bookmarking tips properly, sit back and watch traffic coming to your website.
Link building is not just one of numerous SEO strategies that are employed on the World Wide Web today; in fact, it is crucial to the success of any website trying to compete in the technological age. Even if you have no other SEO methods in place, your site should at least work on building a reliable base of back links.
Why are backlinks so important to the success of a website? For starters, having relevant, reputable sites linking back to a site is one indication of the success and popularity of that site in the eyes of the general online public. And as long as these incoming links are from a quality source then the website’s page rank will improve, thus improving its location within online search results, as well.
How to define a quality backlink? There really is no true definition or standard to be used in determining whether or not a site can be considered high quality – you’ll just have to use your best judgment on this one, as well as a little bit of trial and error. The more popular and well-established sites will obviously be of the highest quality, though it can sometimes be difficult getting your link posted with them. The relevance of the websites that are providing you with back links is important too. If these sites have content that is similar to yours then they are likely to be more beneficial when compared to some random, off-topic website.
If you already have customers, link building is not that hard to achieve. Here are some ways to get links from customers that you already have :
Testimonials
You may have some customers who sent you letters of praise and appreciation; you may have also used sections of them on your website as testimonials. If they are other businesses, they will probably appreciate the mention of their names on your website. It is like free advertising to them.
Go back to those people and ask for a link. It is as simple as that. Chances are they would be happy to supply it. Tip: Make sure your call the webmaster of the company instead of sending him or her an email--webmasters get lots of requests for links and often they just throw them out.
Article Writing
Getting links may involve a little more work for some of your customers. If you supply scrubs to a medical clinic, for instance, it may be somewhat unprofessional to just slap a link on their website to yours. Instead, offer to write an article for them on how scrubs help a clinic stay sterile, and include a link to your website (with permission of course).
That's about link building from me, I hope it can give you all some input for consideration. See you on the next article.
Internet marketing can be a very expensive proposition. There are myriad options for making one's presence more significant online. Training the right individual to take care of these tasks can potentially save any company a great deal of money and, at the same time, net the company new clients and business opportunities. Any employee who is put in charge of Internet marketing for a company of any size will likely require some internet marketing courses or training. The first steps are usually related to the field known as SEO-Search Engine Optimization-one of the most vital aspects of any web marketing campaign,
When it comes to dealing with SEO, small businesses have a few choices. They can either handle the SEO themselves or they can hire a professional SEO company. The first is obviously the most budget-friendly; however, if you and your employees don't understand the basics of doing SEO, you may end up wasting your time. Fortunately, you can learn the basics of SEO fairly quickly.
Paying a company to do SEO, especially if the company is thorough and completely redesigns your website from the ground up to be fully optimized, may be out of your price range. Many small businesses simply can't afford this. However, having an expert in SEO look at your pages can be helpful. Outsourcing only part of the SEO process can be helpful. For example, you may want to hire a professional SEO writer to create content for your website after you determine the keywords yourself.
When preparing an SEO campaign for a small to medium-sized enterprise, you may want to take into consideration the following tips that may help ensure your success :
Always make sure to properly research your keywords beforehand. Because you don't have any time to waste as a small or medium-sized business competing online, you can't afford to spend weeks pursuing a keyword campaign that doesn't work.
Don't bother with loads of filler content on your site. Instead, stick to brief paragraphs that each revolve around a keyword or two.
Make it a point that you are a small or medium-sized enterprise. You may even want to specify your exact location, as some online shoppers avoid websites that are operated by large corporations or those that are based in another country.
One of the most cost-effective SEO strategies for small business owners is known as Google Analytics. Because these services are inexpensive, easy-to-use and quite comprehensive they are great for small to medium-sized enterprises and businesses.
And here are six quick steps to take in order to make a profit through small business seo.
The first step involved in targeted as SEO success is understanding the importance of search engine optimized copy and content at your website. This applys on many levels, keyword enriched content is the foundation upon which all of your other SEO efforts will be built.
The second step associated with small business SEO success is to make certain that you use appropriate metatags are at your website. Many people forget the importance of metatags when they go about designing a website. In fact there are crucial to your overall targeted SEO success.
The third quick step towards small business SEO success is making sure you select an appropriate domain name for your website. You need to bear in mind that the domain name you choose for your operation will have a bearing on your search engine rankings.
The fourth quick step towards small business seo success, to get you on your way to making a profit with SEO, is to make certain that your website is fully functional and fit for purpose. This means that you ought to make certain that your website is attractive and user friendly.
The fifth quick step towards targeted success is to consider engaging the services of a professional. If you've never engaged in SEO efforts, you want to give serious consideration to enlist the support and assistance of a professional or an expert. There is too much at stake to put your small business seo efforts to chance.
The sixth quick step towards small business SEO involves setting up a strategy and a system through which you will continually review what you've done in regard to your SEO activities. You need to make certain that your SEO efforts remain effective not only when you implement them but for the future life cycle of your website.
From what I read from wikipedia, search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
Besides that, The acronym "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.
Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or Spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.
As we knows, the main purpose of SEO is so that our sites is indexed by many search engines. There are many tools out there in the web that provide monitoring SEO. The tools usually display how many pages of your site is indexed, how many backlinks, and traffic to your website. A site rank is made from these tools to determine how "popular" a website compared to the other from search engine point of view.
As for blogger, SEO is used mainly to increase the traffic to their blogs. These are several tips to increase traffic to your blog :
Submit your blog to many search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.
Submit your articles to all existing directory listing such as digg, infogue, lintas berita, etc.
Advertise you blog. This can be done through free advertising or premium advertising.
Update your blog everyday with minimum of five articles each day.
Put link in as many site as possible (with the site owner permisiion of course). This include excganging links with many blogs.
Do blog walking as much as possible everyday.
Make offline advertising. Put your blog name in every public place you can think of, such as your car, friends car, internet cafe, newspaper, magazines, etc.
Keep praying for your blog :p.
I hope my little knowledges of SEO can help you. See You in the next articles.
If your goal is to earn money from Google Adsense through content or article directories, you're better off setting your sights elsewhere. Directories are not high performers when it comes to Google Adsense ads and if you expect a good stream of income from these, you're bound to get disappointed. However, there are other things that you can expect from creating directories and if you look closely, they could be your ticket to finding a good source of revenue.
