Your Companys Website Professional Online Presence

Writen by Carla Reis

A website image should match a company's quality objectives to build your company's online presence. Does yours? The truth is a poorly designed website can damage a company's online presence. More so, your website is your online presence. Internet users expect a reputable company to have a high-quality online presence reflected in a quality and professional website. Think about it as an electronic business card or brochure; a first-class website shows that a company is serious and professional. A website that is well presented, designed and developed will open a myriad of options for low-cost marketing and client acquisition.

This is the first segment in a three-part series that addresses the guidelines on how to plan, present and develop your company's website. The full series includes:

• Professional Online Presence
• Quality Web Site -- Quality Approach
• Website Design, Development & Marketing Aspects

Your Company's Web Site – Professional Online Presence If your company strives for quality, this should be expressed as much by your website as it is with your company's products and services. From now on, consider your website as an extension of those products and services; consider it as your company online presence. Ask yourself what is important to you and your customers when it comes to the services or products your company provides? Is it the advantages like quality, performance, presentation and reliability that are offered? Does your current web site reflect this? Revisit your company's mission statement – is this also reflected in the website?

It's amazing how many companies do not have a professional online presence for fear of expense (in which case, they often opt for a "do-it-yourself" product). A well-developed, well-designed website is not a cost; it's an investment, and any related expenses will convert into new clients. At present, there are several reputable organizations that will help your company build an effective web site for a reasonable price.

It is proven that R.O.I is quickly met when the website properly addresses your requirements and /or target market. Keep in mind that your website is the least expensive 24/7 (worldwide) salesman that you will ever find.

It's important to find a team of website design experts who will listen to you, understand your needs, and not only follow your guidelines, but also present you with new options and suggestions to increase your sales and customer acquisition. A good team will produce a professional online presence that is in tune with your company's image, excels in usability and is search-engine friendly.

Online marketing for your website is also very important since your utmost goal is to attract users that search for the products or services you offer. A high-quality website that is lost among search engines is like placing an expensive ad in a magazine that nobody buys. If Web browsers cannot find your site, they are limited in how they can purchase your product or service. Treat your we site as a marketing tool, not only as a source for company information.

Summary: A professional online presence and a quality website are the most important investments you will make for your company; it will reflect your company's image, and the products and services you offer. Seek a website design company that is willing to learn about your company, and its products and services. Get involved in the website development process and offer your opinion and suggestions – after all, you know your market and your company.

Carla Reis
President
Quest Quality Solutions
----------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2005 - Quest Quality Solutions.
This article can be reproduced in its entirety, if the author credit is retained and there is a prominent source link to www.questqualitysolutions.com.

Carla Reis has a Bachelor Degree in Arts and a Diploma in Web site Design; she also has several years of experience in Web site design training, Search Engine Optimization, and management. Carla's experience with Web site design and Search Engine Optimization [SEO] began when she was the training manager for one of the biggest Search Engine Marketing companies in North America. She developed the company's training manual and SEO certification exams to better qualify the staff and deliver high quality services to the company's clients. After managing the training department and organizing the working flow and distribution for the company, Carla decided to venture on her own. She started her company in 2004 – Quest Quality Solutions. What began as a one-person business has expanded to a team of professionals and has been growing in a steady pace.

Maintaining Your Business Website

Writen by Tim Knox

QUESTION:
Should I build and maintain my business Web site myself or pay someone else to do the work for me? -- Wesley L.

ANSWER:
When you say, pay someone else to do the work for you, Wesley, I am going to assume that you are talking about hiring a professional Web site designer to do the work and not your next-door neighbor's teenage son. If my assumption is correct, then read on. If not, go ahead and flip over to the comics section. You will get no good out of the advice I'm about to give, so you might as well consult Dilbert for your hot business tips.

Should you build and maintain your business Web site yourself or pay someone to do it for you? Let me answer your question with a couple of my own. Number one: is building and maintaining Web sites the key focus of your business? Number two: could your time be better spent doing more important things like, oh I don't know, say running your business? If your answers were no and yes, respectively, then you have no business building and maintain a Web site.

Remember this: every minute you spend on tasks that are not related to the key focus of your business is time spent to the detriment of your business. In other words, every minute you spend focusing on tasks that do not contribute to the growth of your business and thereby increase your bottom line is time wasted.

If you want to be a web designer, be a web designer. However, if the key focus of your business is building widgets, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that your time would be better spent building widgets, not Web sites.

Case in point: I once had a very wealthy dentist ask if I could teach him how to maintain his Web site so he wouldn't have to pay me to do it. Now my teeth had helped put this guy's kids through college, but that didn't seem to matter. At that moment he was more concerned about having to pay for changes to his Web site than my personal oral hygiene. Sure, I said, I'll be glad to teach you how to update your Web site, just as soon as you teach me how to clean my own teeth so I don't have to pay you to do it. He got the point. And he charged me enough for the cleaning to keep his site updated for months. Smart man.

Many business owners think they can't afford a professionally designed Web site and that simply is not true. While the old adage, "you get what you pay for" is never more true than when applied to Web site design, having a professional web designer do the work for you is money well spent. A well-designed Web site can bring you a many-fold return on your investment. You can't say that about too many other collaterals.

While it is best to leave Web site design and maintenance to the experts, it is up to you (or someone considered a subject matter expert within your company) to provide the designer with the content (text and photographs) that best conveys your company's message to your customers. A Web site, no matter how well designed, is meaningless if it lacks the content required to interest customers in the products you sell or services you provide.

Here's are a few questions that, once answered, will help ensure that your Web site's message is as appealing as its design. Go over these points with the designer before the design process begins as the answers will help determine the direction your Web site's design should take.

What Is The Purpose Of Your Web Site?

Most business Web sites have two purposes: (1) to educate the consumer and, (2) to sell them products or services. If you sell shoes, for example, the purpose of your Web site is to educate potential customers on the quality and durability of your shoes and as a result, to sell them shoes. If you paint houses the purpose of your Web site is to educate home owners on why your services are superior to other painters and sell them on hiring you to paint their house. By defining the purpose of your Web site you will give the designer the information required to create a Web site that best conveys that purpose to your target audience.

Who Is My Target Audience?

Your target audience consists of those folks you want to attract to your Web site: potential and current customers, future and current employees, possible investors, etc. Anyone who might be interested in your company and its products or services is a member of your target audience. Correctly identifying your target audience is vital since your Web site should be designed specifically to appeal to your target audience.

Put yourself in their shoes (or in front of their computers). Imagine your Web site through their eyes. If you were visiting a Web site such as yours what would you expect to find and what would you be disappointed not to find? Identify your target audience, then have your Web site designed to fulfill their needs and surpass their expectations.

What Content Should My Web Site Feature?

Your Web site content should be driven by the nature of your business. If you're a real estate agent, your site should feature photographs of homes you have for sale and information on buying and selling a home. If you own an auto body shop, your site might feature before and after photographs of cars that you have repaired. Remember to determine the purpose of your site, then develop the content to serve that purpose.

What's My Competition Doing?

The last question you should ask is one of the most important: What is your competition doing on the Web? Do a Google search for similar businesses and click around their Web sites. How are their Web sites designed? What message are they trying to convey? Are they doing a good job of conveying that message and as a result, selling products? What do you like about their Web sites? What don't you like? Make note of the things you like and the things you hate, then share your findings with your site designer.

Remember, you're not stealing trade secrets here.

You're just borrowing ideas.

Small Business Q&A is written by veteran entrepreneur and syndicated columnist, Tim Knox. Tim's latest books include "Small Business Success Secrets" and "The 30 Day Blueprint For Success!" Related Links: http://www.smallbusinessqa.com http://www.dropshipwholesale.net

Getting The Balance Right

Writen by Mark Adams

Having spent a number of years in the internet design and marketing industry I have seen how important the balance of web design / optimization is to the success of any e-marketing venture.

In the past I have had clients who were frustrated by the fact that competitor web sites ranking high in the search engines were of poor quality compared to their own.

When I looked into this it was obvious what was happening. The so called poor quality sites were composed of simple navigation and then lots of pages with text and an odd image here and there. The clients web site in comparrison was an all singing / dancing mix of flash and bright graphics. The text in the site was limited to a few lines here and there.

Here was an excellent example of two web sites built at different levels. One was basic and probably built by someone at home while the other was professionaly built by a designer. In my mind I was in no doubt that the professional site would probably sell more than the basic one. The only catch here was that the professional site was nearly invisible to the search engines due to the nature of its design and content. A great looking site that no one can find.

Had the web site been built with optimization in mind then it would have probably had far more success. Just because a web site needs to be optimized does not necessarily mean the design has to be sacrificed. There are many ways a web site can be made search engine friendly and still look and function professionaly.

When a visitor arrives at the web site then first impressions really do count. A business does not have very long to promote itself so its important that any visitor is given good reason to stay and explore other pages. This is when clever marketing and copywriting take over from the initial optimization.

If you are thinking of having a new web site built then think very carefully about how it's design / content will influence its's position in the search engines.

If you have a high ranking but poor looking site then consider adding some enhancements that will not affect it's current position.

If you have a site that is extremely search engine unfriendly then consider having it completely re-designed.

Marketing Advice

The best things in life are free so I give this information at no fee.

Creating A Website Based On Adsense Revenue Model

Writen by Lata Tokhi

The latest craze sweeping the webmaster world is creating 'Adsense Websites'. Webmasters are busy cranking out a number of websites aimed to earn entirely from Adsense, with few of them finding the success they hoped for. Creating Adsense Websites is a wonderful idea provided you play by the rules. Creating spammy websites with hardly any content and a whole of links based on 'high-paying keywords' is more likely to get you banned from Google Adsense than earn you high profits you dreamed of.

A small content website created on a specific theme with Adsense ads integrated properly into it, is the correct way to earn from this revenue model. How to logically create a new website based on Adsense Revenue Model is discussed here:

1. Identify High-Paying Keywords

The first step is to decide the theme of your website. Since you are creating a website entirely for Adsense, it might help if you first took time to find out the highest-paying keywords/ads. Advertisers bid for keywords on Google. Some keywords are very expensive and if ads for such keywords are displayed on your website, and clicked upon, your earnings may increase dramatically.

For a list of High Paying Adsense Keywords, visit http://www.momtycoons.com/earning/adsense-keywords.shtml

> To do your own research, use http://www.iotaweb.org/. Type in the desired keyword and the tool will tell you the highest bid on it.

> If you have a Google Adwords Account, log in and use the tool for finding the bid rates for different keywords.

Choose a topic which is fairly high-paying as well of your interest.

2. Build an SEO Website with Useful Content

Once you have chosen the theme topic, start building your website. Register a Domain Name, Set up a Web Hosting Account, choose a simple and fast loading layout for your website and add start adding content. Add at least 10 articles on the topic you have chosen. You can get the articles for free from an Articles Directory but it is best to put original content into an Adsense website. Write the articles yourself or Hire a Content Writer.

Optimize all pages for Search Engines. Use Heading tags, proper titles and keyword-rich content. The more SE optimized your page, the more relevant will be the ads that are displayed.

3. Integrate Adsense Seamlessly

Add Adsense code to every article page. Take time and choose ad formats depending upon your website layout and integrate the ads seamlessly within the content on each page.

Read more about integrating ads seamlessly in your website content at http://www.momtycoons.com/earning/integrate-adsense.shtml

4. Increase Website Traffic

Your website is now done and you need interested visitors to visit your website, read your content and click on your high-paying ads. Start promoting your website by submitting articles, using signature tags, link exchanges etc.

Lata Tokhi is the owner of Mom Tycoons: http://www.momtycoons.com, a website with useful articles and advice for webmasters on topics such as starting online business, setting up websites, marketing and promotion, increasing revenue and sales, search engine tips etc.

Four Ways Of Keyword Research

Writen by Nik Chauhan

Steps to be followed in website development and Marketing

Keyword Research

Before one goes for the website development one should always do some research work on Keywords.

Why Keywords?

Keywords are analytical part of an website which helps in bringing up the site in search engine rankings.

It can be difficult to choose the Keywords that describe your business so that users will see your website when they perform an online search. How do you go about it? This article offers some useful tips.Obviously, you want people who are searching for what you can provide to find your website near the top of those results pages. How do you manage this feat?
The easy answer is "by using keywords and key phrases."
The tricky part of that answer, as you might have guessed, is that you need to use the right keywords. choosing the wrong keyword would do no good from search engine point of view.

Choosing and researching good keywords is a process that takes several steps. I won't have the room to cover all of the steps completely in this article, so I will cover the rest in a subsequent article. Basically, the process goes through four stages:

• Collecting initial keyword ideas.

This is also known as brainstorming. Come up with plenty of ideas; ask other people for ideas, too, including your customers. In this article, I'll discuss some do's and don'ts so you can target your ideas a little, and maybe even come up with a few you wouldn't have thought of originally.

• Checking keyword research tools.

There are online tools that offer information about the number of times users perform searches for specific words. This is very important, because it will help you not at all to optimize for a keyword the search engines never see. Two of the best-known keyword research tools are Wordtracker and Overture.

• Selecting keywords.

This is the point where you put the information from your research together and decide which keywords are going to deliver the best performance for you. Note that I said "performance;" the best keywords might not be the ones that will deliver the most traffic.

• Analytics.

After you've chosen your keywords and optimized your site, you need to perform measurements to see whether it's delivering the amount of traffic and conversions you expected. You can use this information to make adjustments and refine your keyword strategy.

website development and marketing is a hot topic to discuss but here one finds quite a few ways how to deal with it. For more information you can find on site: Website development

Things To Consider Before Starting A Website

Writen by DeAnna Spencer

In the time that I have been using the Internet, (since 1996) I have seen a lot of websites. I have seen a lot of good websites and I have seen a lot that were just plain awful. Here are some things to think about before you start a website.

What is the purpose of your website? Is it meant to be primarily a sales site or is it meant to be purely informative?

Once you have decided on your website's purpose, you need to decide on a theme. There is nothing worse than going to a website and having to play guess what this website is about. To pick a theme, I suggest that you write down a list of things that you are interested in and/or knowledgeable about.

Once you have written your list down, you need to do some research. Use a tool such as the search term suggestion tool on overture to see if there is a demand for your topic. If you type in your topic and see a lot of searches done for your topic then you should use that topic. If you don't see a lot of searches done for your particular topic, try another one.

Now that you have picked a topic that is in high demand, you need to either develop a product that fits the theme of your site or find a product to sell that fits within the theme of your site.

You also need some sort of freebie to offer on your site so that you can build your own opt-in list for marketing purposes. You should offer an ebook or a special report. Maybe even offer an e-course. Whatever you offer, make sure that you have a way of capturing the email addresses of your visitors. These people will become your "warm market" or people that you can market your other offers to.

You will need to find a hosting company to host your site. Free Web space is fine for just casual websites, but if you are serious about making money online you should eventually graduate to a paid host. The reason behind this is that many people perceive a site hosted on a free web space to be unprofessional. I don't agree with these people myself, but you do have to deal with what the majority thinks in this industry.

You also need your own domain name. See the above tip.

You will need to code your site. You can either learn how to do this yourself or you can hire someone to do it for you. The amount of money you have to spend on this endeavor should help you to decide whether or not you want to hire someone.

Lastly, you need to figure out how you are going to promote your site. Here are some suggestions:
writing free articles for reprint in ezines and on websites.
buying advertising in ezines
buying advertising on websites
trading links with relevant sites.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of things to think about when starting a website. This article's purpose is just to get you started. You should certainly read everything you can find about doing business online while you are building your business.

Copyright 2004 by DeAnna Spencer
This article may be reproduced and redistributed freely on the Internet as long as the resource box remains intact.

DeAnna Spencer is a virtual assistant that helps entrepreneurs run a successful business by providing affordable administrative help. She also publishes a blog for small business owners. Visit this small business resource today.

Make Your Website An Online Sales Tool

Writen by Andrew Rowe

In today's day and age just about every company has to have a website. It's widely accepted that if your company doesn't have a website, it's not considered credible in its market. Yet how many companies actually consider their website to be truly an online sales tool? In fact most companies spend a lot of money to design and build fancy websites but they neglect to think of how they're going to turn the website into a work horse for generating leads and online sales opportunities for their company.

Most business owners and executives don't understand that even if they're not engaged in selling a product through an e-commerce system, there's still a great vast opportunity to increase their lead generation through guerilla marketing techniques related to internet marketing. And the core competencies in that area are performing good search engine optimization and having strong pay per click advertising campaigns that are focusing in your core markets.

85% of business buyers go to search engines to find vendors when they don't have a preferred source, so it's absolutely critical that you have an online presence and that you are well optimized with your website so that when people type in keywords related to your product or service you come up at the top of the search engine, whether it be MSN, Google or Yahoo. From there once a person who's searching for your product or service clicks through to your website, what do they find? Do they find a nice "about us" page, or a pretty picture of your company? Or do they find readily engaging tools, free guides and offers that compel them to actually click on an offer and fill out a form and convert themselves into a sales lead.

Companies that are building websites without thinking about optimizing them for the search engines and without thinking about optimizing them for conversion of sales leads are entirely missing the boat. If your company is in the process of building a new website or redesigning its website and it's not considering search engine optimization and developing great offers and conversion mechanisms in calls to action on its website, my suggestion is don't waste your money. It's not enough today to just have a nice piece of brochure-ware that does nothing. Companies that are really winning with their marketing expenses as it relates to web presence are the ones that understand the power of internet marketing and are turning their websites into workhorses for sales.

About Cube Management

Cube Management delivers sales acceleration services to emerging growth and mid-market companies. The experts at Cube Management work across the entire spectrum of marketing, sales and business development to provide customized solutions (whether recruiting, interim management or consulting) that drive revenue and profit growth. Cube Management combines Strategy, Process & People to produce winning results. Download the Cube Management Inside Sales Guide and the Cube Management Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guide.

Importance Of Website Audience Analysis

Writen by Gene DeFazzio

Analyzing the Website Audience

The webmaster should analyze his prospective audience in light of the message he is attempting to convey. You must be concerned with the range of ages represented in your visitors, the education and experience of this audience and their knowledge and opinions on your main theme.

You must adapt your website as specifically as possible to the audience that you are trying to reach. You will need more than a superficial knowledge of your target audience. What are their intrests, are they educated or uneducated, are they experienced or inexperienced, what are their opinions and prejudices and what is their economic and social level.

The webmaster should never fail to consider the emotional state of his audience. Establish a common ground of feeling. You must analyze and utilize their motives and intrests if you are to relate what you have to say to their habits of thought and feeling. To do this you must know as much as possible about the behavior and needs of the people who will be visiting your website.

Often, the subject of your website will give you a hint as to the character of your visitors. If they are intrested enough to visit your website then you can expect that they have an intrest in what you have to offer. Understand your audience in terms of the trends of the day as revealed through newspapers, magazines, broadcasts, the movies and web surfing. Compare the customs, standards, traditions and manners that you possess with that of your target audience and create a common ground with them.Define and Refine

There are 4 steps, that if followed, will define your target audience and refine your site to meet their intrests. They are;

1) Investigation - Consider the purpose of the website, the layout that best projects the idea that you wish to convey and characteristics of your prospective audience. List possible topics and select the one best suited to all aspects of the situation: your intrests and qualifications, the requirements necessary to promote your ideas, the necessary content to accomplish this and the expectations and characteristics of the audience.

2) Organization - The next step for the webmaster is to determine the structure of the website. The webmaster must decide the logical requirements of the subject matter and the most appropriate way to adapt it to the prospective audience. Only after a webmaster has selected the topic, has analyzed the particular audience, and has collected the proper content will they be equipped to plan the structure of the website.

3) Method of Expression - The third step in building an audience friendly website is to express the thought in a way that will communicate to your audience exactly what you intend. The central theme should be easy to follow, the vocabulary must be suited to the understanding of the audience and be interesting enough to hold the attention of your visitors.

4) Mastery of the Content - You must master the content of your website and present a logical sequence of ideas leading to a particular goal. Set up your website in such a way that there is a smooth progression from one idea to another. Make clear the exact meaning of what you are saying each step of the way.

Gene DeFazzio is the webmaster of http://www.rocketface.com. Rocketface(R) Workshop is an attempt to gather together, in one place, information on how to design a website plus a few of my own thoughts. Every attempt has been made to eliminate technical jargon and buzz words.

Four Strategies On Finding Out What Visitors Think Of Your Website Information

Writen by Chris Le Roy

The Internet is what I consider one of the most awesome things every created. I am of that generation that grew up with computers and the Internet has really been a god send for me as it allows me access to places and people I would never have had the opportunity to meet. It is also the source of some of the best information you could ever wish to garner. But! It is also the source of some of the worst information as well.

Website owners, just like you and me really need to carefully look at the material that we provide on our websites and consider the issue of whether everything we are providing is really what our visitors really want. So, the question is, how do we find out?

There are four simple key strategies you can use to find out whether the visitors to your site actually value your information. The four strategies are –

1. Email the Visitors
2. Survey the Visitors
3. Put Feedback Ratings on the Page
4. Email to Friends buttons

These four strategies might seem obvious or simple but how many people actually use them. Not too many.

Why Put These Strategies Into Place?

The key reason for this is that by understanding what your customers are thinking you can tailor the information on your website so that they are more inline with what they want. For example, and I will use my own training company as an example, if we had let say a sudden rush of 10,000 visitors to our site and they told us via the four strategies above that they wanted more information on Excel, what do you think we would do. We would add more information on Excel. If through the Feedback ratings we got higher positive responses for say articles on Pivot Tables, what would we do? We would put more articles on Pivot Tables onto our website.

Let me give you another very clear reason to do this. My team and I run a website in Townsville, Australia called GetTheRightPrice.com. This website provides the fuel prices for the local community and tells them where to get the best price. For three years my company had been running this site to the tune of $100,000 plus a year. We had struggled to work out how we could run this site and make a profit. Over the three years we used some of the strategies above to learn one clear lesson. Nobody in the community was prepared to pay for the fuel price, which meant we had to change our way of thinking to find a model that worked.

Okay so let's look at the four strategies.

Strategy 1. - Emailing Your Visitors

This strategy I personally think is quite simple and straight forward, but it does rely on one thing. You need to be asking your visitors what their email addresses are. If you own a website and you aren't collecting visitors details, then what are you doing. Remember one thing, always ask your visitors their first name and their email address so that when you send out an email, you can address the email to them personally. You will always get more responses if you address the visitors by their first name.

One other thing, get the visitors details into some sort of Customer Database as soon as possible. There are lots around.

When you email your visitors you could ask them simply some questions to reply to, you might ask them to complete an attached survey or you may just ask them to give you some feedback on say a certain webpage.

One thing to note too, sometimes people can be very shy about completing a survey via email. You may want to consider finding a way, with this strategy where they can reply, but anonymously.

Strategy 2 – Survey the Visitors

This is one, I have been using a lot of late and I have learnt so much about my customers. You can survey the visitors in two ways, have a link on the page that takes them to the survey or you can use what we call an Exit Survey. This was a strategy I learnt from a series of interviews done by a gentleman called Mr H. There are about 5 hours of discussions on how to really make an effective website in these interviews. An exit survey is where a screen will popup as they leave your website and done effectively is a really simple way to learn what your customers think.

I thought when I first used it people would be really anti the technique, but they haven't been and I have got some really cool information from my customers. One thing though, if you are using Pay-Per-Click search engines, then they usually frown on this technique. But, if your traffic is from other websites then I encourage you to use this technique.

Note a few things though, for this method to work, the questions must be extremely simple and quick and to get the optimum responses back you need to make sure that you offer the visitor something. In particular some Free Gift like an eBook, article or report and make it something worthwhile not rubbish. Nothing irritates me more, than registering for something free and it being a load of rubbish. If you do this, it will affect your credibility.

Strategy 3 – Feedback Ratings On Your Webpage

Feedback ratings are definitely what the big boys are using. If you visit sites like MSNBC and go to their news articles, at the bottom of each article you will see the ability to define how you rated this story and they give you five stars to click on. With this sort of information what you can do is to then look at the styles of articles you are providing and provide more in that category. This will ultimately help you to attract the customer back in the future.

The other key thing with this style of tracking is that you can work out if a particular author or style of article is more attractive to your visitors. It can also help you work out whether its worth paying to get a key author to write for you.

Strategy 4 – Email This Article To Your Friends button

This strategy is really an extension of Strategy 3. What it essentially requires you to do is to track how many times somebody forwards your article to a friend. By looking at the statistics from here, if a certain style of article is being emailed then you may again want to look at getting more articles in that category.

What's the bottom Line?

The bottom line is this, the more you learn about your customers behaviors, what they like, what they don't like, who they are etc, the more effective your website will become and the more likely people will come back to your website.

The other thing I would like to put to you, is not to lose your statistics. You need to be looking at them regularly. In our centre we use Microsoft Access to view and evaluate our statistics. Trends change in the marketplace and what works today may not work in the future, so by keeping those statistics you will be able to see if the trends are changing.

Chris Le Roy is the Managing Director of One-on-One Personal Computer Training and has been training people in building websites and using the Internet through his company for 10 years. If you would like to listen to the interviews mentioned in this article click on the link – http://www.1-on-1.biz/dms.asp

Whos On Your Web Team

Writen by Jeanette S Cates, PhD

One of the phenomena of the Web is that it all looks so easy. After all, it just takes some typing, a few graphics and a link here or there to create a web page, right?

But it's more complex than that when you're serious about doing business online. In fact, it takes a TEAM to create a profitable online business. So who is on your web team?

You, the business owner, are an important part of the web team. You are the person who sets the direction. And you ensure that direction is followed. Just because you are not technical does not mean you should compromise your vision. Stick by your guns and have the technical staff set it up to your standards.

Your Web Designer. He or she is a professional who combines both artistic and technical skills. They may choose to outsource the graphics or the programming, but their specialty is ensuring that your site looks good and functions properly. Your web designer may only create your site, then leave the maintenance to someone else in the organization or they may stay on for the maintenance role. You definitely need someone who can create new pages, add links, and respond to the changing environment of your online business.

Most web designers are not Internet marketing experts. You or the Internet Strategist need to tell the web designer what standards you want applied to your site. You are the manager of the process. The designer works for you. Even if they think a fancy graphic would look good, you should ask them to refrain, unless you know it will enhance sales.

Your WebMaster. This person makes sure your server is running properly and that all of the backend services that your web designer depends on are operating properly. Your webmaster may be the same as your web host, depending on the complexity of your site. In some cases your web designer may also be your webmaster.

But never assume that all of these roles are being done by a member of the team. Instead, ask if they will perform specific functions. What is not being done can hurt you more than what is being done.

Your Internet Marketing Strategist. This person understands how business is done online. She understands your business goals and sets out a plan to ensure you are able to achieve those goals online with your website and the marketing activities prescribed. The strategist looks at every aspect of your information assets that can be turned into information products or free offers, as well as at your website. The strategist may be a one-time investment or it may be someone you work with regularly.

Your Internet Marketing Team. These are the people who do the activities included in your strategic plan. These activities may include registering your site, marketing your articles, creating link exchanges, and running your pay-per-click advertising campaigns. This role may be done in-house or outsourced. But it is one that is ongoing.

Regardless of whether or not you've ever outlined all of the activities that are involved in creating, maintaining, marketing and profiting from a website, they do all exist. And if you've been wondering why it just doesn't seem to be "happening" for you - it could be you've left out an important function and/or member of your web team.

Copyright 2006 Jeanette Cates

Dr. Jeanette Cates is an Internet Strategist who works with independent professionals who are ready to turn their knowledge and their websites into gold. Dr. Cates offers a one-time Brain Dump Special for online business owners seeking guidance. http://www.YourInternetStrategist.com

Web Business Overview Have A Plan

Writen by Halstatt Pires

So you've decided you'd like to go into business on the web, eh? This article will give an overview of options that are available for your web business and will help to give you an idea of what goals should be set for your project.

After deciding to be a web entrepreneur, the next step is to create a business plan. Business plans are as essential to a web entrepreneur as blueprints are to a construction worker. To build a business most efficiently, you must first be an architect and plan how you would like your business to look, what it will do and how your goals will be accomplished.

There are many ways a person can go about making money with the Internet. Options include selling products as a wholesaler or retailer, selling services, promoting products or services as an affiliate partner, selling advertising, selling email or demographic information, selling subscriptions to sites and any number of other ways and combinations of money making ideas.

A good business plan will include details on the service or products you will be offering, growth goals for your new business, projected expenses and losses, employee projections, and any other information you will need to clearly outline your successful business. Though there are many approaches to the actual construction of a business plan, a month by month or quarter by quarter analysis is common.

For example, if your online business will be selling widgets, you may want to go through, month by month and estimate the total number of widgets you will sell, the cost of selling these widgets, expenditures on marketing, hosting and overhead, and any other foreseeable factors you can think of. If within six months you want to begin selling skyhooks as well as widgets, this should also be accounted for in your business plan.

Before moving on to our next topic, it is important to remember that business plans are constantly changing. Some of your projections will be difficult to make accurately, so do the best you can with the information at hand. As more data becomes available through research and experience you will be able to make revisions to your business plan. I am of the belief that it is generally a good idea to make profit projections on the low end to start with. If you believe you can sell between 10 and 100 widgets your first month, it is better to plan to sell only 10, and be pleasantly surprised when you sell 55, rather than to plan for 100 and fall short of goals that have become unrealistic yet necessary for the survival of your business.

After you have a good plan for your business, the next step will be to research your business. But that's a subject for the next article.

Halstatt Pires is an Internet marketing consultant with http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing firm in San Diego offering automated web site systems through http://www.businesscreatorpro.com

What Hosting Companies Dont Tell You Could Hurt You

Writen by Dave Young

Did you know that hosting companies overcrowd their servers despite all the issues caused by servers running hundreds of accounts? Are you aware of what happens if your website is hosted on a server that's overcrowded? You're probably thinking to yourself, "what do you mean overcrowd their servers?" Overcrowded servers mean big money for your hosting company, but also big problems for your website.

Hosting companies are willing to sacrifice the success of your website in order to build their own profit. The more accounts hosted on a server, the more revenue they can generate. Greed takes priority to a hosting company. Sure the plans they offer sound good, but do you really know what's going on behind the scenes? After they take your hard-earned money, what happens next? Unless you're a system administrator or network engineer, you probably have no idea how your website functions on an overcrowded server.

If you've reviewed or researched hosting companies you will notice they all look the same. They offer similar packages, claim they provide support, and appear to have a network worthy of the highest caliber websites. But what they don't tell you is the type of disk space or bandwidth your website will be using. They don't mention possible security risks. And they especially don't mention how many accounts they create per server.

Avoiding the problems associated with overcrowded servers is extremely easy…

To read the entire article, visit http://www.gp-host.com.

Dave Young is the President/CEO of GP-Host, a division of Gluepoint, LLC. GP-Host provides a unique hosting environment for entrepreneurs and business owners. info@gp-host.com

How To Build A Quality Website

Writen by Nowshade Kabir

The other day I received an email from a guy asking whether we could build his eCommerce website. Since Rusbiz is a company which has a full service web solutions development department, I sent him our executive brochure by email and asked if I should send him our website building checklist. The answer I received was "Can I work directly with your web programmer and tell me what your hourly rate is?" I wrote him back that there is no problem in working with the programmer, but we use a team of experts to build a website and he will be much better off if he goes by a flat price for his project instead of going by hourly rate. Apparently he did not like the idea! Too bad!

Web development services fundamentally differ from say an attorney's services. If you are working with a professional company, depending on the size of your web project a team of people will work on it. Namely: your account manager, lead programmer, web programmer, designer, Content editor, database programmer, web promotional specialist, and web administrator. The tricky thing about website is starting from making your site by yourself on Geocity or similar free site builders to hiring topnotch web development companies that charge thousands of dollars the range is way too broad. Often, people select a company to do their web development job based on their subjective perception not based on knowledgeable decisions. Although, price should be a key issue, you should not go for a company just because it quoted you a cheap hourly rate! Many fall for nicely designed previous works of the vendor. The design is also only a part of the whole project, albeit a very important one but don't make the mistake of overemphasizing on it! A beautifully designed website with nice graphics and pictures is not necessarily a good eCommerce website. It could be even just the

Website development is increasingly becoming a sophisticated task with narrow specialties. Before handing over your job, make sure that the company does have all the right people in their team. The team may also consist of other specialists apart from the ones listed below:

Team Members and Description of their Services

Project or account Manager
This is the person who manages expectations through a project's lifecycle. Determines project needs, outlines specific deliverables and oversees the process and team from start to finish. He or she also maintains ongoing client communication and education throughout project. Handles budget and scope issues, including weekly status updates and additional changes.

Art Director/Designer
This person oversees visual design process. Helps transforming client expectations into the right visual look and feel. Applies technical and user needs into final UI (User Interface) design. Works with project manager and the client to establish a clearer vision of the site.

Information Architect/Designer
Defines overall site organization and layout from an informational, navigational and functional perspective. Works with client and project manager to determine overall content strategy and site structure, page layout and interaction through out a site. Participates in usability testing and works with developers to bridge gap between design and technology.

Developer/Programmer
This person works on writing and coding programming parts of the web site. Oversees design and ensures effective translation to HTML. Also works with other developers of the production team to maintain standards for coding. Depending on the size of the site, there could be several programmers involve in a project.

Content Manager
This individual provides a consistent style and tone of the site. She works closely with client to gather all information and materials for the Web site. Understands fundamentals of content development, and has a clear understanding of the overall goals and communication objectives of the site. She works with the designer to implement content in an efficient manner. She also works with Web Promotional Specialist in order to bring the content inline with search engines' requirement.

Technical Lead
Provides management and direction of the programming team for back-end projects such as database development or system integration specialists. She acts as a liaison between front-end and back-end teams.

Database Programmer
Depending on the needs of the website, a database specialist may necessary to handle the development of various catalogs and various database issues.

Usability Specialist
An individual with a background in human factors engineering and/or cognitive psychology who has a broad understanding of usability issues on the Web. This individual should have knowledge in information design, navigation and Web development processes.

Web Promotional Specialist
Helps optimizing web pages for search engines. Understand the fundamentals of search engine optimizations and aware of the latest changes in the algorithms of mail search engines. Make recommendations to the client and help him popularize the website. This individual works closely with content manager, designer and developer.

Now, for your website you may or may not need a team with all the members stated above, and in some cases one person may have knowledge of two fields but it is better to understand that in the ever changing world of the Internet if you are serious about your web business, you better build your site with the help of real experts of each core area.

Statistics shows that almost 70 percent of web projects do not finish on expected time frame with allocated budget. To reduce your risk while ordering your new website or revamping your existing one, take the following steps:

Check out the vendor's site thoroughly.
Do they follow what they preach? How the site looks like? Are you going to buy a product from the look and feel of the site? Check out the example sites. Are they good enough?

Find out if the team consists of professionals.
Ask them detail questions. Check out cross reference. Talk to the team members directly.

Write a clear well-defined technical scope.
Develop a thorough technical scope before starting building your eCommerce site. This will eliminate confusions before they occur. You will have a coherent picture of the required time and budget. You will also understand your own needs better. A scope is like your business plan and works as your road map. Spend enough time to make your scope as meticulous as possible. Once you finalized your scope, no matter what, don't try to change it at later stage if you want to finish your project on time.

Work closely with the team.
Ask questions whenever they arise to the individual of the team, whom they concern most.

An astounding large number of site owners are not happy with their websites. A little preparation and follow-up will help you avoid becoming one of them.

Nowshade Kabir is the CEO of Rusbiz.com, a global B2B Portal, which helps companies build web store, buy and sell products and services using eMarketplace, eCatalog and other features. Rusbiz also offers website development packages: http://www.rusbiz.com/design_package.html

Flash Deadly Sins That Can Kill Your Web Business

Writen by Alan Steward

Looks like every client wants a Flash site these days but the reality is...as flashy as these sites may look, there are many negatives you may want to consider before delving into Flash.

Deadly Sin One - Long Load Times

This is the most obvious problem with most Flash sites. Flash files can get large in a hurry and if the page takes too long to load, your visitor will move on without even seeing your site. Ideally, you would want your Flash web page to load just as fast as a 'regular' page with text and images. And yes, it can be done!

Problem #1 - Images

The whole reason why Flash was developed was to be able to use vector graphics on web pages. Vector Graphics are infinitely smaller than pixel based images, they can be resized to any size and animated without creating large file sizes. Unfortunately, many designers use regular pixel based graphics like photos in their Flash design and end up with huge files. Rule #1 for good Flash design should be...Use Vector Graphics only!

Problem #2 - Sound

What is a good picture without sound? Once you have this great Flash animated page, you want to add sound to it. This is the #2 culprit resulting in large file sizes and slow loads. The trick here is to use loops. Flash Music Loops are ultra short slices of music, that when looped in Flash play great background music sound tracks that load fast and sound great. You can find Flash Music Loops at http://www.flashmusictracks.com These loops that are near CD quality and most are only 15k or less in size. They also offer a free Flash Music Player that allows for the music to continue playing even if the visitor switches to another page, you can even select a different music track or stop the music at any time while browsing, totally impossible with any normal Flash implementation. Another thing that helps keep file sizes down is to use low-res MP3 files for button effects and sound effects. You don't really need 128k MP3 quality when most computer's speakers will sound just as good with 24k or 32k MP3s. Another easy file size saver...use mono!

Deadly Sin Two - Missing Links

This fact is often overlooked. When you use Flash Buttons and Links, search engines will no longer find your links on the pages. This can be extremely disastrous for your search engine rankings. Search Engines need to be able to follow links to successfully index your site. Plus, the more well placed links the robot finds on your site, the higher your ranking will be. When you use all Flash, you won't have any visible links and you effectively kill any chance of being found on search engines.

What's the answer here? Use a Flash/HTML hybrid page. Even if you have Flash links, still try to duplicate those links on the bottom of the page in HTML code so the search engines can find them.

Deadly Sin Three - Compatibility

This factor used to be important but today it's no longer relevant. In the early days of Flash, many web users didn't have the Flash plug in and they moved on to another site rather than to download and install Flash just to visit your site. This is no longer an issue. 99% of all web users will have browsers that can 'see' Flash pages and you no longer have to design a Flash and Non-Flash Version for your site. If your visitors run for the hills rather than stick around to visit your site it's the load time, not compatibility that is to blame.

So what is a man to do? You want Flash but you still want quick load times and good search engine rankings. It can be done but you need to design your Flash site with all these factors in mind. It is possible to design Flash Pages that actually load faster than many 'regular' pages with lots of graphics. A good hybrid design with enough HTML elements can get you ranked well with the search engines. The FlashMusicTracks website mentioned above is a perfect example. It uses Flash Banners and Logos only, everything else is HTML. The site looks good, sounds good and everything loads very fast.

So, you don't have to be afraid of Flash killing your web business if you use Flash wisely.

About The Author

Article by Alan Steward, Webmaster and Sound Designer at http://www.musicleads.net.

You are free to use this article on your website or in your ezine as long as you do use it in its entirety.

Earning From Your Website

Writen by Helen Peshkova

Before you start building your site, ask yourself "WHY?". Why did you decide to build your own web site. How are you going to earn money? Creating simple homepage will not get you any money at all nor you receive lots of visitors. Your website must be the part of your business. It also must be the part of your business plan.

When you are planning your website, ask you the following questions:

1. Who is your audience?
Your main goal is to provide information to meet the needs of your key audience, in a manner that is user-friendly. Audiences may include your clients: businessmen, professionals, etc.

2. What goals do you want to achieve with this site?
What problems is your Web site trying to resolve? What are the advantages to having a Web site? Think about these questions as you prioritize your goals, and use them as a guide in your decision-making.

3. Is the information you want to provide the same information that your audience wants from you?
Your perceptions may dramatically differ from their perceptions! Involve your visitors, listen to their comments, test your site with them. Approach your information as if you were a user visiting your site for the first time. Does it make sense?

4. Is your information easily accessible?
Do not put up roadblocks! Make information available with as few "clicks" as possible. Always make contact information readily available. Don't put up "under construction" pages -- this frustrates users, who may not return to your site.

5. Is your content style appropriate to your audience?
Unless your users are expecting to find a text-heavy page, keep your copy simple and short. If it isn't immediately obvious what the purpose of the page is, the user probably won't read more than one or two sentences before moving on.

6. How will you keep the content up-to-date?
Who is responsible for hosting and updating website content? How often will he or she do it?

7. What is the structure of your site?
It is very helpful to sketch out a "site map" of your content in order to organize it effectively. Site maps help determine navigation across your site as well as the "breadcrumb" element on your pages. It may be helpful to create a map of your content as it exists on your current site, and another for how you envision the organization of your new site.

Written by Helen Peshkova, RichTrack.com.

http://www.RichTrack.com is one of the first business oriented education portals. It's the leading online business information network for millionaires. The goal of RichTrack.com is to present business content in a professional, helpful and practical format that helps you getting rich.

Nonsense Why Do I Need A Website

Writen by John Krycek

"I don't sell anything online, I don't advertise online, in fact I don't really even know how to use a computer... why should I pay for a website?"

If you don't feel a website can help your business grow or increase business sales, or if you're happy with the site your nephew made for you over half a decade ago... then you're not intune with current business trends and business practices.

Fear the unknown no longer!

Don't feel inferior and don't let that notion frighten you... that's why were here! To educate and help you understand exactly how our design and website services can help you.

You shouldn't do something because everyone else is. As far as the internet is concerned, there are definitely good, sound, solid reasons for having a web presence. This article will touch on just a few... and none of the following points have anything to do with selling a product or service of any kind online. All of these reasons affect your brick and mortar business... in a positive way!

The reasons you should have a website in plain English.

Even if you never use the internet, MOST of your customers do. In early 2005, Google announced it had over 9 Billion pages in its index. Common sense should tell us that there must be something to this internet marketing!

By having even a simple, informative website about you, your product or service, you open an instant, FREE door to perspective clientele that you never had before. This is the digital information age. The purpose of the website is to give yourself a billboard in it. Even the simplest website can:

Instant Access to your business Collateral- Provide Downloadable forms, price lists, sale sheets and brochures to people researching a purchase. House a forum via email to quickly and easily answer questions about your goods and services.

Reduce Costs- A strong enough web presence can eliminate many print advertising and other campaign costs. Even on the most rigourous web campaigns, the advertising cost per customer is far, far less by comparison.

Give People What They Are Looking For- More and more people research a company or product online before face to face contact. Today people expect to find a web site for a company with at the very least further information on services or products.

Always On- Information about your company is available 24/7, locally, nationally, and globally at no extra cost. Imagine the cost of a direct mail piece through the post office to every address in the world with a computer!

Cost Effective- Can easily be the most cost effective advertising and marketing medium of communication to existing and potential customers.

Showcase What You Do Best- If your product and service is quality and you're a one person operation, your website can focus on your business and open the door to people who might not be thinking of a smaller business for their needs.

John Krycek -- As the owner and creative director of theMouseworks.ca I've found the best way to help people with internet marketing is to first help them understand internet marketing! Read more articles on the insights and secrets of web design and search engine optimization in easy, non-technical, up front English!

A New Meaning Of Denver Web Development

Writen by Groshan Fabiola

The term 'Web development' has a broad meaning, because it refers to everything that is included in creating a successful web site, from graphical design, to programming, configuring the server and search engine optimization. Today there are thousands of web development companies, small ones with few employees and large ones with hundreds.

You can find a large number of web design companies in the city of Denver. Denver's web development industry has evolved quite a lot, the clients now have many offers to choose from.

The Denver web development firms are Internet marketing companies concentrated on both web design and business, and they can help anyone interested in launching his business on the Internet and creating the site that's best fit for him. Most of the Denver web development companies can take care of everything that is required for a site to be successful - its graphical design, appearance, and of course they also take care of search engine optimization and upgrades. The Denver web development companies also have servers that offer reliable web hosting solutions for all types of business, offering dedicated hosting, colocated hosting, shared hosting, or unique solutions.

The strategy applied by the professional Denver web development companies consists in talking to the customer first, finding out exactly what he wants, then researching the specified domain, looking for similar material that worked for other sites, and then beginning the work. When the site is finished, the Denver web development programmers do everything that is possible to raise the site's page ranking, from search engine optimization to writing and submitting articles.

If you own an outdated web site the Denver web development firms can easily transform it into a sharp looking, up to date one, and they can design special custom applications that fit into your site, and last, but not least, the Denver web development firms have special promotional offers

Many Denver web development companies are known worldwide, they have years of practice in this domain, and they are receiving offers from people and firms everywhere, providing 24/7 customer services.

This fine article is written by Grojan Fabiola during a very carefully research on Denver web development. Any other useful information or advice and turning points about Denver web development you can find by clicking the link.

How To Promote Your Law Firm Website On The Internet For Maximum Profit

Writen by Michael Turner

Making maximum profit from your law firm website is important, but as a lawyer you might not have any clue about search engine optimization and Internet marketing for your legal site. However, it is not so difficult to poise your website to be successful online even if you are not experienced with Internet marketing and driving website traffic. All you have to do is review the following tips and include them in your website marketing plan. Before you know it you will notice that your website counter is recording more hits per day and telling you that your directories, keywords, and links are working.

Tip #1 - Submitting to Law Directories

Take some time online to orient yourself with the myriad of law directories available. Register your domain name and the type of law you practice with as many law directories as you possibly can. By doing this, people searching through law directories for a lawyer will have your website as a choice when making their decision on which attorney to hire. As a result, your website should be as comprehensive as possible with every bit of information related to your niche available to visitors. Many people use directories now instead of the yellow pages so when you list your site with these directories, you'll get targeted traffic to your website and ultimately more clients.

Tip #2 - Optimizing for Specific Keywords

Nobody knows what the search engines will be looking for in the future, but right now keywords play a critical role in the ultimate ranking your site receives. When individuals search for specific words online, search engines give them pages that are optimized for those keywords. Because of this fact, you should be sure to include your industry specific keywords as well as location and the specific type of law you practice. By doing so, you will get more targeted traffic because your web pages will rank well for the keyword phrases your potential clients are using to search the internet.

Tip #3 - Incoming Links

Like keywords, incoming links are the other major consideration search engines use when ranking your site. Regardless of whether you get other websites to link to you or use auction sites like eBay to auction off your services and include links in the text, when you have more links you will have a better result with clickthrough traffic and also the search engines. Better search engine results means you will have more traffic and more sales. It is certainly worthwhile to put some effort into building links.

Include these three tactics into your law firm's Internet marketing strategy and you'll be surprised at how quickly they will work for you in generating more traffic and more clients. It is also important to keep in mind that you should regularly update your website, check your links, monitor your keyword positioning, and build your directory listings.

Michael Turner reveals his foolproof way to increase website traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it free right now at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/

Internet Marketing 5 Reasons Why Your Business Must Have An Online Presence

Writen by Dean Mercado

The Internet has officially changed the face of business and in case no one has done this for you already, let me be the first to formally welcome you to the "Information Age", or should we call it the "Internet Age".

The Internet is simply not a fad or a flavor of the week. It is the real deal and it is here to stay. It may morph in one way, shape, or form however, it is here to stay and the most successful businesses are taking advantage of it.

So why exactly should you take your business online? Although there are tons of reasons, here are 5 key ones:

1. It is expected. Quite simply, the Internet is one the first (if not the first) places people look to find out more about you, your business, and/or your product. They look for your website as well as information they can find out about you from other websites. Yes, I dare say it, in 99.9% of the cases, it will damage your credibility to some degree with a prospect if you cannot be found out there.

2. It is cheap. Never in history has a marketing medium been available to all businesses, no matter the size of their company or bank account that afforded them so much possibility for success.

Obviously money if applied properly can increase your results on the Internet; however, you really can get started with little or no money. Skeptical, just read some of the books from the "Guerrilla Marketing" series by Jay Conrad Levinson.

3. It is immediate. Face it. We live in a world of instant gratification. We want everything yesterday. If something is not immediately available, we just may lose interest or worse yet get it from somewhere else – like your competition.

4. It is 24/7. The Internet simply never sleeps. Having and implementing an effective Internet strategy can be like having a well tuned marketing and sales force that continues to do your bidding around the clock.

5. It is global. Why limit your business to the 15 minute radius surrounding your office? Your current competition certainly isn't and new competitors are seemingly coming out of nowhere every day.

Look at the Internet as a means to allow you to share your genius with prospects who otherwise might not have had the opportunity to experience what you have to offer.

So in closing, what's the best advice I can muster up on this topic? Make a sincere effort to understand the Internet and the sheer power and opportunity it brings to your business. Create a plan of attack and get in the game. Play on the grandest court available today, the Internet!

© 2005 Online Marketing Muscle -- All Rights Reserved.

Dean Mercado is an Internet marketing coach, strategist, author, and speaker. Dean and his company Online Marketing Muscle help entrepreneurial professionals leverage the power of Internet marketing to turn their businesses into money magnets. Visit Online Marketing Muscle for many more Internet marketing tips.

http://www.OnlineMarketingMuscle.com

Getting The Most From Your Web Site

Writen by Trelian Gada

In today's business environment, the online business has begun to play a major role and having a website for your business has become an issue of paramount importance. Not only having a website, but online business needs a marketing plan, a plan for the website itself and involves a lot of thought process. The very first thing a business needs is a website. The website should have its own business objectives and a clear cut long term goal. Website strategy should always be long term and not short term.

The online business planning and strategy implementation begins once you have a fully functional, professional looking and optimized website. Measuring your online business is no mean task. Due to latest trends in dynamic content, you may put up a different promotional or discounts or deals on a weekly, monthly or even hourly basis. A baseline measure is possible only when you measure your business during a quite month of no promotional and deals are put up. This will indicate the performance of your online business more accurately and help you plan ahead. Keeping tabs on all happenings at the site should be monitored.

Bringing visitors to your site is important. This is called traffic generation. But once the traffic arrives, it is your websites responsibility to make the visitor make a purchase. The number of purchases compared against the traffic is called the conversion rate. The conversion rate can only be bettered by your website through promotional, discounts or deals or any other way you think fit.

Traffic generation can be achieved by search engine optimization, the process through which your site can be edited or developed to rank higher in the search engine results, preferably in the first 10 or so. Use organic procedures for long term results.

Putting up forms when a visitor comes to your site may not be helpful, after all many of the visitors find this irritating and time consuming. Even if the visitor does fill in the form, it is not necessary that he makes a purchase.

Always make sure that the navigation through your website is simple and easy. The prices and product description pages should be easily accessible and clearly worded. Put yourself in the visitor's shoes and imagine you are trying to buy something on the internet. What would you like to see in a website – Simplicity, Navigation, Pricing, Ease of Use, Testimonials, and Transparency? Make sure that your site fulfills these pre conditions.

If in doubt, get the website assessed by a web development and design or SEO professional. You will not repent the advice.

What Is Ajax

Writen by Nipun Chadha

We were getting a number of querries from our clients and friends, asking about what AJAX is? With the development of Microsoft's Live, everyone is going crazy about AJAX. So, we at Xaprio Solutions thaught of publishing this small article about AJAX, which will help you guys understand it better.

Like DHTML, LAMP, or SPA, Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together. In fact, derivative/composite technologies based substantially upon Ajax, such as AFLAX, are already appearing. The Term AJAX refers to, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.

For a number of tasks, only small amounts of data need to be transferred between the client and the server, allowing a number of Ajax applications to perform almost as well as applications executed natively on the user's machine. This has the effect that pages need only be incrementally updated in the user's browser, rather than having to be entirely refreshed. "Every user's action that normally would generate an HTTP request takes the form of a JavaScript call to the Ajax engine instead", wrote Jesse James Garrett, in the essay that first defined the term. "Any response to a user action that doesn't require a trip back to the server — such as simple data validation, editing data in memory, and even some navigation — the engine handles on its own. If the engine needs something from the server in order to respond — if it's submitting data for processing, loading additional interface code, or retrieving new data — the engine makes those requests asynchronously, usually using XML, without stalling a user's interaction with the application."

Traditional web applications essentially submit forms, completed by a user, to a web server. The web server does some processing, and responds by sending a new web page back. Because the server must send a whole new page each time, applications run more slowly and awkwardly than their native counterparts.

Ajax applications, on the other hand, can send requests to the web server to retrieve only the data that is needed, and may use SOAP or some other XML-based web services dialect. On the client, JavaScript processes the web server's response, and may then modify the document's content through the DOM to show the user that an action has been completed. The result is a more responsive application, since the amount of data interchanged between the web browser and web server is vastly reduced. Web server processing time is also saved, since much of it is done on the client.

The earliest form of asynchronous remote scripting, Microsoft's Remote Scripting, was developed before XMLHttpRequest existed, and made use of a dedicated Java applet. Thereafter, remote scripting was extended by Netscape DevEdge at around 2001/2002 by use of an IFRAME instead of a Java applet.

http://blogs.xaprio.com

7 Killer Ways To Increase Your Online Sales

Writen by Tony L. Callahan

Every online entrepreneur I talk to is asking the same question, "How do I increase my online sales, NOW?"

Online selling is essentially a numbers game. The more visitors to a site, the more sales that site will make. The number of sales made divided by the total number of visitors to a site is called the conversion rate. A typical site will have a conversion rate of between 1 and 2 percent, or 1 to 2 sales per 100 visitors.

It is obvious that if the number of visitors increases, and the conversion rate remains the same, then sales will increase. Traffic is the first variable that most online marketers attempt to influence when they begin their online marketing campaigns.

There are two basic problems with the increase traffic method. The first is that it is expensive to run advertising and improve a site's ranking in the search engines. The second, and subtler issue is that there is no guarantee that the conversion rate will remain constant.

So what about increasing the conversion rate? Using the example above, if the number of buyers could be increased from 1 or 2 per hundred visitors to 2 to 4, sales will have doubled! So what can be done to increase a web site's conversion rate? Below I list 7 techniques designed to accomplish this goal:

1. Provide plenty of testimonials

   These testimonials should be from previous customers and should include specifics as to how the product or service helped them solve a problem.

   Obtaining testimonials is no problem, just ask. People love to be asked what they think; most will be willing to share their thoughts on your product or service. Implement a process of following up with your customers with a questionnaire. Leave plenty of room for their comments and make it clear that their comments may be used in your advertising.

2. Improve your follow up

   Many people will not buy the first time they see your product. In fact, some experts claim that people must see your message seven times before they are ready to buy. Autoresponder courses are a great way to follow up with the potential customer. There are many free autoresponder services on the web. I use FreeAutoBot.com.

3. Give away free samples

   By letting your customers try before they buy, you can significantly increase your sales. If you sell an information product, provide a few paragraphs or even the first chapter by autoresponder. This technique also helps to improve follow up by guaranteeing you obtain contact information.

4. Give a bonus product

   Everyone likes to get something for nothing, especially if that something is perceived as valuable. E-books make a great bonus, especially if they contain original content. If you are unable to create your own e-book, you could give away someone else's. Free-eBooks.net is a good resource for finding E-books to give away.

5. Focus the web site

   Use the Direct Response Site model. A direct response site is one where the customer's choices are very limited. Essentially they can buy the product, bookmark the page, subscribe to your ezine, or leave the site. The more options a visitor has, the less likely they are to make a purchase.

6. Follow on sales are crucial

   It is well known that successful businesses make 75% of their sales to repeat customers. Start a free ezine and get your customers to subscribe. Get their permission to send them information on upgrades and new products. On their receipt, mention a product that compliments their purchase. Don't have a product to offer for follow on sales? Find and join an affiliate program offering products of interest to your target market.

7. Change the web site copy

   Appeal to target emotion rather than reason. People respond more intensely to emotional appeals than to intellectual discussion. Design your copy to focus on the visitor's dreams, desires, fears or goals. Position your product to appeal to their emotional needs.

Implement these seven tips, and watch your online sales increase.

About The Author

Copyright 2002 Tony L. Callahan, All Rights Reserved Tony L. Callahan is president of his own Internet marketing company, Link-Promote.com. He also publishes Web-Links Monthly, a newsletter full of tips, tricks, tools and techniques for successful web site promotions. http://www.link-promote.com/wlmonth/subscribe/index.html.

Why You Should Know Html Code If You Are Building A Website

Writen by Chris Le Roy

Back 20 years ago when the Internet was just in its infancy, the only way to build a webpage was simply to use notepad, a free text editor supplied with Microsoft Windows. Now as the Internet has become a collage of music, special effects and flash, the art of writing HTML code is slowly being lost to HTML Editors like Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. Yet, whether you like it or not, to be able to effectively build websites you still need to know at least basic HTML Code.

Let me explain …

HTML or Hypertext Markup Language is in all essence the language of the World Wide Web. Without HTML our Internet Browsers like Netscape, Internet Explorer or Firefox would not be able to interpret our webpages. HTML is made up of a series of tags that describe the inner workings and structure of how you want to present your webpages. Now in all seriousness you could survive building webpages without knowing one little bit of HTML but to be truly successful on the web this is not true.

Search engines are now one of the main tools utilised on the web and everyday you see Microsoft's MSN, Yahoo and Google jostling for the number one position in the search engine stakes but as a web programmer being able to position yourself into a top ranking spot is probably one of the most important skills you will need to master. As being in one of the top positions for your keywords means that you will be receiving free focused traffic to your website which is much better than having to pay for it via Google's Adword, Overture and any one of the other text ad based services.

So why is knowing HTML going to help you in getting your website positioned into a top spot in the search engines …

The first thing you need to know is how to correctly format your header tags of your webpage because without properly formatted header tags, the search engines won't know what your sites about and what keywords you wish to associate with the webpage. One of the big issues I have seen with some of the HTML editors is that they don't address this issue of Header tags or in particular meta tags, which means if you are building a website you are already compromising the websites ability to be placed into the right position within search engines.

For example many of the HTML editors will provide you with popup forms that will help you set your meta data for your descriptions and keywords but they miss out other important meta data such as whether the search engines spiders should index all the pages, the language of the webpage, the character set and what type of document you are creating based on the HTML Standard.

PLEASE NOTE: I have substituted the < > tags with [ ] brackets simply because many of the article submission companies and websites will not allow you to lodge articles with HTML Tags in the body of the article. To use the code sample below in your webpages simply replace the [] square brackets with the < > tags

[!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"] [html] [head] [meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us"] [meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"] [meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 6.0"] [meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document"] [TITLE]Your Title Goes Here [/TITLE]

[META NAME="description" CONTENT="Your Description Goes Here"] [META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Your Keywords Go Here"] [META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,all"> [/head]

[/html]

One thing I should note is that just because you provide all this information does not mean that -

a) All Search Engines use this information b) You are guaranteed to get a top place in the search engine

But having each of these small elements in your webpage, certainly do when put together makes an improvement in your search engine place. Remember though that every search engine is different and that the algorithms they use for website placement is incredibly complex and certainly a well guarded secret but if you do add these elements at least you will get a few points in the positive direction.

There is another reason for putting this information into your website. Not having some of this information can also affect the ability of a visually impaired person to view your website. This might sound a little strange but visually impaired people have tools that convert screen webpages into brail messages. However, in some cases not including some of the information outlined above in your meta tags like the content language and character set can affect whether their brail software will read your website correctly. So if your customer base is built on say a 30% market of those people who are disabled with visual impairment then you could be costing yourself money.

One of the other key reasons why you should know how to write at least basic html code is to help you build incoming links to your webpages. A technique you can follow to build those incoming links is to write articles that provide information for people about what you do. For example if you owned a Golfing Website that sold all things Golf, then you might consider writing articles on how to select a Golf Club or where the best Golfing Clubs and ranges can be found.

When you are submitting your articles to places like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com or ArticlesON.com they will ask you to use certain html tags to help accentuate your article. For example generally in the body of your article you can only use things like bold, italics, underline and list items but in other areas like where you put your details you can add things like Hyperlinks and Hypertext. Now in the three article submission sites mentioned before, if you want to add a Hyperlink then you must know your basic HTML code, because they do not build your links for you, you have to write the HTML Tags from scratch.

When you are building your hyperlinks to link back to your webpage, you will want to make sure one two things -

1. The Hyperlink, that is the webpage or website you are linking to contains the keywords in either domain name, folder name or webpage name. 2. Make sure the Hypertext or better known as anchor text uses your keywords as well.

Let us look at a basic example. If I had written a really cool article on a brand new Golf Club that I knew was going to sell millions and had a lot of interest in the market then my link back to the webpage that provides more information on the Golf Club would be built in the way shown below. Let us say the name of the Golf Club is called the Lion Heart X9.

[a href="http://www.GolfProAustralia.com.au/LionHeartX9.htm]Lion Heart X9 Golf Club[/a]

Note -Once again the < > tags have been substituted with [] brackets simply to meet the article submission requirements. You must use the < > bracket tags in your webpage or you webpage will not work.

If you didn't know how to write the hyperlinks in the way shown above and the search engines found your articles on a number of different websites, then they would not be able to give you credit for the links back to your website and again this is going to cost you web traffic.

The bottom line is this. If you want to build serious webpages and sites that are going to make you money, you will definitely need at the very least good basic skills in using and understanding HTML code.

Chris Le Roy is the Managing Director of One-on-One Personal Computer Training. His computer training company provides a range HTML Code Cheat Sheets and Microsoft FrontPage 2003 Cheat Sheets for helping students get to know how to build webpages and the underlying HTML Code. All the Cheat Sheets are available in PDF Downloadable format or a Laminated Format.

How Worldly Is Your World Wide Web

Writen by Cheryl Lockhart

The growth in Internet usage around the world is astounding - 146% in the five years prior to March 2005. And it's not just European and North American users on the Net. The fastest growth was found in Africa with an almost 200% increase in usage. I am often pleasantly surprised as to how fast the internet connections are in 'developing countries' like Indonesia - much faster than the connection at my parent's farm in rural Alberta in fact!

But wait - don't rush off and start translating your web site into Mandarin or Setswana just yet. 'Internationalizing' a web site it does not necessarily mean translation, at least not initially.

Who is really your customer?

Just because you sell the greatest new gardening tool, it doesn't mean that you will sell directly to every green thumb gardener in the United Kingdom - you would use a sales agent or distributor, right? So it makes sense that you would use your web site to find a British business partner rather than direct customers. Use your web site to advertise as if you were hiring a new employee and list the experience and contacts your new partner must have. I recommend that you prepare a 'Partner Inquiry Questionnaire' that will weed out the truly interested from the rotten apples. If they take the time to fill it out, they are serious. If not, you haven't wasted your time.

If you have already identified a partner, use your web site to promote them. List their contact details - use a page titled 'International,' 'Distributors' or 'Global Locations' and link to their web site. If they don't have one, or it is very basic with little or no information you can provide a valuable service by linking to technical information on your site, or provide them with simple programming code that they can incorporate into their own site.

Not world wide - yet

If properly promoted, your web site will generate inquiries from all over the world. However, if your company is only shipping its widgets in North American right now, save everyone time and effort by clearly stating so right on your web page.

If you have plans to enter new markets in the near future, invite interested customers to be put on an e-mail notice list. It's an excellent way to gauge market interest - and think of how easy it will be to hit the ground running with this list of prospects, once you do enter the market.

Where the heck is Saskatchewan?

When that awesome new prospect visits your 'Contact' page, is it clear who you are and how they can reach you? Be sure that your contact information is understandable by anyone who reads it, regardless of where they are from.

- Don't use abbreviations like St. or AB. Spell out the entire word.

- Be sure to indicate which country you are located in. International customers may not realize that Saskatchewan is a province in Canada.

- If you have a toll-free number, indicate where it works (e.g. in North America only). For other numbers, be sure to include the country code.

- When listing your hours of operation, use the 24 hour clock and note the time zone (and if applicable, whether you observe daylight savings time), relative to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). For example, a business in Alberta could indicate that its hours of operation are:

Monday - Friday, 08:00 - 17:00

November - March: Mountain Standard Time (MST) = UTC-7

April - October: Mountain Daylight Time (MDT) = UTC-6

Keep it current

I hate visiting web sites with a 'What's New' section with an entry from 2001, the year the web site was launched, or worse - nothing is new! Be sure to announce your international activities - trade shows you will be attending, new markets launched, successes abroad...

Be wary of any listing any information that, while useful for your domestic customers, can create conflict for your foreign partner. For example, an on-line price list is useful in Canada but dangerous if you charge a different price for your export customers. The same principle applies to products that you may not be able to offer in all markets. Be clear and you should be able to avoid any conflicts.

We're not in Saskatchewan anymore

It's time for your web site to reflect your global aspirations, whether or not you are a world class company, or intend to be someday!

And if you are still intent on translating your site, consider that there are 291 million English language Internet users, 113 million Chinese and 67 million Japanese followed by Spanish (57 million), German (54 million and French (37 million).

Copyright© 2005.

Cheryl Lockhart of International Strategies Ltd. assists small- to medium-sized Canadian and foreign enterprises navigate the complexities of global business development. Services include international project identification and management, market research and analysis and foreign partner development.

To learn more about exporting and gain access to more FREE e-zines, visit her web site http://www.intl-strategies.com

Web Accessibility For Screen Magnifier Users

Writen by Trenton Moss

The needs of screen magnifier users are overlooked when implementing web accessibility on to a website. Screen magnifiers are used by partially sighted web users to increase the size of on-screen elements. Some users will magnify the screen so that only three to four words are able to appear on the screen at any one time. You can try using a screen magnifier yourself by downloading the Zoomtext screen magnifier from http://www.aisquared.com/Products/ZoomText8_mag/FreeTrial/Z8FreeTrial.htm for a free 30 day trial.

The good news is that some of the basic principles for improving accessibility and usability for screen magnifiers users, also increase usability for everyone. To help, we've listed six ways to improve accessibility and usability for screen magnifier users:

1. Don't embed text within images

Text embedded within images can become blurry and pixelated when viewed in screen magnifiers, and therefore completely illegible. This is especially true when the image text is rather poor quality, so if you absolutely have to embed text within images then make sure the image is of high quality. Many screen magnifier users can find it quite difficult to read text at the best of times, so when it appears fuzzy to them it can become difficult to impossible to read.

It's not usually necessary to embed text within images anymore, as most presentational effects can now be achieved with CSS. By embedding text within images the download time of each page can become significantly greater due to the weight of these images - for users on dial-up modems it can be a real pain waiting for these images to download and render.

If you're not sure if a piece of text on the page is embedded within an image or not, try highlighting the text. If you can highlight each letter individually then the text is real text and isn't embedded within an image.

2. Clearly separate sections of the page

Different sections of each web page should be clearly separated through the use of borders and different background colours. Screen magnifiers users can only see one tiny section of a web page at any one time so it can sometimes be hard for these users to orientate themselves within the page.

By using a blue background colour for the navigation, for example, screen magnifier users can quickly move through the page and when they see a blue background they instantly know that the content are has finished and the navigation area begun.

Likewise, by separating different sections of the page with borders, when a screen magnifier user moves over that border they know they're moving into a different section. One especially common form of this, is using a vertical bar to separate horizontal navigation items.

Separating different sections of the page with background colours and borders doesn't only increase usability for screen magnifier users - it increases usability for everyone. When regularly sighted users scan through a web page, if the content, footer and navigation are all effectively differentiated it's very easy to quickly gain an understanding of the on-page layout.

3. Use clear and descriptive headings often

When screen magnifier users move their magnifier across the screen one of the items that stand out to them is headings. By ensuring heading text is large, and perhaps by differentiating it through the use of colour, it will stand out to these users.

Screen magnifier users usually have to stop the movement of the magnifier when they want to read a piece of text, so when they see a heading, they can stop and read it. Because headings (in theory at least!) describe the content contained beneath them, screen magnifier users can read a heading, gain an understanding of the content beneath it, and decide whether they want to read that content or not. If not, they can simply move the magnifier down the screen and stop at the next heading.

Headings are incredibly useful for fully sighted users too for essentially the same reason. When you scan through a web page, headings are one of the items that stand out to you. Again, you can read the heading (or listen to it for a screen reader user), and provided its descriptive, instantly gain an understanding of the content beneath it. You can then keep reading or skip on to the next heading down the page.

4. Ensure link text is descriptive of its destination

Link text such as 'click here' and 'more' should be avoided and replaced with link text that adequately describes the link destination. Link text, along with headings, is one of the items that stands out to screen magnifier users (and all users for that matter) when browsing a web page. If 'click here' is used then these users (and in fact all users) will have to search through the text before and after the link in order to work out its destination.

5. Avoid scrolling or flashing text

Scrolling or flashing text is generally known for offering poor usability, as it means that users can't read the text in their own time. This is doubly true for screen magnifier users who read web pages at a slower rate - chances are that they won't have time to read the text at all before it disappears.

6. Front-load paragraph content

By front-loading paragraph content, screen magnifier users can access the main point of each paragraph immediately. Front-loading means placing the conclusion first, followed by the what, why, when, where and how. By placing the conclusion first, screen magnifier users can read the conclusion of the paragraph straightaway and then decide whether they are interested in reading the rest of the paragraph or not.

If screen magnifier users aren't interested in the content of a paragraph, they can move the magnifier down the screen and when they see white space they know that the paragraph has ended and the next paragraph begun.

This rule about front-loading paragraph content actually benefits absolutely everyone. By putting the conclusion at the start of the paragraph, all users can instantly gain an understanding of the point of the paragraph and decide whether they want to keep reading it (or skip to the next paragraph).

Conclusion

All-in-all, there are quite a few things that can be done to improve usability and accessibility for screen magnifier users. The good news though is that all of them improve usability for absolutely everyone.

This article was written by Trenton Moss. He's crazy about web usability and accessibility - so crazy that he went and started his own web usability and accessibility consultancy (Webcredible - http://www.webcredible.co.uk) to help make the Internet a better place for everyone.