Posts Tagged ‘small business’

Proper website design strategies are important to give value to what you have online. Using the appropriate strategies to promote your business website could not only increase your clientele, but also assure that you aren’t penalized for deceitful means of gaining popularity online.

The purpose of a good business website is to get attention from search engines, and in turn receive the traffic you need to turn your visitors into potential customers. Use natural methods of SEO such as having orignial content, adding pages to your website frequently, blogging often to increase SEO, and using valid code to be indexed by search engines. Because there is so much importance in the engine that drives your website, having the best there is to offer would put your business website on the cutting edge of taking on the competition. That’s exactly what CodeRepair offers.

Turn your visitors into customers by offering them a call to action, and give them reasons why your company stands out above the rest. Bookmark my blog and website for tips and advice for your small business to get the boost it needs to be competitive in today’s market, and contact me today by phone or email for more details on how to obtain a website that generates the income you as a business owner desire. For more about ideas to get started promoting online, review my post on small business website home page advice.

Consider these computer management shortcut tips when working with documents, photos or videos. Using shortcuts is very helpful and saves time when working on anything. With quick ways of accomplishing complicated tasks, your projects will tend to run smoothly.

Some useful tips include the use of shortcut keys such as with the shift or control button. Copying text or a section of a photo can be easily done with ‘control + x’ to cut, ‘control + c’ to copy, ‘control + v’ to paste and ‘control + a’ to select all. To undo anything on a text document or a graphic, just click ‘ctrl + z’.

Here’s a great tip for moving or uploading multiple files at once, and an alternative to selecting them all by dragging the mouse and boxing them in. Highlight the first file in a group to begin. Then go to the last file you want to highlight in the group and while holding the shift key, double click on it. This should highlight the entire group in between and allow you to move, copy or upload that entire group quickly and easily. If you want to copy a file instead of moving it to another folder, drag it with the right click of your mouse.

F5 is used to refresh a website page if you want to reload it, whether for seeing new changes made or to just refresh a stale webpage. In the same way, to do a “hard refresh” simply hold control while clicking F5. ‘Alt + F4′ closes the current window you are on.

Changing photos from one format to another is simple. If you want to change a file from gif or bmp to jpeg, or vice versa, an easy way is to right click on it, choose ‘open with’, choose paint, then on the top right of paint, under ‘file’ choose ‘save as’, and choose the format you’d like to save it as. Paint is kept in your accessories folder and can be useful to resize and edit photos as well, using the options across the top.

When changing video files from wmv to mp4 or between any other formats, DVD Videosoft could be a useful option. Adding graphics to photos can be easily done with Befunky.com. Add special photo effects such as starbursts, ink, text, shapes and speech bubbles.

Keep checking my blog and website for tips, tools and advice for making your online experience more productive. I offer custom CMS website design and SEO services for small businesses worldwide.

Add a Google Map to your small business website when you want your website visitors to be able to easily locate your business. Adding a Google map can have great benefits to your customers for your small business website because you will be easliy found when one of your website visitors wants to visit for your products or services. Not only can Google Maps give your potential customer a map of your business location, but you can show what the outside of your business looks like, aiding your customer in what to look for when they arrive in your area.

Besides adding contact information such as email, phone number and address, sometimes adding a Google Map to your website may be to the advantage to your small business website if your business depends on physical contact with your customers.

Adding a Google Map is easy to do. Simply find a map that pinpoints your business location and surrounding roads, then click on “link” for that specific Google Map. Then copy and paste it into your website to show your customer how to physically arrive at your business. Google Maps can make it easy for your customers to find your small business.

Let your users search your website with Google Site Search
Add a Google Map to your business
Learn how to Add a Google Searchbox to your website
More about Adding a Google Searchbox to Your Website

Also read my blog post on Site Maps for Your Website and
Add a Google Search Function to Your Website

Realizing the importance of code validation for website pages is very important for web designers. By realizing the reasons behind having perfect code, small business website owners can take advantage of the rewards of having perfect code in the HTML and CSS of their web pages.

Validation checks your documents for code errors from standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. Browsers auto-correct website code, but each one does it in a different way, so web designers need to keep this in mind to avoid broken layouts in certain browsers. Pages render faster for websites with valid code, therefore the website pages tend to load faster, and websites with valid code are more accessible to all types of browsers, screen readers and platforms. Google tends index pages with valid HTML and CSS, so valid code is a good way to be higher in search engine rankings. Finally, having valid code today helps insure that your website will work with technologies that haven’t even been invented yet.

Realizing the importance of code validation in webdesign can help small business website owners’ websites load faster, be more accessible, get indexed more often, and work on devices invented in the future. Web design with proper code validation may help your website reap the rewards that could bring the traffic you need to succeed.

Validate HTML and CSS with these websites:
CSS Validator
HTML Validator
W3 HTML Validator

For more on this subject see “The Benefits of Perfect XHTML Code”

Small business website design choices are a crucial element to begin an online relationship that will attract potential customers and clients. Using a large company for your website design project may not always be the way to go. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen these corporates use bad SEO strategies to design websites for their customers. Sometimes they put the administrative contact in their own name instead of the website owner’s and have multiple errors on webpages such as missing keywords, descriptions and titles. I’ve even noticed that these company designed websites have errors and warnings on their own main page, something a common visitor wouldn’t notice.

People get charged exorbitant amounts for monthly hosting, like $40 to $100, when it should that much should be for a YEAR of hosting. They see a website online and think it’s the best thing since sliced bread, not realizing that it may not bring any traffic at all, and in Google’s eyes is like a blank sheet of paper. People think “I got a big name company doing my work and they are in the top ten, they must know what they’re doing”, when in actuality, it’s the small webdesign companies like myself who are going to take the time and effort to make sure your projects are done properly.

Your website design choice for small business is not one you want to make more than once. In conclusion, be careful who you pick and don’t be afraid to ask questions to your website designer. If they don’t want to make you the administrative contact or discuss SEO value for your website, you may want to find someone else.

The importance of market branding revolves around understanding, choosing, and marketing your business logo and motto, or your “market brand”. Market Branding is a name, term, symbol, sign and/or design to differentiate and identify goods and services of a seller or group of sellers.

Market branding is about getting your potential clients to think you are the only one with a solution to their problem. Your logo’s colors should convey the nature of your business. Using a matching design and color scheme on your website, business card and printed materials can make your company’s market branding more effective and increase it’s market value. Your business logo design should give a positive first impression to attract new customers with a unique look that is simple and makes a statement. Your market branding should deliver your message clearly, confirm credibility, motivate the buyer, and establish user loyalty. Your market brand is your source of promise to the consumer, and the foundation of marketing communication that business should not be without.

The importance of market branding involves multiple considerations. By choosing appropriate designs, colors and logos, a small busniess owner can effectively portray the business they are in. Consider what the customer is going to see, because when you have a positive first impression, you may find that potential customers may become clients.

Understanding the difference between HTML and CSS may be complicated to most people, but a standard for website programmers. The following will outline differences for small business website owners, to be comfortable with the terms when discussing HTML and CSS.

HTML handles the structure, or construction and output of webpages, and CSS decorates, aligns and positions the elements in HTML, taking the normal HTML output adding display rules. The three sections of HTML source code include inline, internal and external markup.

HTML inline markup defines the webpage layout and structures the output for tables, divisions, forms, links, buttons, text and images, such as video and flash documents.

Internal markup, unseen by visitors, declares character set and document declarations and keywords. It links languages such as CSS or Javascript used for decorating, aligning and inserting dynamic items.

External markup isn’t contained in the HTML, but is in a different file affecting the webpage a variety of ways. It’s contents are called up by the internal markup section.

CSS, on the other hand, doesn’t “create” anything. CSS takes HTML output and adds display rules by editing element height and width, background color, border, visibility and alignment. HTML does some of these things, but the methods are usually “deprecated”, or soon to be. Deprecated code refers to features of software which are superseded and can be avoided, because their use causes warnings that recommend alternate practices, indicating the feature’s future removal. Labeled as deprecated instead of removing this code gives programmers time for bringing the code into compliance with new standards, and provides backward compatibility.

By understanding the difference between HTML and CSS, and how they interact, may simplify discussion of small business website design projects. HTML and CSS, when used in conjunction, can aid small business websites in keeping up with today’s standards for website design.

Using social media marketing to improve traffic to a small business website can be both advantageous and profitable. Some approaches include the small business website owner to write about what people care about, start a buzz on Twitter and Facebook, use social bookmarks, and share with like-minded individuals.

If you write about something that interests people, your post may have a better chance being picked up on the internet. Posting on Twitter, an amazing resource for spreading news, links and current events, can incorporate small business website owners into a web of followers. Using social bookmarks such as Digg, Zimbio and Blogflux will incorporate multiple blog resources to bring small business website owners traffic to their site. Sharing content with like-minded individuals may translate to greater traffic to a small business website also. Video, linking, email and podcasts are some other good media devices which can spread your word as well.

Using social media marketing to improve visitor hits is helpful to increase internet traffic to any small business website. A small business website owner should include as many types of media that is relevant to aid in the constant forge ahead to page one of Google.

Obtaining a winning website involves consideration of multiple factors. With well over 150 million websites online now, trying to come up with a winning site is close in comparison to winning the lottery. Some try to see the forest through the trees, while others spend their time studying the individual atoms that make up the bark. The trick is finding a balance between the two, combining them and perhaps raise your chances of ranking close to page one.

Sometimes finding a niche that has little competition may aid in receiving a decent page ranking, and other times techniques to increase SEO can help too. With about 1.3 billion internet users to date (doubling every 5.32 years), chances are someone will find your website. Balancing pleasant design, creativity, perfect code, accessibility, and adding content often, both original and high quality, can greatly increase a website’s SEO. Combine these attributes and control the “lottery” to increase your small business website’s chances, keeping in mind that the objective is getting to Google page one.

Obtaining a winning small business website involves an immense combination of criteria for any site owner. The balance of website design techniques may aid in the traffic and page ranking a site receives. Though there is no magic formula for the perfect webpage, incorporating multiple techniques can help small business website owners turn their site visitors into customers.

I recently visited a site known as Website Grader. I found it as an extremely useful tool telling me of what needs to be improved, and what is appropriate in MY website. Though I was disappointed with the score, it helped me realize what needs improvement.

Using Website Grader gives a small business website owner insight on the properties of a website that can be improved. I’ve read reviews that website designers wrote saying a high grade could give small business website owners a “false sense of security”. Point taken. Regardless, the grader site gives a view of many factors necessary to be monitored in order to have an efficient running website. Some of these factors include: Domain stability, readability, page rank, traffic rank, inbound links and a final grade. By studying the report, small business website owners can see where their website excels and where it is lacking, and try to correct those errors.

By checking your small business website on Website Grader, small business website owners can gain perspective on what’s right and wrong with a site. This information can be used to improve the accessibility of a website, and enhance a website’s page rank with Google. I advise running your small business website through website.grader.com in order to find out where your website ranks.

Read more about how to Analyze a Website with Website Grader