SanDiegoWebDesign.org
San Diego Web Design Resource Directory. Serving the web design and development needs of San Diego Businesses.
This site is a resource for any person or business developing a web site. Transcend Solutions is our recommended full service professional web design firm / web development company... servicing San Diego since 1995, we want to thank them for pulling together the information contained on this site!
Do's When Building Your Site
There
are some essentials you need when building your website. You
need these things to make your site have a clean professional
look.
Keep It Simple - Simplicity and usability is key for creating effective business web site.
Make your home page stand out - Your home page is the most important on your site. Make it your most creative to get visitors attention right away so they'll stick around.
No Broken Links - Make sure you check your site before you upload so there are no broken links.
Optimize Graphics - Graphics should enhance your page...not slow down your page. All bloated images should be scaled down before uploading your site.
Content - Your site should be as informative as possible, make sure you have plenty of information pertaining to your area of expertise.
Easy Navigation - Visitors should be able to find any part of your site with ease and not get lost in the process
Contact Pages - Post your e-mail, phone and fax information on every page of your site to make it easy for your visitors to get in touch with you.
Spelling - Make sure you proofread each page and correct any spelling errors on your site.
Search Engine Optimization - Your pages should be formatted for the search engines properly before you upload your site.
Color Scheme - Build your site around a two or three color scheme that is easy on the eye and appealing to the eye.
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Ten Do Not's When Building Your Site
There
are some things you should definitely not do when building
your site. These things will annoy your visitors to no end.
1. Have ten different types of colored text - This is very annoying.
2. Navigation Inconsistencies- Show your site to some friends before you upload your site and try to let them surf around. If they get lost change your navigation scheme
3. Flash and unnecessary animations - Don't have any crazy graphics unless they serve a specific purpose.
4. No contact information - Make it easy for your visitors to find their contact information.
5. Confusing Background Images - Make sure your background is a solid color or just white, don't use crazy designs for your background.
6. Unnecessary Scrolling - Make sure your visitors can see most of your pages right on the screen. Don't make them have to scroll to find your information.
7. Awards - Do not put them on your site period.
8. Strange Links - Avoid links or linked GIF's that go to site that have nothing to do with what your site is about.
9. Overusing JavaScript - Don't use JavaScript unless you have a clearly defined role for your script on your site
10. Keep it Simple Stupid - If you remember KISS it will make your programming experience much easier.
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, December 22, 2003:
Summary:
Sites are getting better at using minimalist design, maintaining archives, and offering comprehensive services. However, these advances entail their own usability problems, as several prominent mistakes from 2003 show.
Here's my list of ten ways that websites have been particularly annoying recently.
Many companies, particularly in the high tech industry, use vague or generic language to describe their purpose. Obscuring this basic fact makes it much harder for users to interpret a website's information and services.
A strong mental model can grow from small seeds, as each additional design element adds to the user's existing understanding of a site. However, many sites create blurry mental models in users' minds because they fail to offer the one hard fact that users need to place other facts in their proper context.
Archives add substantial value to a site with very little extra effort. Although more and more sites are archiving old content, most sites still fail to maintain good archives. Some sites treat archives as a separate site area, assigning pages new URLs when they move them from the main area into the archive.
Changing the URL when archiving content causes linkrot. It also makes other sites reluctant to link to you. Although sites might consider linking to a current article, if they've been burned by linkrot in the past, they'll often pass you by because they don't want to bother with having to update their own pages when you move yours.
Without dates on articles, press releases, and other content, users have no idea whether the information is current or obsolete. It's great to keep content in archives. The Alertbox, for example, gets 80% of its readership for old columns, which readers continue to find useful. But some facts and recommendations are strongly date-dependent, such as when I recommend using a certain version of a software package for another two years. Obviously, I mean two years from the day the article was written; if readers can't see the date, they won't know how to follow the recommendation.
A user confronted a similar error in our recent test of how investors and business journalists use the investor relations areas of corporate websites. The user found a news item through a site's search engine and used the item to evaluate the company's current business prospects. Fine, except that the item was a few years old. The search engine had listed a misleading date for the article -- probably the date that the file was moved or had a typo fixed.
The search engine on my own site has the same problem: it relies on the operating system's file-modification date rather than the date the content was written. As a result, I've shut off the date feature in the search result listings. Such dates can be very useful, but they do more damage than good if users can't trust them. Of course, the ideal solution is to get a content management system that feeds the authoring date to the search engine. Any big site with an IT staff should do so.
It's great that websites are now using smaller pictures. Avoiding the bloated designs of the past decreases download time and increases information richness. It's also good when sites link small pictures to bigger pictures, so users have the option of seeing the image in more detail.
The main problem here is that websites typically produce small images by simply scaling down bigger images. If an original photo has a lot of intricate detail, the thumbnail is often incomprehensible.
When using photos on the Web:
Include fewer people and objects, in less complicated settings than you would for photos intended for print
Emphasize close-up shots with clean backgrounds
Use relevance-enhanced image reduction when preparing small photos from big ones. Don't just resize; first crop the image to focus on a salient and simple element
Many sites have begun paying attention to users with disabilities and are following accessibility guidelines, such as including ALT texts for images.
Unfortunately, some sites don't realize that ALT text is a user interface element, not a statement of political correctness. ALT text should help blind users (and others who can't see images) navigate and operate the site. The text should describe the image's meaning for the interaction and what users need to know about the image to use the site most effectively. There is no need to describe irrelevant visual details.
For example, I came across a site that used the following ALT text for its logo: "Link to home page using the IDEAS logo: two swooshes surround ideas and a sun is rising in the background." It might be reasonable to have a textual description of the logo design somewhere on the site for blind users who are curious about how it looks, but there is no reason for every user's screen reader to announce the number of swooshes in the logo on every single page view.
It takes a screen reader a long time to read out nineteen words, and the excessive description makes it harder for users to pick out the salient information: that the graphic is a link to the homepage.
Short is good when writing for the Web; it's even better when writing for screen readers.
Comparing and choosing between alternatives is the basis for most critical Web tasks, yet most websites don't support users who want to consider alternatives.
What if I want to travel out Sunday instead of Saturday? How would that affect the price of my airline ticket? On most travel sites, the only way to answer this question is to start again from the first screen and plan an entirely new trip, losing all the work required to build your first itinerary.
What if I want a color copier instead of a monochrome one, but I'm satisfied with all the other attributes of the monochrome copier I'm currently viewing? Can I navigate by attribute and change only one parameter? Usually not.
Some websites do let users pick out a few products and view a comparison table, but such tables typically have low usability and don't highlight the most important differences between products.
It used to be that Web sites offered one or two things. Now it's common to find sites with thousands or millions of items. Wonderful, but that means that item listings are often very long and hard to use.
One of the main usability guidelines for category pages is to let users winnow items according to attributes of interest. To "winnow" a list basically means to filter out elements that don't meet specified criteria, leaving a shorter list that's easier to manage and understand.
Useful winnowing requires four things.
The site must support winnowing in the first place, and most don't.
The winnowing attributes must make sense to users rather than being highly technical or company-internal (say, using part numbers, even though they may be offered for search if customers know exactly what they want).
Criteria should differentiate products of interest from those the user wants to ignore. Examples:
Show only products that can be delivered by Christmas Eve.
Show only shoes that are available in size 10 extra-wide.
Finally, of course, the user interface that controls the winnowing process must be simple so that users can focus their attention on attributes and listings, not on the mechanics of operating the site.
Sites that offer many items ought to provide winnowing and sorting, which is a highly useful way to deal with lists and is fortunately fairly common. Unfortunately, many sites only let users sort items by brand. So you can find, say, all Armani products, but not all red sweaters. To support sorting by attributes of interest to users, the obvious first question is "What attributes do users value?" The answers will differ by product category, but user research can help you discover them, as can a good sales person.
Put the burden on the computer, not the human: let users enter data in the format they prefer. Two common ways of unfairly restricting users:
Picky, overly specific forms. Splitting what users see as a single piece of information into multiple fields means that users must waste time moving the cursor around. A typical example is when forms ask users for their first and last names as two items, rather than simply letting users enter their full name in a single field, which is much faster to type. Another example is:
Human formatting prohibited. Any text entry field that requires users to type information in a specific way rather than allow the natural variations that humans prefer can be irritating. Many sites, for example, force users to enter credit card numbers as 1234567890123456, rather than letting them put spaces between groups of four digits, which significantly reduces the risk of errors. Similarly, some sites won't let users enter a phone number with parentheses around the area code, even though many people are used to such parentheses. Our testing has shown that senior citizens are particularly harmed when a website's format is different than a format they've grown accustomed to over many years of use.
Restrictive data entry also causes internationalization problems, because the one, sacred format that the computer will accept often ends up excluding customers from other countries.
This point was discussed in detail as item #10 on my list of ten most violated homepage guidelines, but it's important for all pages, not just homepages.
Many of this year's top design mistakes actually indicate a happy phenomenon: we are making progress in Web usability. Now that sites are doing certain things correctly, we get hit by second-order phenomena that only cause problems because users have progressed past the first-order issues.
For example, the question of good or bad ALT text only arises for sites that care enough about accessibility to have any ALT text. Other top mistakes this year derive from sites that target fast downloads by reducing image size, that maintain good archives, or that have a broad product selection. All are positive design directions, but attention to details is required to achieve optimum usability impact.
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, November 10, 2003:
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Summary:
There are ten usability mistakes that about two-thirds of corporate websites make. The prevalence of these errors alone warrants attention, especially since they appear on sites with significant investment in usable design.
I typically focus my top-ten lists on issues that I think are the most important and most in need of attention. This time, I've used a different criterion: I've focused on the known usability principles that designers most frequently violate. Whether big or small, the very prevalence of these usability problems makes them worthy of attention.
The frequency statistics are based on the numerous homepage reviews that my company has performed since I published my book on homepage usability. This data source introduces a bias, because only big companies or government agencies with a substantial usability commitment will invest $10,000 to have an independent expert assess its homepage design. However, we can turn that bug into a feature: if companies with a demonstrated commitment to usability make certain mistakes, they must be particularly slippery pitfalls.
For each of the ten most frequent mistakes, I state the deplorably low percentage of homepages that follow the guideline. I've sorted the list by compliance rate: number one is the guideline that the fewest sites follow (that is, the mistake that's made most often).
I also list the guideline's number as it appears in my book, in case you want to read more about it.
Compliance rate:
27%
Guideline number in Homepage Usability book: 3
This is one of the most important issues in homepage design, so it's particularly sad that it's the least followed of all the guidelines. Websites are incredibly bad at explicitly stating what they offer users. Instead, they hide their offerings in generic marketese that makes very little impression on prospective customers.
Remember: when users have needs, they typically query search engines and allocate only a few seconds to scan each of the sites that the search engine drags up.
Compliance rate:
28%
Guideline number in Homepage Usability book: 67
Fighting frozen layouts seems a lost battle, but it's worth repeating: different users have different monitor sizes. People with big monitors want to be able to resize their browsers to view multiple windows simultaneously. You can't assume that everyone's window width is 800 pixels: it's too much for some users and too little for others.
Compliance rate:
33%
Guideline number in Homepage Usability book: 37
Knowing where you've been is one of the three basic features that all navigation designs should support. (The other two are "Where am I?" and "Where can I go?")
It's sad that only a third of corporate homepages tell users at a glance which site areas they've already seen. Navigational confusion results when designers disable one of the few useful features of a standard Web browser: having visited and unvisited links appear in different colors. Our testing has shown that violating this guideline is particularly harmful for elderly users.
Compliance rate:
35%
Guideline number in Homepage Usability book: 56
For example, use photos of people who have an obvious connection to the content as opposed to using models or generic stock photos. People are naturally drawn to pictures; gratuitous graphics can distract users from critical content.
Stock photography sellers are doing a brisk business, but users don't believe that your product will make them happy just because there's a smiling lady on your homepage. Better to show your actual product.
Compliance rate:
36%
Guideline number in Homepage Usability book: 2
Our recent study of how people use "about us" information on websites did find that most users could eventually dig up information about a company's purpose. But why do most sites make prospects work so hard?
In keeping with most advertising slogans, content-free tag lines abound. Once you've paid millions to get a useless slogan developed, it's probably hard to accept that it won't work for your website.
I suggest a compromise: put the useless slogan in a graphic banner next to your logo, where it will be ignored. Then add a true tag line in plain-text format in the content area where people will actually see it.
Compliance rate:
37%
Guideline number in Homepage Usability book: 33
For the Alertbox, 80% of the readership happens after a column has passed from the homepage into the archives. In general, users remember when they've seen something interesting on a homepage. However, unless that homepage lists recent features and offers links to them in the archive, users will never be able to find what they're looking for on subsequent visits.
Compliance rate:
39%
Guideline number in Homepage Usability book: 75
This is mainly important for search engine visibility, but why not take advantage of this superior -- and cheap -- form of Internet marketing?
Compliance rate:
40%
Guideline number in Homepage Usability book: 49
This is a small point, but there's no reason to label the search box if there's a "Search" button right next to it. Interaction design's less is more principle tells us that extra elements in a dialogue distract users from the salient points and reduce their ability to understand an interface. (In other words, with less to consider, people understand more of what's there.)
Compliance rate:
40%
Guideline number in Homepage Usability book: 110
This guideline only applies to sites that provide stock quotes, either in the investor relations information or elsewhere. With stock quotes, the general principle is to help users understand the relative magnitude of a change, and thus its true importance. (A similar guideline applies to presenting other statistics that change over time.)
A stock increase of $0.75 means very different things if the starting price was $8 (a booming 9% leap) versus $60 (a modest 1% gain).
Compliance rate:
41%
Guideline number in Homepage Usability book: 43
This is a special case of a guideline that applies to all website or intranet pages: never have a link that points to the current page. (A button to refresh stock quotes or other changing information is a different matter, and should be presented as a command button rather than a navigation link since it doesn't lead to a new location.) Active links to current pages cause three problems:
If they click it, a link leading to the current page is an utter waste of users' time.
Worse, such links cause users to doubt whether they're really at the location they think they're at.
Worst of all, if users do follow these no-op links they'll be confused as to their new location, particularly if the page is scrolled back to the top.
Homepage links on the homepage typically result from using a universal navigation bar that includes "home" as an option. Fine. But when users are on a page that's featured in the navbar, you should turn off that option's link and highlight it in such as way that indicates that it's the current location.
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Link popularity analysis is one of the best ways to quantifiably and independently measure your website's online awareness and overall visibility. Simply put, link popularity refers to the total number of links or "votes" that a search engine has found for your website.
Marketleap has designed this link popularity tool to help website owners find out who is linking to their site, but also to give a useful benchmarking report to quickly show where you stand in comparison to competitors and other major online players.
PLEASE TAKE SPECIAL NOTE that Link Popularity values constantly change due to the dynamic nature of the Web. As such, the values reported by Marketleap for your site(s) are collected live each time a request is made. To ensure the accuracy of results, be sure to click through to the corresponding search engine.
Everything You Need to Know About Link Analysis & Link Popularity
http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/
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Website Promotion & Online Advertising
Target Marketing
In your history of surfing the web, you must have visited a
site that says it is a "shopping mall" site. It contains
thousands of items from hundreds of different topics. How
often have you purchased from one of these sites? Probably,
not often, unless it was a major website with a huge budget.
Small business websites should consider catering to small
niche
markets.
When deciding what products you are going to sell, choose just a few products and specialize in those products. It's much tougher to advertise a site that sells a wide variety of products due to generalization. If you have a narrow, well defined set of products, your whole advertising campaign will be easier and more effective.
This is especially true when marketing to search engines. General keywords are difficult to rank competitively. Specific keywords can achieve much better rankings. A good article to read on this business concept is called
Narrow Your focus.Transcend Solutions™ includes internet marketing and site search engine optimization with all of our web design solutions. We utilize the Internet's top marketing tools, services and best practices to begin promoting and marketing your web site....at the most affordable price.
Search Engine Optimization
Information on analyzing and optimizing your web site to
rank well in search engines and directories. Content, link
popularity, site architecture and meta-tags all play an important
role.
more
Banner Ads
Banner Advertising can be a valuable way of marketing
your website and business. Banner advertising is
typically purchased in bulk and therefore can be expensive.
Business benefit from aligning their banner ads with only
the most targeted keywords. Banner ads can be charged
per impression or per-click-through. Every time your
banner is displayed is considered an impression. This
is more expensive but is beneficial in building a brand
name. Every time a consumer clicks on your banner and
hyper-links to your site is considered a "click-through".
This is therefore less expensive and focused on generating
traffic.
Keyword Ads
A most effective form of banner advertising is referred to
as keyword ads. Keywords ads get served by provider
sites and search engines when pre-determined keywords are
searched y users on the site. Keyword banner ads can
be charged per impression or per-click-through. Unless
you are advertising on a web site that generally attracts
your target customers, keyword advertising assures that
visitors with interest in your keywords will see your online
banner ad. Several top search engines offer keyword
advertising.
Search
Engine Promotion & Submission Software
Search engine submission software automates the ongoing, time
consuming task of submitting your web site to search engines and
directories. Transcend Solutions provides a service
utilizing the search engine submission software AddWeb created by
Cyrberspace HQ (http://www.cyberspacehq.com/)
Web Position Gold is also an excellent software. For
additional information visit First Place Software at
http://www.webposition.com/
For more information
on how Transcend Solutions utilizes these and other services to
assist our clients, visit our
Internet marketing page.
We all know that E-mail is an extremely cost-efficient way
of communicating and it is extremely for online businesses.
It is critical that you and your web site securely capture and
store your online customer's information. This information
is invaluable to your business and will be most helpful when you
begin developing an email campaign or online newsletter.
Here are a few main points to remember for managing your online
newsletter or email campaign.
Keep it simple. You do not want to overwhelm your customer by sending too much information or sending large, graphic intensive emails.
"Opt-In / Opt-Out". Make sure you are sending emails to existing customers or consumers how have given you permission to solicit them. We all know how annoying it can be to receive unwanted emails. With that said, make sure you give the recipient the option of removing them from receiving on going email from your company.
Be consistent. In order to build and strengthen your brand, you will want to be consistent in your communications. The frequency of your email communications should depend on your business, products and services.
Provide value. Give your customers a reason to be excited when reading your email. This can be in the form of relevant, valuable content or product discounts.
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Narrow Your Focus and Broaden Your Sales
If your web-based business solves a
specific problem, then your chances of online success are good. This is not
a facetious statement because you'd be surprised to know how many businesses go
online with no clear objective whatsoever. But in order to increase those
chances, an immensely important step in marketing effectively online is required
-- targeting.
This is where many marketers fail, for they are
trying to be "all things to all people." Their web site may offer a product that
solves a specific problem. And unquestionably, the marketplace -- and the
potential -- on the Internet is huge. But it is also for this very reason that
general offers either get easily drowned in this boundless electronic ocean or
fail to capture the netizen's attention due to the vagueness of the
offering's nature.
Since the marketplace is so vast, attention span so
short and competition so enormous, there is no better place for market targeting
than on the Internet. Today's rapidly changing, technology-driven marketplace
mandates a sharper marketing aim. If your business doesn't have one, you're
going to either have a really tough time or require a huge marketing budget.
Therefore, try to discover the demographics as well as the psychographics of
your niche -- your niche being your core, largest or most profitable
market. If you don't have a narrowly defined market, then identify it or isolate
one. And once you've defined it, it will then be easier for you to market your
offer in front of an audience that will most likely be genuinely interested in
it. Otherwise, without one you'll be merely shooting blanks.
Demographics are the basic qualities and characteristics of your market.
They include age, gender, culture, employment, industry, income level, marital
status, location and so on. For example, does your product cater uniquely to
women? Is it more appealing to a specific industry? Does your product complement
another type of product? Is your market mostly made up of French Canadians? In
other words, who buys from you specifically?
If you were to answer that
last question with "everyone," then you are falling in the "all things to all
people" trap mentioned earlier. Avoid it as much as you can. But if you do cater
to a diverse market, then the trick is to find out who buys from you the most or
the most often. Above all, ask yourself this all-important question: Who is
my perfect customer?
On the other hand, psychographics consist
of the emotional and behavioral qualities of your target market.
They include emotions, rationales, buying histories, psychology and thought
processes behind the decision to buy your product. For example, they include
your customers' interests, associations to which they belong, previous purchases
they've made, other similar or related products they've consumed, activities in
which they're engaged, the length of time they remained with a particular
company in the past, and so on.
Stated differently, demographics define
the qualities of those people who may *need* your product, while psychographics
are the qualities of those who may not only need but also *want* your product.
Before you target your market, profile your customer -- your perfect customer.
You can start by conducting some marketing research among your current client
base, potential clients and clients of other similar products or companies. But
never underestimate the gold mine that can be found in your own backyard
-- your clients.
In order to illustrate the difference between
demographics and psychographics, let's look at cosmetic surgeons and
particularly hair transplant doctors. Hair restoration caters typically to men
who have experienced hair loss and are able to afford such an operation. In
other words, men and bald men specifically are potential patients because they
may need more hair.
But psychographics on the other hand go a little
further. In this example, they are comprised of men who not only need more hair
but also want more hair. This is important since not all of them do -- it's a
matter of personal priorities, just as the type of clothing one chooses to wear.
If you think about it, would you consider all bald men as potential clients?
Hopefully not.
Therefore, in order to target this specific market as
precisely as possible and thus generate higher quality leads, doctors must take
their patients' psychographic profile into account. Elements include their
lifestyle, their interests, the type of industry in which they work (since
certain industries are more image-related) as well as their previous buying
habits (such as men who have already invested in other forms of hair replacement
solutions).
Once done, they can easily find places on the web where this
perfect customer hangs out. They fish where the fish swim. For example, there
are web sites and even "vortals," which are niche-based portals, catering to
bald men seeking a hair loss solution (like regrowth.com). There are even
discussion lists and ezines whose subscribers consist of people suffering from
thinning hair. And of course, the list goes on.
Nevertheless, keep in
mind that less is more. Narrow your focus to a specific niche and,
paradoxically, you will broaden your sales. Arm yourself with as much
information as possible about your perfect customer, and then target *that*
customer more than any other. While you can't be everything to everyone, you
shouldn't be targeting everyone for everything.
Michel Fortin is an internationally acclaimed and highly sought-after consultant whose marketing advice has helped countless clients earn millions of dollars in record time. He is also the Senior Editor of Internet Marketing Chronicles, a weekly newsletter with 125,000 subscribers, as well as the author of four books. His latest book, “Power Positioning Dot Com” reveals how to keep your product or service indelibly carved into your prospects' uppermost consciousness at all times.
Check out the cool, interactive device on the site that puts your business
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Professional Website Marketing Strategies
Often there is a trial and error period in finding the perfect path to follow or the ideal strategy for your particular product or service. Critically important is presenting your product or service in a way that conveys a message of professionalism and credibility.
It has long been a fundamental business principle that if your product is of the highest quality, easy to acquire and less costly to the consumer, that they will "beat a path to your door". For the most part that may be true but there are a few other considerations that are critical to the success of your business. While there are countless methods and approaches that you can take in reaching your goals, my experience has shown that the very first thing to consider is that all your presentation materials should be of the highest caliber. That doesn’t mean they have to be expensive, but be aware that you represent yourself every time you pass out a business card or write a letter to a potential customer. Therefore you are always marketing yourself. Be sure that the tools you use are professionally and skillfully prepared. Opportunities for the growth of your company are enormous but can potentially be expensive. Therefore the following are just a few ways you may consider for marketing your product or service that are the least expensive and often the most effective in reaching your target audience.
1. Prepare a good press release.
While there are not guarantees that an editor will pick up
your story, the potential is staggering. All you need is
one editor who is interested in your story and you’ve hit
the bull's-eye. Overall, a press release is one of the least
expensive methods for promoting your company, product or
service.
2. Write articles about your area of
expertise;
and the reasons your product will benefit the masses. Make
sure the article is useful to those who read it. Every
good e-zine is constantly looking for potentially
interesting and important articles to feature. Writing
articles gives you an opportunity to advertise for free
while building credibility.
3. Include a good bio on your web
site.
About you and your company. Write it in the third person.
You don’t want your bio to sound autobiographical, but you
do want your audience to know something about you. A bio
can create trustworthiness.
4. If it means paying a little bit
more...
Make sure you have a good webmaster to create your web
site. You want to be sure your web site represents you in
a manner that conveys all of the above namely credibility,
trust-worthiness and professionalism.
5. Introduce yourself via e-mail.
I don’t mean writing those tacky letters that are pure
promo hype. I mean constructing a very professional letter
that targets those who may have an interest in your
product. A well-constructed letter is worth its weight in
gold.
To encapsulate, it is unmistakable that the marketing approaches and strategies available are extensive but in order that you attract the target market you’re eager to draw to your site, you must maintain a competitive edge by choosing professionalism. Above all, be sure to provide an enhanced level of customer-oriented service. Nothing draws clients to your business more effectively than providing the most advanced and best possible customer service. If you wish to position yourself in the forefront, the primary key in getting a positive reception to your product or service is through providing flawless customer service.
Copyright © 2000 Stephen R. Renfrow, All Rights Reserved.Webmaster of the HOME BIZ NETWORK http://homebiznet.nu Since 1994 HBN has been providing Tools/Tips/Secrets/Help including proven Biz Opps for the SOHO industry. He also provides Web Design and Hosting services. Developed the "Business On A Disk" concept on CDRom. Specializes in helping to understand and master financial freedom. Subscribe to the "H.B.N. EZINE" Privy information for the SOHO Professional http://homebiznet.nu/ezine/index.html
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Page Titles and Meta Tags
Keyword Analysis
Link Popularity
Link popularity is the number of "relevant" websites that link to
your website. Search engines have begun to weight link
popularity as a very significant factor to your sites ranking.
For this reason, it very important to encourage linking to your
site by outside websites. Links to your site can best be
achieved by pursuing reciprocal links with pertinent sites,
existing partner and supplier sites as well as industry sites and
web directories.
For more information on how Transcend Solutions utilizes these and other services to assist our clients, visit our
Internet marketing page. We specialize in providing professional web site solutions at the most affordable rates. Contact us to discuss how we can help you! We will meet or beat professional bids presented by other firms on your website projects! We look forward to working with you.-Top- San Diego Web Design - Professional and Affordable Web Site Design in San Diego -Top-
Affiliate Programs
Make sure that the programs you join are making your work worthwhile. Join programs that give you a high payout for each sale and at least 25-30% on commission for each sale. Your product should be something that you would feel comfortable purchasing and recommending to your visitors. Also, promote your site all the time. Use a newsletter to keep your mailing list informed of new products and articles on your site. Promote to search engines. Build your reciprocal link list. After building your site you should spend 90% of your time on marketing so you can get the visitors you need to make you efforts worth while.
The most important thing is not to give up. If you don't see results within a few weeks keep plugging away. 80% of affiliates make almost nothing with their programs, so if you've seen even a small commission check, you're already ahead of the game.
A great affiliate site is
Commission Junction
Industry & Business Affiliations
One powerful and often overlooked method of advertising, and
generating business is to partner with existing business
suppliers and related industry associations. Suppliers
and existing business partners are a natural place to begin
offering your products and services. Having
pre-established business relationships with these entities
means your foot is in the "door"...and that is half the
work. Another way to get your foot in the door is to
work to partner with targeted associations whose members
would benefit from your offering. These associations
benefit from providing value to their members and therefore
are often more open and less stringent about testing new
business opportunities.
Message Boards
Message boards are a good way to interact with other webmasters and customers that are interested in your field of products. You can get your foot in the door, by giving advice and guidance to people on the message boards. This can lead to them asking you about a website or particular product you are selling. If you work to become a leader in your product field, visitors will feel more comfortable when visiting your site. They will remember that you know what you are talking about, and that your endorsement of a product is to be trusted.
Message boards are a good way to passively promote your site. Visit them when you feel like doing something different for a change, and get involved in discussions with possible customers. Becoming an "expert" in your product line will increase your sales and enhance your websites credibility.
Press Releases & Publicity
The media provide you
with the best way to generate business for your product or
service. News is big business and almost everybody has their
favorite programs, news services and publications. Every industry
has hundreds of specialized TV programs, radio shows, magazines
and publications dedicated to their particular topic.
Sending a press release is one of the most effective ways to generate publicity for your business. It can drive mountains of customers to your web sites and order lines. Just one mention of your business in any of your industry's major publications can bring targeted prospects to your site and explode your sales.
Most companies pay for advertisements in their trade papers or on TV and radio. Press releases are different — besides your time and effort, they are FREE!!
Until recently, sending a press release was both time consuming and expensive. You had to purchase a media database that cost thousands of dollars, or hire a distribution service to send your release to the media for hundreds of dollars each time.
http://www.onlinepressreleases.com/
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Web Site Design Tracking Results
Web Stats / Usage Reports
Web statistics are necessary to track your website
marketing efforts. The main statistics that show your
overall progress are hits, visitors and page views. Hits are
tracked when any image or page loads from your web server on to a
visitors browser. Hits are not as accurate as visitors since some
pages has many images or page elements on one page.
Paying attention to visitors is a better way to track your website traffic. Every time someone visits your site they are tracked as a visitor. A good statistic to look for is "unique" visitors. Once a person visits your site they will not be added to the unique visitors category if they visit again. This is a good way to track new or actual visitors to your website.
Page views are a good indication of how "sticky" your website is. A good statistic to consider is Page Views divided by the number of Visitors you have. This statistic will give you a good idea if your content is interesting and if your visitors are staying on your site for a long time while browsing.
Domain Names
Capturing a memorable domain name can be of great importance
to building your online business and brand. Domain names
containing keywords are often ranked more favorably. At
Transcend Solutions, domain name registration is included with any
web design service. A great resource site for registering
and managing domain name is
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Web Designing is as easy as 1-2-3
Web Designing is as easy as 1-2-3, claim some of the software tools on the market that "generate" your pages for you. Unfortunately, many web designers today have fallen prey to this marketing gimmick - and the results are obvious. Every now and then, one comes across a website that looks good with a particular browser and a particular screen-resolution; but view it with a different browser, and you can't even read the plain text on the page. Worse still, given the number of operating systems that are used by netizens worldwide, these pages will never be seen properly by more than a half of the intended surfers.
Now let's assume that this web page belongs to a site that sells stuff online. The very fact that half the users cannot even see the page, translates into losses worth half the amount straightaway (perhaps, even more!) I guess that makes a good case for the raison d'être of this article! Web Designing is, in my opinion, a cocktail of creative skills & technical prowess – and one is no less important than the other.
In the following lines, I have jotted down a few points that I noticed during my online journeys, important from the point of view of web designers. Some of them may be taken with a pinch of salt; for it is not possible to please everyone everytime. But most of them are simple enough to be used as a rule of thumb.
A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. A picture file, alas, is also almost as big. Images, no doubt, enhance the look of a page, but it is not advisable to go overboard in stuffing your page with a truckload of images. Most net-surfers use a dial-up connection, and the average time to load a page should be no longer than 5 seconds. If it's longer, the surfer will most probably click away elsewhere. So, within this time, all the images on a page must be loaded as well. So, as a rough yardstick, keep the aggregate page size less than 30k.
Another important point to note is that each file on the page requires a separate HTTP request to the server. So a lot of small images - even if they do not add up to a lot in terms of bytes - will slow down the loading a lot.
Even when you must use images for navigation, please give a second thought to the users who will not be seeing those jazzy, fantastic & truly amazing buttons that you spent hours to design. Yes, I'm talking of the ALT text attribute of the IMG tag. Do not forget to provide an Alternate Text for each image that you use for navigation. (It may be left blank for certain images that are purely for aesthetic reasons, but let that be an exception, rather than the rule.) Though not obviously apparent, ALT text can help such users immensely.
Modern browsers offer users a choice to turn off images. This gives an idea of how troublesome the unwanted images could be.
A couple of more attributes that make your pages load faster are the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes. Without these, the browser must wait for the image to download since it cannot know how much space to leave for them!
Navigability & functionality come before artistic excellence. It is no use making your site a masterpiece of art if users cannot navigate around it - even after they reach the main page, they have no clue as to how to go where they want to go.
Especially common, is a kind of navigation that some people call Mystery Meat Navigation. That means, that unless your mouse moves over an image, you have no idea where that link might take you. Only when the mouse hovers do you see the actual link. This is cumbersome because users need to move their mouse all over the place to find out which part is a link and which is not.
Follow the K.I.S.S. principle: Keep it simple, stupid!
Next is a very important practical suggestion: whenever your whole page is within a TABLE, the page cannot render (i.e., the page does not show on the screen) unless the entire table is downloaded. You might have noticed this on several websites, when there is no activity for a long time, and suddenly the entire page is visible. Hence, to avoid such a situation, what you should do is this: Split the table up into two tables one below the other, and let the top one be a short table that displays just the page header and a few navigation links. So now, immediately upon downloading this part of the page, users can see the page header – and this prepares them for the long wait ahead, as well as keeps them from leaving your site to go to other sites, in case of a slow connection.
The ongoing browser wars have left only
one casualty – the user. As a word of caution, stay away
from all browser-specific functions. Because if a
certain feature is supported by one browser, it will most
definitely not be supported by another. Where you must use
such features, it should not hamper the display of the page
in the other browser which does not support such
functionality. In other words, your page should degrade
gracefully.
Creating a new browser window should be the authority of the user only. Do not try to popup new windows to clutter the user's screen. All links must open in the same window by default. An exception, however, may be made for pages containing a links list. It is convenient in such cases to open links in another window, so that the user can come back to the links page easily. Even in such cases, it is advisable to give the user a prior note that links would open in a new window.
Keep in mind the fonts-challenged users too. The ultra-jazzy "Cloister Black MT Light" font that looks so amazing on your machine may well be degraded into plain old Times New Roman on your user's machine. The reason? He/she does not have the font installed on his/her machine - and one thing's obvious - there's nothing you can do about the situation, sitting halfway across the globe from them.
Stay clear of out-of-the-way hard-to-find fonts. Use plain vanilla fonts like Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, and Courier. If need be, make your jazzy fonts into an image and put that on the page. (and while you're there, do not forget Tip #1.)
A new design trick that is increasingly being used on the web has caught my fancy: It is a very functional navigation bar that guides you across all possible paths within the site. It looks something like this:
Home > Section
> Subsection > Page
What better than to give your users a handy way of visiting just about any other page on your own site, and informing them where they are!
Another new trend on the web is not all
that inviting - various vendors come up with
"revolutionary plug-ins" and undoubtedly, most amateur
web designers jump up to spruce up their pages using them.
The reality is that most people won't have them installed,
and wouldn't care about it anyway. Come to think of it, have
you seen plug-ins on any of the most popular sites,
including Yahoo.com, Amazon.com or Google.com? It's simply
not the best thing to do. Mention must be made here of
Macromedia's Shockwave Flash plug-in, which has now made its
way onto most computers today, and thus presents no harm in
using vector animation on your site.
Java is yet another often-misused
technology on webpages. Use Java as a utilitarian
programming language, not as a graphics front-end for your
photos/images. There are various things you can do with
Java; that does not mean you should do all of them. Java
applets are known to run slower, so users experience a
certain sluggishness in performance. And worse still, Java
has been known to crash certain browsers. This is not
something everyone likes, especially if it is done for the
sole purpose of showing a set of images in a slideshow! The moral: Use it, but with discretion.
Never underestimate the importance of
those META tags. They can make all the difference
between your users coming to your site and going to your
competitor's – just because they couldn't find yours. Search
Engines heavily rely upon the Keywords & Description
Meta tags to populate their search database. And once again,
use discretion in writing these. Including a huge number of
keywords for the same page can spell trouble. The
description should be a small, meaningful summary of the
whole page that makes sense even when seen out-of-context of
the webpage itself, say, in a listing of search engine
results.
And the final point that summarizes all
the points so forth: Write for all browsers, all
resolutions, and all color-depths. If you show people
pages that look best with their own browser and their own
resolution, that makes them feel "at home", and you get a
better response. Compare this with a website that proclaims
"Viewed best with Browser X at a resolution of 1024x768."
I'll give you a choice between two options when you see
such a page: download the suggested browser (which might
well be over 50 Megs), then go get a new monitor that
supports the high-resolution, and then adjust your screen
setting so you get the perfect picture. Or simply click away
to another site. Which do you prefer?
The web waits for no one. And
furthermore, the user is king. Try your best to keep the
user happy. And to keep all users happy. For, a good
website is like a good storefront - it can mean all the
difference between a casual surfer and a serious customer.
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Do you want your site to load quickly? If it is your personal homepage, it may be a big deal to you. If you are trying to run a business, or offer people important information, this can be very important. If your front page takes a great deal of time to load into a browser, then you may want to do a little redesigning to increase the number of visitors that decide to stay at your site.
First, remember that not everyone has a T1, cable modem, or ISDN connection to the internet. In fact, there are still a large number of surfers with modems less than 56K. So, as web designers we must see to it that our sites load as quickly as possible without losing anything important.
Let's start with the obvious bandwidth hogs: images and other media. My suggestion here is to take out every form of multimedia embedded in you front page except for images. Sure, a background song can be nice, but these sound files can take up a great deal of bandwidth, especially if the sound is a .wav file. (I made a 30 second .wav on my computer- It came out around 140K). Videos can be even more taxing, (1 MB or more at times) and should probably be avoided unless absolutely necessary. As a surfer, if I have to wait more than 10 seconds for something like this to load, I'm tempted to hit "Stop" or "Back". So if you use these, keep the file sizes small (Probably 30-40K or less would be OK). Better yet, save them for a later page.
Your images will be your next big worry. These can also get quite large, so caution is necessary when dealing with images. For starters, do not make an image any larger than you need it to be for the effect you desire. If you have an image that is 600 pixels x 600 pixels, your page could take forever to load. One of the easiest ways to reduce the file size of your image is to simply give the image smaller dimensions. Go to your image editing program, and resize or resample your image to make it smaller. You can also compress your images using special services on the web which reduce the file size of images for you, and let you choose the images that still look good once they are compressed. There are links to an image program, an image rendering tutorial, and image file size reduction services at the bottom of the article for you.
After you have the images as compact as you can make them, you can save loading time on other pages by using one or more of the images from the front page on other pages. The image you loaded for the viewer on the front page will be in the browser's cache, and will load instantly when it is called on your other pages! This will allow you to load other things you may need without needing to worry about the image again.
Another trick you can use is to define the width and height in all of your image tags. This way, the browser knows how much space the image will use on the page, and will not have to adjust everything once the image starts loading. It will save a little time, and will also keep the page from jumping when an image loads.
Finally, be sure your front page is as short as possible as well. A longer page can take a long time to load, even if it is all text. Put extra information on another page and use a link for people to go view it. You will save a little extra time, and maybe reduce clutter a little bit.
Well, I am done thinking for today, maybe I'll have a few more speed tips for you in a future article. Until then, have fun with your speed enhanced web sites!
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There are many web design companies in San Diego. Make sure to shop around and get a professional web designer for your project. Contact Transcend Solutions, they are reliable, professional and willing to go the extra mile for your web design and development needs.
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