All too often businesses get their new websites designed and then forget about them and expect them to do the rest. Business people sometimes assume that if a website doesn’t take off, that the web designer hasn’t done his job correctly, that may be true in some cases, but for a website to really excel it needs to be treated like a high maintenance girlfriend. Here is my list of the top 5 things you can do to set your website on fire and make it really take off. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: home page, web content, web design, web designers, web publishing
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For several years I have experimented with various web publishing platforms to varying degrees of satisfaction. The ultimate, in my opinion, has to have several important elements. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: CMS, web content, web publishing
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Without a doubt the most critical single item of a website yet also the most neglected is the home page. First impression mean a lot, your website’s home page has to accomplish several different tasks and do them well in a short period of time or your visitors will leave. These tasks are: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: home page, web design
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Creating a great web design is a balancing act between many varied and sometime contradictory elements. A website needs to please different groups of people and accomplish several functions at the same time. It combines left-brain, logical thinking and right-brain, artistic thinking. The average user or even owners of websites have little knowledge of what all goes into a truly great website, therefore I have compiled a list of the different things a website must accomplish to be considered great.
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Tags: business image, HTML standards, search engine optimization, web design
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Who was it that said “if you build it they will come” because it’s not true online. How many websites have failed because the person assumed that visitors would just magically appear, I met with a business person recently who had spent many thousands of dollars on an eCommerce website that had, over the course of many months, sold nothing at all. Building a website without search engine optimization is like putting a retail store at the end of a dark alley and then Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: conversion rate, search engine optimization, web content
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The task of keeping a website’s content fresh and up-to-date can be a daunting one, yet it’s of utmost importance to the success of that website. Adding a Content Management System (CMS) to your website makes updating content a snap, but until recently these were very expensive to implement. The cost of implementing a CMS is much lower today than it was a few years ago for a couple of reason Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Content Management System, web content
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There must be a great deal of easy money to be made selling SEO (search engine optimization) services, or at least that’s the impression I get from all the snake oil salesmen that seem to be hawking SEO these days. Not that I don’t recommend search engine optimization as an important step in creating a successful website, I definitely do, but if you’re going to spend your hard earned money on SEO you need to make sure you’re getting your moneys worth. Unfortunately because the average person has a limited understanding of what goes into SEO they are easy targets for dishonest businesses.
If you are planning on paying for search engine optimization services you should get answers to the following 5 questions before choosing a company.
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Tags: search engine optimization
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Turning web visitors into paying customers
I’ll let you in on a little secret of web design, search engine optimization does not necessarily produce a successful website, better expressed as SEO ≠ $. While it’s true that search engine optimization (SEO) is very important to a website’s success it is by no means the only element of it’s success.
The goals of individual websites may differ quite a bit, for one the goal may be to get a visitor to buy a product, while another may be to get a visitor to call, or fill out a form to request further information. Whatever the end goal is, reaching that objective is called a conversion Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: conversion rate, image optimization, search engine optimization, usability, web content, web design
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It’s been my experience that most clients enter into a web design contract knowing no more about what they’re doing than they do about molecular biology. I wouldn’t hire a carpenter to build onto my house without some knowledge about what he was doing so I could know I wasn’t being ripped off and I wouldn’t go into surgery without reading up on the procedure first. An educated client is a happy client and produces happy web designers, therefore I present my list of 10 things you should know about web design. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: HTML standards, web design, web designers, web standards
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