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Whether you intend to create a new web initiative, or you’re trying to better your existing web presence, a web design company offers you a complete range of web development services for your webdesign needs.

If you’re looking for simple website development, or if you want to build an entire online e-commerce, a web design company has all of the services and tools that you need to start from scratch, or to integrate new elements into your organization’s existing architecture.

The services offered by a quality web design company will be diverse, yet still specialized. Professional website design should be flexible enough to meet your unique needs, but have enough experience to do the job correctly, and make suggestions to properly tailor your webdesign to your desired outcome.

Examples of services that you should look for in a superior web design company should include:

�Website development – not only a full webdesign, but fully integrated online applications should also be available. From the most basic informational sites to the most complicated flow-based applications, a good web design company should provide the proper scalability required for adjusting your website development with today’s unpredictable marketplace.
�Database development and integration – website development isn’t just a matter of posting individual pages. A scalable, structured database needs to be worked into the webdesign for rich backend engines.
�E-business and shopping cart applications – if your website is selling anything, then you’ll need a professional web site design that includes what you need among B2B, B2C, and procurement applications.
�Branding and Advertising – any quality web design company knows that website development involves more than just stating the obvious. The website is vital for making the desired impression among visitors so that they will be encouraged to act on your message, and to return whenever they need your products and/or services.
�Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – any professional web site design should include a strategy that has been proven to achieve high ranking among the top search engines. SEO is vital to attaining the highest number of visitors.
�Site statistics – you can’t just assume that your site or any of your advertising efforts are doing well. You need to be able to monitor and measure them. Therefore, a good web design company will also offer you the tools you need to receive critical statistics about your site overall, its tracked pages, the total visitors per page, the top refer URLs, as well as the total visitors per day, time of day, and the keywords that were used in search engines to find your site.
�System Management Services – web development should offer a full range of system support services that include support for applications, servers, and networks, and should allow for fine-tuning of performance configurations.

A web design company understands that the internet is currently among the most effective marketing tools available. If you don’t have an online presence, you aren’t reaching your full potential or connecting with a large percentage of your prospective client base. Instead of having the attitude of building a web site, a good webdesign business should know how to effectively work your vision into a virtual representation of your organization. As though simply by viewing your website, a visitor should feel as though they’ve had a good discussion with one of your trained representatives.

Most importantly, a truly great web design company will listen to exactly what you want, will ask good questions, and will deliver a solid professional web site design in precisely the way that you want it done. You need to know that they care about what you want to say and about what your clients need.

About the Author
Mark Nenadic
Mark is the director and face behind FifteenDegrees-North, where you will find articles and resources to help with SEO, marketing and Web design. Read Marks Blog Here:

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What Can a Web Design Company Do For You

Almost each offline business can start online sales. There are many ways to do it through large special web sites, or shopping and trade leads portals where ads and listings can be posted, however one of the most popular and effective ways is to have own e-commerce web site. It also can be called e-shop, online shop, online store, shopping cart site, etc.

When a small business owners starts thinking of having his own e-commerce web site he starts looking for reliable, handful and affordable e-commerce solution. What features he may need to run the e-commerce business successfully?

The golden rule of every business – no matter online or offline – is to decide BEFORE its running how people will know about it and how, why, and when they will buy exactly here. So marketing and advertising also work here but have some specific and used web promotion and SEO tactics. At the very beginning of its life each e-commerce web site can be compared to an unknown shop in a desolate place and it’s a hard work to make it popular e-commerce resource where people want and like to buy. There are many companies that offer web promotion services so it’s always possible to find one which will be the happy medium in aspect of professionalism and affordable cost.

When this part is clear it’s time to think about technical side of e-commerce business.
There are 2 main features it must have.

�Shopping cart system that allows buying products. It must have user-friendly interface, be reliable, compatible with major payment and shipping systems. There are many providers, developers, or resellers of shopping carts so they can be free, free-ware and paid.

�Online catalogue of products that can be divided into categories. The catalogue must have administration ability, so site owner can edit each product’s title, price, description, image, position in the catalogue.

Also it’s great to have ability of managing pricing policy – create “hot prices”, specials offers, discounts, etc. A great plus is to have all stats for the e-commerce website active operations, i.e. info about the customers, orders, payments, etc. and ability to manage it.

Also the site may contain simple information pages such as Contact us, About us, History, Team, etc. and if the site owner is not a web designer he will need a Content management system (CMS) integrated into the pages to be able to edit and update their content without hiring a webmaster or paying his web design company for each small change.

All the viewed above was about the technical side of the e-commerce website, however interface design also plays great role as it creates appropriate mood for site visitors that helps to turn them into customers and buyers. That’s why e-commerce site design must be made by professionals, who take into consideration many important design, marketing, and psychological aspects, and able to create a great selling solution.

Successfully selected domain name is also a plus for e-commerce web site as it not only brings visual information to the site visitors and must be easy to remember and type, but also plays great role in search engines rankings. So before buying a domain name for e-commerce web site it’s recommended to make some research on this topic or ask advice of professionals.

And finally, the professionally made e-commerce website must be easily and quickly accessible from each place of the world so it’s very important to choose a reliable hosting provider which can guarantee stable work of the web site 24x7x365 at affordable price.

These are main features an average e-commerce web site must have. Of course there are many specific details that are unique for each web site however having the above-mentioned things can give some warranties that the e-commerce website will do its main job – sell.

About the Author
The package “E-commerce website in 48 hours” has been designed to cover all e-commerce needs meanwhile staying affordable for small and medium business budget as it costs one time fee of $480 More details at http://ecommerce-website-in48hours.com/

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E-commerce Website Design Guide for Small Business Owners

When you create a web design that is appealing to visit, people will be more likely to visit more often, add you to their bookmark list, and, therefore, think of you first when your products and/or services are needed. Therefore, when you’re designing your website, it is strongly advised that you place a good deal of emphasis on building a likeable website design. This, strictly said, is a craft. It is a subjective process. This means that a likeable website design is not only different from one opinion to the next, but is also open to as many different options as you can think of.

If you’re looking for more direction for a likeable website design than “what you think is right” then there are two key steps that you can take to make it work. These steps include:

Keeping away from traditional, stale ideas
Be wary of novelties until they’ve settled

Now, keep in mind that the point of this article is not trying to tell you how you should specifically design your website, nor is it trying to establish what is right and wrong. The point is to lay down a good foundation to give you a place to get things started.

Though everything does have its place, it is important that you try to use tools only when they enhance the actual message that you’re trying to put across, instead of just downloading them and sprinkling them around on your site because you think they look neat.

Most of these stale old tools have been used a million times before and are simply getting too tired for a web design that is supposed to stand out. Such traditional tools include:

Page counters
Too many animated GIFs
Javascript text scrolling
Page fade-ins
Under-construction signs
And other similar devices.

If you find that you do want or need a page counter, that’s fine, just make sure that it is hidden. This means that you’ll be able to see it, as the person who owns the site, but your visitors won’t. Other than for your own measuring purposes, a counter doesn’t serve any real purpose to your site. In fact, if you do get a lot of traffic, a page counter only looks arrogant when it’s included in your web design. Similarly, if your site doesn’t get very much traffic, is this really something that you want to be bragging about?

The same thing goes for Javascript scrolling and page fading. Though these seemed pretty interesting when they were first introduced, they have been used so frequently that the only message they seem to put across is a lack of originality about the website design.

Under construction signs are a pointless part of any website. After all, shouldn’t your website – and the entire World Wide Web for that matter – always technically under construction. It’s always growing, changing, adapting, and therefore never has a need for an under construction sign. If you truly feel the need to say that your page is coming soon, do just that. Place a little text marker on the page that says that it is coming soon. If you have an expected date for its “live” day, even better.

The same idea is true with novelties. Every week, and every day there is a new and hot “thing” on the internet. If you wanted to stay on top of each new development, you’d quickly be overwhelmed. However, for a likeable web design, you’ll want to stay away from such things and reach out to a wider audience. This means that you’ll need to wait until the novelties aren’t novel anymore; they’re just good.

Though there will always be people jumping on the band wagon for fresh new things, you don’t need to be the guinea pig. Your site’s likeability needs to be based upon the willingness of your visitors to find its elements appealing.

Some examples of novelties that have become quite popular but are becoming heavily disliked by web users and web developers include:

Java applets
Shockwave objects
Activex controls
Anything requiring plug-ins
Specialized document formats (requiring a program download, even if that software is free)

This doesn’t mean that you specifically need to avoid these things. If they work for your site, great. Just make sure that you’re using them for the right reasons, not just because they seem new and spiffy.

Don’t be afraid to try new things, but make sure that your goal is to make your web design more likeable and workable, not just a place for the next design fad.

About the Author
Mark NenadicMark is the director and face behind FifteenDegrees-North, where you will find articles and resources to help with SEO, marketing and Web design.

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Web Design for a Likable Website

If you’ve had a website for a while now, the odds are that some web designers somewhere with too much time on their hands have contacted you about this or that element of your website, telling you how they can repair it for you. In fact, if you’ve been contacted by enough of them, and depending on your site, you may have discovered that a number of different points of view have begun to crop up regarding the proper changes that your site “requires”. This article will help to discover the myths and the realities of what these “Website Design Police” have to say. Often, they’re pushing myth more than anything else.

The first issue that the website design police often tell you is that content is the only thing a website requires, and there should never be any animation, sound, Java, or anything else “extra”. It’s true, the content is the most important part of your website, and it is true that the more you add graphics, Java applets, audio elements, and animations, the longer your website will take to load, however, this doesn’t mean that they need to be cut out altogether.

If your website takes too long to load, a number of your visitors won’t stick around to wait. They’ll simply head over to the next site that doesn’t take as long. Therefore, the trick to using additional bells and whistles on your website is knowing how much you can use, while still being appropriate for fast download speeds under reasonable circumstances.

So when are the additional features appropriate to your website design? It all depends on how your actual content will be complimented. What is your site about, and how will extra website design features make it better? For example, if your website is selling website design services – that is, you want people to buy your services to make their sites better – than having content alone isn’t really going to impress anyone. Prospective customers will be looking at your site as an example of the potential of their own websites. If it’s nothing much to look at, they won’t be around very long. This type of site needs a reasonable amount of color, graphics, and other features that will make it very appealing, yet not so much that it takes too long to load.

The next myth that many website design police like to try to tell you about is that your site is only as good as the graphics it has. This is the exact other end of the spectrum from the first myth discussed in this article. There are other people who think that the more color, animations, graphics, sounds, and other features there are on your website, the better it is. However, these aren’t people who have very much real world experience with web design, or are those who have only ever had a T1 or broadband connection and don’t know the frustrations of waiting for a site to load.

This isn’t to say that decorative graphics and animations don’t have any value. Certainly they’re a fine addition to the right webpage. It makes it much more appealing to look at, and may then be easier and more welcoming to read. However, graphics should be used sparingly, and should be as small as they can be without being difficult to make out.

To try to achieve a good balance, there are a few things that you can put into practice:

Break up your text. Spread out your paragraphs and don’t make any paragraphs too big. Put some space between the paragraphs to make the text more pleasant to read.

If you want to have a colored background, try to make it subtle because readability works best on a white background with black text and the more you divert, the more challenging it will be.

As a final point, remember that when you must choose between your content and making your site beautiful, it should be the content that wins out. Sure, you can come to a good balance that will work, but when you do need to debate whether to add graphics or animations where it would sacrifice content, err to the side of content. No matter what your website is for, few people will be there only to admire your graphics. Those who will be motivated to return will do so because of your strong content.

About the Author
Mark NenadicMark is the director and face behind FifteenDegrees-North, where you will find articles and resources to help with SEO, marketing and Web design.

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Myths of Web Design Worth Uncovering

1. Find a topic you can create a two part article on. Write part one of your article and place it on a page on your website. Place Google Adsense ads next to your article. Next you will want to create part two of your article and make sure to make reference to your first article in your second article. Take part two of your article and submit it to ezine publishers, and article directories.

Using this technique, part two of your article will drive traffic to part one of your article. In this way you will profit when someone clicks on your Google Adsense ads when visiting the web page that you have part one of your article on.

2. Create a site that is related to your market that has nothing on it but good quality content about a popular topic in your market. Make sure that you place Google Adsense ads on the site also. You’ll then offer ezine publishers and ad on one of the pages of your site if they’ll mention your site to their subscribers. Make sure they know they’ll benefit by other ezines publishers sending traffic to your site. Their subscribers will be exposed to those ads also. You’ll profit from the earnings you earn by people clicking on your Google Adsense ads.

This technique is profitable for everyone involved. I haven’t seen anyone using it so be a pioneer and watch this technique explode your Google Adsense income!

3. Find a profitable topic and create a 5-10 website about the topic. Make sure to place Google Adsense ads on your website along with the content. Next you will want to create a mini-ebook or report about the topic, and include affiliate links for products and services related to your topic. Take your mini-ebook or report and give it to website owners and ezine publishers who can reach your target market. Allow them to brand the affiliate links in your mini-ebook or report with their own affiliate links. Within your mini-ebook or report, you’ll want to make many references to the website you created for this topic that have your Google Adsense ads on it. Whoever passes this mini-ebook or report around will be driving traffic to your site, and you’ll profit from those that click on your Google Adsense ads.

This technique uses viral marketing which in my opinion is one of the most powerful marketing techniques around. You can get some added exposure by submitting your ebook to ebook directories. Do a search to find ebook directories.

4. Take a couple of articles that you have written, and upload them to your website. Make sure to place your Google Adsense code next to your article. Now take the URL of your articles and place the URL in your signature line in your email or forum signature line.

With this one easy technique, I’ve made up to $46 a day for spending a few minutes putting the URLs into my signature line.

5. Create a mini ecourse on a topic that you know about or do research on a popular topic and create a mini course for it. Take each day of your course and place it on it’s own website. Day one will have it’s own page. Day two will have it’s own page, and so on. Make sure you place Google Adsense ads on each of these pages also.

When people sign up for your ecourse instead of emailing them the content, send them to the website address where the content is. The key to this is putting your Google Adsense ads before the content.

By using this technique you are not only building a subscriber list, but you’ll also profit from people who click on your Google Adsense ads when visiting to read your ecourse.

In the future I will be writing more articles on how to profit with Google Adsense without having to use any SEO techniques. By using the techniques above, you are working smarter and not harder, and that’s really the key to making money with Google Adsense.

About the Author
Liz Tomey reveals several adsense secrets that hundreds of people are using every day to make their sites profitable with Google Adsense ads. Visit her site for the free report “Confessions Of An Adsense Girl”.

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5 Profitable No SEO Needed Adsense Techniques

Most of the local business owners, who I know, still don’t have a web presence -for a combination of reasons. Many business owners are from my age group and don’t feel comfortable setting up a website. So, they pay somebody else to do it or it never gets done. There are a multitude of reasons to avoid launching your business on the web, and all of them are “lame excuses.”

As I travel around town, I get to hear all the excuses. “I’m too old,” “Our business isn’t the Internet type,” and “I don’t know HTML.” You can tell everybody else those excuses, but do you want to grow your business or not? The vast majority of small
businesses fail, and the Internet is the cheapest form of advertising available.

If haven’t launched a website or Blog, you are delaying business marketing progress for nothing. Take a computer class, learn from your kids, or learn from your grandchildren, but start as soon as possible. Perhaps, your grandchild can earn some money teaching you how to make even more money.

Blogs are easy to start with, since you don’t need to have any HTML knowledge. You can also go to Blogger, and get a free Blog. It might take you 10 to 15 minutes to set up and start posting information right away.

Some website hosts work like that too, but let’s assume you have a site of some kind. Did you know your website host might have a Blog feature built in, at no extra charge? If you have this feature, you can easily build a commercial Blog.

For a small business, with a website and commercial Blog, you should be able to establish your natural search engine rankings. Sometimes, these are called “organic rankings” and you don’t have to pay a penny for them. It may take a few months or more to establish yourself, and you should make regular posts.

For optimum results, your regular posts can be daily, a few times per week, or once a week. More postings are much better and will have significant impact on your rankings. Search engines love frequent posts, such as those found in Blogs.

Instead of worrying about Google algorithms, and SEO(search engine optimization) theories, go back to the basics and boost your rankings with content. Most of us have heard, “Content is King,” and it is totally true.

So what do you say about your business? Tell your established customers and prospects about your service and products. Explain what your unique selling proposition (USP) is. This is what makes you different from similar businesses in your town.

When you have new products, or are looking for feedback about new product development, a Blog is extremely useful. Your customers and prospects can leave you feedback, so marketing research is very easy.

Lastly, don’t shy away from a “gold mine.” Free advertising is too valuable to ignore. Blogs are the advertising bargain of the decade and possibly, of the 21st century.

� Copyright 2005 – Paul Jerard / Aura Publications

About the Author
Paul Jerard is the director of Yoga teacher training at Aura in RI. He’s a master instructor of martial arts and Yoga. He teaches Yoga, martial arts, and fitness. He wrote: Is Running a Yoga Business Right for You? For Yoga students wanting to be a Yoga teacher.http://www.yoga-teacher-training.org

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Tired of SEO Theories and Algorithms Try Blogging

A lot of web pages will find an SEO sitemap useful in improving their performance. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, the process that aims to create or revise Internet sites so that it can be better found by search engines. The objective of SEO campaigns is to have websites appear in the top listing or first results page of search engines.

Internet search engines, such as Google and A9, maintain a very large database of Web pages and available files. To do this, they devise a program called a web crawler, or spider. This software automatically and continuously surfs and hunts content in the Web. Pages that the spider finds are retrieved and indexed according to text content, giving more weight to titles and paragraph headers. Spiders never stop navigating the web from page to page, to index the relevant content of the Internet. Besides looking at the text of titles and headers, some programs are able to identify default tags and keep a library of these page keywords or key phrases in the index.

When a user connects to the Internet types a query, which is automatically interpreted as keywords, the search engine scans the saved index and creates a list of web pages that is most appropriate to what the user is searching for.

SEO will use all the combined techniques of keyword analysis, smart code, good content literature, link popularity study and website organization to place the subject web page as high as possible in the list of search results in search engines. Web pages displayed on the top of results pages are assumed to get the most attention, and therefore, opportunity for earnings for web businesses and pages with sponsor links.

Search engines usually return a list of results ranking pages according to the number of Internet sites linked to them. Results can be classified as organic, or sponsored links. Sponsored links are shown prominently because their creators or agents paid the search engine. Sponsored links are the main source of income of search engines. “Organic” search results are the lists of actual results from the engines index and are directly related to the keyword typed in the request.
One of the more effective techniques of SEO is the creation of a well-organized site map in a website. Since the site’s main page and other content are directly linked to a site map, spiders can more easily move through the website, identify the key words of the content, and index these for a search engine. This is where the SEO sitemap helps the website creator or administrator.

Site maps are usually pages filled with links. These are shown as tables or lists, although lists are generally more effective. Writing code for SEO sitemaps is very easy and simple to format and maintain. These are ideally basic HTML pages with default tags, logical titles and keywords scattered in the Meta description. Introduction areas can contain more of the keywords. The site should have a main heading for every directory.

A simple list layout helps reduce unnecessary tags that might “hide” your keywords. Some spiders give more weight to the following, than text in the normal body of the webpage: heading text, content within link elements, text nearer the top of the page and the text written for a link. Therefore, writing the keywords and links in these areas could somehow move up the web page’s ranking. This goes for SEO sitemaps as well.

Web sites should be designed consistently, so navigation models should follow the flow of the site map. Therefore, the first section in the site map should be the first link in the navigation bar.

In an SEO Sitemap, and most pages, the headings contain title attributes where more key phrases in the site map can be added. Keywords are generally well chosen and written in the body of a webpage. However, in an SEO site map with little text, key words should be added as much as possible. As much as possible, web links should follow web page titles, and must undergo SEO during coding. Care must be exercised not to cram the page with keywords and links, or the page will be interpreted as blatant spamming and not receive any traffic at all.

There is no way to guarantee that a website will be shown in the topmost ranking of “organic” search results for an extended period of time. However, smart and responsible SEO sitemap techniques can be used to place the website high up in the search position. Regular monitoring and adjustment of the SEO Sitemap and search results would ensure that a website is kept near the top ranking and receiving lots of web user traffic.

About the Author
Jeremiah Patton has been currently using sitemaps for easy navigation for visitors and for better crawling from search engines. Jeremiah Patton uses a sitemap for his work at home moms website http://www.2ndincome4u.com with great success.

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SEO Sitemaps Give Websites a Boost