Here is a list of important rules to consider to build a business web site that accurately reflects your company’s products as well as interests your visitors long enough to become paying customers.

1. Simplify Menus

An important key to build a business website is to keep it simple. The website should be simple enough for a child to navigate. Avoid the elaborate flash menus and multi-tiered drop down menus.

Visitors will leave if they cannot quickly find what they are looking for. Make sure that your most important links are always visible – the links to your products and services.

2. Simplify Navigation

Visitors to a website should always know where they are on the website and how to get back to where they were. Often users will become immersed in their browsing and after reading through a material on the website they will want to go back to re-read important information.

The user must be able to easily get back to find information, and more importantly navigate to the point where they can purchase a product, service, or click through a link.

3. Avoid Splash Pages

Splash pages are displayed as the website loads and usually have a command such as “enter site here”. There are numerous disadvantages to using splash pages.

These pages may not load for slow internet connections, may take too long to load, may be blocked by user and are often not found by search engines. Users surfing the net may press the back browser or head to the next display result rather than wait for these pages to load.

4. Avoid Excessive Banner Ads

The average web user is accustomed to banner ads, and they are often overlooked and completely ignored. Instead, experts suggest using the valuable page space to increase the amount of relevant content with affiliate links.

This method subtly encourages users to purchase products that meet their interests.

5. Avoid Audio

Typically, users are annoyed by a continuous loop of music while they browse through a website for information or to make a purchase. Often the music is so annoying that users quickly leave the website.

If the audio is absolutely necessary allow website visitors mute and volume options.

To build a business website, web designers and developers must consider the purpose and needs of the average website user. Websites featuring simple and clean designs attract users, interest them in the site, and keep them at the site longer.

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The world of web designing is huge and complex. Moreover, with new innovations made daily, it has become all the more complex. Every day new and new technologies are coming and making development fast and easy for the end user. However, there are basic rules that stand tall for all times and changes.

1) Content: The most important thing to remember about popular web sites is that they are always rich in content. When someone visits your site, they are always looking for something in your website. If your content is not well enough to explain the goal of the site then visitor will no longer stay on your site.

2) Graphics: Limit the size of each image to about 10-12 KB. Though the number of broadband users is increasing, tolerance of slow loading pages is still not nil. Huge images cause web pages to load very slowly and so, they should be optimized appropriately. Now days, all major search engine also considering the loading time of the website while ranking them, so use of graphics needs more attention.

The images that you put on your website should be in sync with the content there. Graphics creates the first impression of the website. So it should be very neat and clear and easy to convey your message.

3) Web page design and looks: Always prefer standard layout style for your page. Visitor of the site surf many website and he has learned and observed some basic method of surfing. So, If you try to give them some new way of navigation or present your content differently then there are many chances that people accept your new looks or not. Try to provide easy navigation of the website and present content in less number of clicks.

Another important element is the Whitespace. It decides how presentable the content of the page looks. However excessive or even restrained use of the Whitespace can have contrasting effects.

Graphics can be used as design elements of the website page. For instance, you can wrap text around an image and load in onto the web page.

4) Fonts: Always use Serif font for the headlines and Sans-Serif for the textual matter of the website. Because of low screen resolutions of computer monitors, the Sans serif fonts make the text easily readable. But if Serif fonts for the text content of the website, it can have a blurred effect and will not be readable.

Make use of standard font families. Stick to fonts like Verdana, Geneva, Arial, and Helvetica. They would make the content look better.

5) Advertisement: Visitors to your website don’t come to see the advertisements, but to look for information that they need. No visitor would stay if the ads on the website overwhelm the content on it. Advertisements are necessary to earn revenue but scaring off visitors would defeat the very purpose of the website.

By: Jimmy Carter

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website design tips

So, you want to start building your business online and create a solid, expert web presence?

Before you start building your site you need to do keyword research. This is an important and often overlooked part to building a new page. Get started by looking in Google for other sites on the same topic your blog will be and have a look to see what keywords they may be targeting. Start making a list of the words that someone would be typing in when trying to find your site. Then go to Wordtracker and start looking for more keywords.

Hosting

Using good web hosting is a critical decision in the website building process. You want a host that is reliable, has good customer service and someone who’s stable enough you can be pretty sure they won’t go out of business anytime soon.

Website Design

There are so many choices and details for website design I’m just going to stay with the basics here. You can get yourself a static website or a content management system. I almost always choose WordPress for my content management system because it is easy to setup, easy to customize, easy to use and very search engine friendly.

There are many different systems you can use to create a website. One popular but complicated program is Dreamweaver. You can also get site builders that come with hosting (I don’t normally recommend this one because it is restrictive). You can use WordPress as a website or use another type of content management system like the program Joomla (also free).

If you’ve got some experience with website design, you might want to do it yourself. Or, if you don’t think you can build a good looking website then hire a professional to do it right.

Remember, though, that your website doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, there is a train of thought to say if your site looks more ‘homemade’ that it may be good for business.

Setup

Plan your pages: Know how many pages you want to start with and how much information you will be providing on each page.

Here are some of the typical pages you will find on a website:

Index – this is of course the main page
About – People look for this and you should have it. Have your picture, your name and details about the business and about you.
Contact – Another one that people look for, make it easy to find
Services – if you offer services

Keyword research

Do your research on all the keywords you might possibly want to target. Where I go for my keyword research: Wordtracker & Google Analytics Keyword Tool

You’ll want to use the keywords in any meta tags you use. An important meta tag to use is the meta description because the wording you use will often show up in the search engines. The title is also important too, and can contain keywords. You can also use keywords to name the page and the domain URL. for example http://www.site.com/keywords-go-here.html – use dashes to separate the words.

Make sure your use of keywords anywhere seems natural and not ‘stuffed’.

Setup a Sitemap

It’s a good idea to get your site set up with a sitemap. When Google finds your site it will ‘crawl’ through all the different pages you have set up. If you have a sitemap it directs those crawls to all the pages you want to be found and indexed by the search engine, ensuring your important pages get found.

You can use a Sitemap creator tool to get yourself a sitemap in both.xml and.html forms. Once you have sitemap go to Googles Webmaster Tools to let them know you’ve added it.

Get Incoming Links

There are many ways to start getting links incoming to your site. Here are a few things to set-up:

Website Directories – There are hundreds of website directories all over the internet that allow you to post your website for free. You don’t have to submit to them all (and you likely don’t have time to) but it’s a good idea to find a few with a good Google Pagerank and submit your site to them. Yahoo has a paid, quality directory that you may want to consider adding your listing to.

Article Directories – Posting an article to directories is a great way to get links back to your website. Write quality articles that get noticed and your sure to get some traffic from those directories as well. EzineArticles.com is one of the most respected article directories.

Comments – There are many blogs that now disable the no-follow tag that is installed so comment on their blogs will give you an incoming link.

Set up 404 Error pages

Some web hosts have a spot in the control panel where you can just enter in the URL of the page you’d like to redirect to. With other hosts you may have to just set up a redirect and forward the standard (read: ugly, plain and non-functional) 404 redirect to a page you’ve created.

You can use your domain name if you like but you can also get creative with this and offer people a little surprise just for finding the 404 Redirect page.

Here are some ideas of what to put on an error page:

- Newsletter or mailing list sign up – If you are building a list then this is a prime opportunity to tell a bit about it and ask the person to sign up.
- Give a gift – Offer a free report or audio as a ‘surprise’ gift to make up for them not finding the page they were looking for.
- Point to your articles – If someone is looking for a page on your site then are interested in what you have to say. Point them to some great articles you have written and help them dive deeper into your website.

Set up your redirect when you set up the website or you’re likely to forget about it and loose people who find nothing when they come to the wrong page on your site.

These are just a few things to consider when building your website, the options are really endless and your website will be a constant work in progress. But why not keep it simple to start? You can always get more complicated as your site grows and you know it’s needs more clearly.

For now just get the site up. It’s better to take action then to try and be absolutely perfect.

By: Angela Wills

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Caffeinated Content

If you are a dentist, creating your own practice website is a great option for bringing in new patients as well as educating current patients. A website for your dental office is also the perfect way to make shy patients feel more comfortable and informed when choosing your office. If you are considering a new website or redesign, you may also want to consider the following options and ideas:

Blogs: I recommend adding a blog to any website that deals with the public or information for a number of reasons. Firstly, blogs are a great way to communicate with your patients. Blogs can be used to inform patients about simple tasks such as flossing, highly desired services such as teeth whitening, or even gum disease. Secondly, blogs are a great way for the public to get to know your office. With so many people being weary of the dentist’s office having a blog is a great way make patients see your office is knowledgeable, friendly, and safe. Lastly blogs are ideal for Search Engine Optimization. The continuous new content blogs provide allow more pages of your website to be indexed which allows your website rank on search engines such as Google and MSN to go up.

Photos: While other medical offices are limited to photos of their staff and building, dental offices can use photos to exemplify their work. Before and after pictures of teeth whitening and other procedures will show off your office’s talents and set you apart from other practices.

Specialties: Websites are the ideal place for showcasing your practices specialties. If you specialize in a new technique, working with children, or have new equipment your website can be used to describe your talents. This is a great way to bring in new patients and make current patients aware of procedures they didn’t know were available.

Newsletters: Instead of sending out paper newsletters each month, dental offices can use their websites as a way to have patients sign up for monthly (or how ever often you choose) newsletters. Newsletters can be sent out automatically to patients cutting the time, cost, and hassle of mailing newsletters out of your practice.

By: Asia Peschong

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Caffeinated Content

The internet is one of the fastest growing networks in the world, and is arguably the greatest collection of information the world has ever seen. New websites are being created every day by the thousands, but many of these sites are designed without a specific plan in mind. This haphazard method of website design coupled with the fact that there are dozens of similar websites for a given type of site design make creating a unique and effective site particularly challenging. In this article, we’ll go over some general design tips that will have your site working fluidly while keeping it fairly original.

One of the most important aspects of website design is navigation, as this determines not only how easily users will be able to reach different parts of your site, but how search engines (which are the main way that people access websites on the net) index your site for search results pages. Most sites use a navigation bar at the top of their site for easy access to various aspects of the site, and users have come to expect this in some degree. Side bars are used less frequently, and frames are so archaic that they might actually count against you. Using a Java or Flash application as a navigation tool allows you to create expanding navigation bars for even easier browsing.

A frequently overlooked aspect of website design is sound and music. This does not mean that many websites fail to include sound or music, as these are relatively common features, but many sites forget to realize that embedded sound or music can drastically change the way someone sees a website. For example, a site dedicated to a movie or video game release can probably get away with embedded music, since people might be excited to see what music will be featured in the game. On a professional site for an online business, however, sound will likely seem out of place or tacky.

Website design does not dictate that a site has to be made a certain way, and originality mixed with functionality is always a welcomed change of pace. If you have a way to build a site that allows it to be easy to use and intuitive while also creating a new look that isn’t frequently used, you are likely to be rewarded with a greater number of users. Keeping these tips in mind is a good place to start.

By: Matthew McKernan

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