Category: Web Design

As more and more consumers are turning to the internet to research local buying opportunities, small, locally-based businesses without an internet presence are really losing out on one of the most cost-efficient, effective forms of advertising for their business. Even entrepreneur.com published a lengthy article discussing why every small business needs a website.

The old way of thinking that you need to shell out thousands of dollars to a designer and have a big, complicated site for your business is, in my opinion, outdated. Since you conduct your business offline, your website only needs to serve as an advertisement for your business, not a method of doing business. By having a site that is optimized to show up for local searchers and combining that with an effective, direct-response message to get those visitors into your business, you can have an advertising medium that is out working for you and your business 24/7!

WHAT TO THINK ABOUT BEFORE YOU HIRE A DESIGNER

Before you rush out and hire a designer, there are a few things you should consider.....

1. Does the designer have any marketing or advertising experience? Many designer do awesome work, but their minds are geared toward appearance rather than business functionality. You want a nice, professional, catchy site, but you need to remember that the real value in the result the site produces for you. A site obviously does no good if nobody sees it. Furthermore, it does no good if the right audience does not see it. If you sell landscaping services in Cleveland, what good does it do you if someone in San Francisco sees your site?

2. How many ways can your business benefit from having a site? A website is a great tool, you can send current customers to it, use it to draw in new customers and many other useful tasks. For example, when I design a site, I like to include a way for visitors to "opt-in" to receive emails from the site owner. The enticement is usually some sort of coupon or other valuable tidbit. This is awesome for a couple of reasons. For one, it makes the visitor more vested in you and your business and hopefully provides the enticement to either come into your business or call. Secondly, the site owner can now legally send an email to the people who have opted in. Imagine having a list of 500 names and email addresses that you can automatically send an email to promoting a new product or a special offer. This is very powerful!

3. What kind of ongoing support does the designer offer? Will you just be handed a site or will the designer provide hosting? If hosting is provided, how much does it cost and what does it entail? Does the hosting include revisions or do you need to pay every time your site is updated? Basically, unless you know your way around the technical parts of a website, having your designer on hand to host the site and make changes is a good idea. Some designers charge a flat fee just for hosting and then if you need revisions you pay their hourly rate. Other designers offer a more broad package that may include a certain number of revisions every month plus other services to keep your site performing well. This is just one of the areas you must thoroughly research with your designer before signing up.

My company normally charges a flat fee for all the design work and then a monthly hosting fee which includes unlimited revisions and other proactive services designer to keep your site performing well and generating leads for your business.

So, if you are small, local business without a website you should seriously consider having one because your competition probably does!

About the Author

Brian is the owner of Medina Web Marketing, a small design company in Northeast Ohio catering specifically to the internet marketing needs of small, local businesses. You can learn more by visiting their site at http://www.medinawebmarketing.com

Category: Web Design

One of the most important strategies in the world of internet marketing and business is the fact that you have to come up with ways of attracting potential customers. In the world of Internet marketing, one of the sure ways to keep the customers coming up is when you have an effective and at the same time an attractive website.

Web design is nothing more than a conceptualization of various electronic media content delivery through the Internet in the form of technologies. This requires planning and modeling so that such data will be suitable for interpretation and display by a web browser or other web-based graphical user interfaces (GUI's). In other words, it must be suitable for viewing and very much understandable by the clients.

The rationale behind a web design is to create a website that has a content presentation for the benefit of the end user. The elements used in making a website are text, bit-mapped images, forms that are placed on the page by using HTML, XML, or XTML tags. If you intend to display a more complex media you may opt for programs such as Flash, Quicktime, Java run time environment and other plug ins that can be infused into the web pages using HTML or XTML tags.

To further manipulate web pages, you may also make adjustments as to the various browsers' compliance with w3c standards. Web pages are either static or dynamic.

What are static pages? If your web site has static pages then the content and lay-out does not change unless manually done so by the owner of the website. However, if your pages are dynamic then the appearance will depend on the end-users input. Content may be changed by using client-side scripting languages such as JavaScript, Actionscript, media players, JScript, and PDF reader plug-ins, etc. To alter DOM elements you can use DHTML. In complex applications you may use server-side scripting languages (PHP, ASP, Perl, Coldfusion, JSP, Python, etc.

What should your website have?

As to the content, the substance should be relevant to the site to reach the targeted audience. The site must also be user friendly and its navigation is simple and reliable. The appearance must look consistent and uniform when it comes to the usage of the graphics and the text. It must appear convincing, professional and appealing to the eyes of the viewing public. Another important factor is that the site must also be easy to find through advertisement media and major search engines. In other words you must have an effective web design to make this work. After all, your website will serve as the front liner in the ever emerging battle in the world of Internet Marketing. The competition is getting stiffer, so make it worth your while!

About the Author

Virginia Magallanes, 25, works as company writer for Call Center Philippines Unique Interaction