Small Business Website Design Strategies

For a small business a website can have a massive impact on whether that small business thrives or dies out. There are several very important differences between a website built for a large business and a website built for a small business. It’s important that a small business and the website design company who builds the website for that small business are aware of those differences so that the website has the greatest positive impact.

First of all don’t try to look and act like the big boys. If you are a small business please do not plaster your site with platitudes like “family owned since 1642” or “customer service is our specialty” blah blah. IBM and Coke can get away with having pretty sites that blather on and on using all kinds of corporate jargon but a small business cannot do that. Here’s why…

Big companies are already established brands. They can rest on their laurels now; at least they think they can. A small business website needs to grab the visitor by the throat with some hard hitting headlines and copy and get busy proving its case because before visiting that website it’s likely the visitor has never heard of that small business.

Think of it like a courtroom. The small business is on trial it’s products and services are suspect from the get go. That small business needs to prove beyond a shadow of doubt that it can provide the best value over its competitors. What’s worse is that you only have about 8 seconds from the time the visitor hits the homepage to the time they click the back button to hook them into your sales copy.

The number one difference here is the copy. A small business website needs to be a life support unit for its unique selling proposition or USP not a contestant in this year’s flashy foo foo web design award contest. Win customers not awards. Forget the animation and music and go easy on the images. What a small business needs is a lean, mean conversion machine.

Studies show the visitors don’t even consciously register images until after they have absorbed the copy on the page. Makes sense because what they came for was information not the old receptionist at the desk on the phone pictures that we have seen over and over again. They want to know who the heck you are and what you can do for them and make it snappy!

It’s brutal but that’s the way it works. A small business that knows this and applies this to their website has a huge advantage over those who don’t. So if you are a small business owner and need a website keep this article in mind or if you have an existing website take a look at it and reevaluate it’s effectiveness in light of this information. Small changes can have dramatic effects on sales conversion.

Article is submitted on behalf of Charles Preston, who is President of Click Response, a website marketing and design firm where you can get affordable search engine optimization that works.

Tips For A Great, Effective Web Site Design

While surfing the internet I have seen many different types and styles of web sites. The design of all of the different web sites on the internet varies widely. I have noticed that within the last five years there has been a tremendous move towards Flash web sites or Flash elements in web sites. Personally I am not a huge fan of a web site built entirely in Flash, because I believe that it is too much for the user to absorb everything that is happening. Also when a search engine crawls a web site made completely with Flash it will not be able to pick up any text in the web site that is embedded in the Flash images. Normally a search engine will rank a Flash-only web site lower than a non-Flash web site, because there are more keywords included in the paragraphs of the web site that are not made completely with Flash. However using some Flash elements in a web site design is a great idea. Flash can help make your web site pop, and give the user a focal point that will draw their eye into your web site.

Web site design is the most important element of creating a web site. The design of the web site is what actually brings the users into the site and keeps them there. A major aspect of your web site design is the web site navigation. If the navigation of a web site design is not very good, then the user will leave the web site quickly, without really looking at much of anything. If the web site is difficult to read, or the colors are not appealing to the user then they may also leave. A good, clean, and simple web site is the best type of site to create, because it allows the user to navigate easily, and find the information that they desire.

Some people like to use navigation on the side and some like to use navigation on the top of the web site. No matter which you choose you want to be consistent, so that the user always knows where to go to move to another page. Personally I like to use the main navigation across the top of the page, with the secondary navigation down the left side. The main navigation will have the main points of the site, and the secondary navigation will allow the user to delve deeper into any one of the main navigation topics. I prefer to use navigation this way, because it allows the user to navigate to almost anywhere within the web site with only two clicks. One of the clicks will get them into the main topic, and then they can get into more detailed information relating to the main topic using the secondary navigation.

Recently I have looked at a few web site design companies in the UK. These design companies have very nice classic styles that are very easy to read, and they relay the information to the user in a very nice way. UK web site design seems to use fewer Flash elements, and more CSS and JavaScript techniques to entice the user. I also prefer CSS and JavaScript techniques, because they do not require Flash Player to be able to see the effects. Also these techniques are much more subtle than Flash elements. CSS and JavaScript are just text markups, so the text can still be read by the search engines’ spiders, which usually translates into a higher search engine ranking.

For help designing an effective, attractive website, visit web design uk / web design Manchester.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gabriel_J._Adams

The Easy guide to making a robots.txt file

If you have a website you really need to have a robots.txt file. It gives search engine spiders specific commands and it is easy to use and easy to maintain. Here is an easy guide to a robots.txt file in five minutes.

There are times when you don’t want a search engine to index a page or a folder on your website. Maybe you have some information you just don’t want to have show up in google. This may include your statistics page, a page of notes, or a dynamic page. And, importantly, if you use google adsense and the search tool that displays search results on your website google mandates you exclude this page from search engines. Which means they mandate you having a robots.txt file.

A robots.txt file is a simple document named robots.txt and saved in the root folder of your website. Search engines see this and follow any commands it contains. Create a simple text document using any word processor program like notepad and put these two lines it:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

The first line tells all spiders to listen up because the following command is for you. The second line means do not index any of the following pages. And it is here you put the url of any pages you don’t want spidered. So if you wanted the spiders to skip your private page it looks like this:

Disallow:/privatepage.htm

If you want the spiders to skip a whole folder you put the url of that folder with a slash like this:

Disallow:/privatefolder/

Simply place this text file in the root folder of your website and you are done. In the future you can add and remove commands easily.

The robots.txt file is a very easy file to write and maintain and it is a very powerful tool that will help you interact successfully with search engines. This disallow command is the simplest and most used command but there are also many other commands you can use and if you have a website it is well worth your time to have a robots.txt file and even to research it a bit further.

About the Author
For more interesting insights into being a creative webmaster and making your website work for you visit the authors site at: The Creative Webmaster – Forging the Iron of Creativity on the Anvil of a Website

What is Ajax?

by Ajay Sharma

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.

About the author:
I am working in http://www.xaprio.com. Xaprio Solutions is an India based IT Company revolving in and around Outsourcing. We aims towards the "Web Fulfillment" by developing and designing world class applications and products and by taking the Web to Next Generation.

What A Newbie Webmaster Should Know About Domain Registration

Domain Name Registration

Affordable domain name registration was extremely difficult to be found in the past. In fact, all domain name registrars used to charge a flat fee of $70 which was to register your domain name for two years.

Now there has been an explosion of companies that offer affordable domain name registration. Some will register your domain name for less than $15 a year, especially if you are registering multiple sites for a number of years at the same time. Be aware that you may have to have a number of variations of your ideal site name as you often find that the more popular terms have already been registered or reserved for future use.

If you are serious about your online presence then it is essential to consider a bulk domain name registration. The most obvious benefit of having a bulk domain name registration is that your site will appear higher on the search engines. That may be incentive enough but registering as a .net, .biz, http://.co.uk, .la or other domain names too has a far greater benefit which many people do not think about.

A major benefit of having a bulk domain name registration for your site is to prevent the more unscrupulous cyber sitters from piggybacking on the success of your website. Imagine if you could register as a google.au and benefit from the millions of people who use a Google site every day? You see how this could work to someone’s advantage if Google hadn’t performed a bulk domain name registration to prevent this. The extra cost to have a bulk domain name registration can be minimal and there are a number of web domain registrars who offer bulk discounts to their customers.

Wholesale domain name registration is an increasingly popular way for webmasters to register multiple domain names at the same time at a fraction of their individual costs combined. A new marketing technique has been sweeping the World Wide Web recently where webmasters create hundreds of websites with only a small amount of text to attract visitors by keyword searches and wholesale domain name registration has led to this process being simplified.

About the Author:

D. Goldberg is webmaster of Webhosting Specialists. Find out everything about web hosting and domain registration.

Read more articles by: Dana Goldberg

Article Source: www.iSnare.com

The Use Of Meta Tags Are Important

When it comes to your Meta tags you want them to contain key information about your website as well as your top keywords. Make sure they keywords are in the title as well as in the body of the text. Make sure you write a description about your page using specific information and keywords, but keep it short and sweet. All your keywords should always be relevant to the content within the page they describe. With the title tag, each search engine looks at it and uses it primarily the same way, to summarize and compile the websites contents for its search engine users. The how and where your keywords are in your title tag are the most important element with to which you can get benefit from using title tag. Choosing keywords is an essential part of producing a successful website.

When creating the title for the website makes sure you include keywords in the title that are on the page. There has been a lot of talk about title tags about how they are not important anymore, but in reality they are still important. On your page to properly place your title tag you should put it between the HEAD tags, one of the best place to include it is right after the HEAD tag. Most of the SE use the meta title as the title of the page. When you do a search on search engines the title that is listed is the title on the website and sometime the Meta title is used. Once you understand why the title is so important, you can easily write more effective title tags. The title is so important because the first thing that a human searcher sees is the title. The Meta title is a critical factor in controlling where your site is listed in search engines.

In many results the Meta description will appear on the results page right under the title. The only caveat to remember is that your META description will only show if the search term is in the META description. Try to keep the title brief so it is not cut off in the results, it is best practice if you keep the description under 200 characters.. Your description contains your important key phrase and key words. Place your description in the opening paragraph, if you do this the description is weighted heavier by search engines. Sometimes even google picks up description tag. Make sure that title and description is crafted neatly and attracts both visitors and search engines.

Bots have been spidering the web since the '90's, including pages into various collections. Pictures are worth 1000 words to you and me, but zero to a search engine. Even if you ensure you have completely relevant Meta Tags, some search engines will still ignore them. Always make sure that your meta tags do not have any line breaks. The more educated you are about what search engines are looking for, the better you will be able to respond and rise in the rankings.

If you only put the description in the Meta tag section, then the search engine robots will see it but many of your visitors will not. Don't hide this information in a place where your readers cannot see it. Meta tags are HTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page. Using Meta tags is not some magic answer that everyone thinks it is. Meta Tags are most commonly used to distinguish the keywords that are relevant to a page's content. The robots do scan the Meta tags and some of the search engines will use the information from them. Meta tags are still important today, they might not be as important but you still need to use them if you want to compete with other sites.

About the Author:

David Marc Fishman helps webmasters with a link directory like yahoo directorydirectory to establish one way links. and

Tips to Make a Fast Loading Flash

Flash is cool! But it takes a lot of time to download. No, Flash distracts the visitors. I disagree, Flash grabs the attention of the visitors. This is what web designers and website owners argue about regarding Flash. In this article you will learn the good things and the bad things about Flash and how to overcome the bad things.

Flash is cool but it takes a lot of time to download. No, Flash distracts the visitors. I disagree; Flash grabs the attention of the visitors. This is what web designers and website owners argue about regarding Flash. In this article you will learn the good things and the bad things about Flash and how to overcome the bad things.

First, let me explain why Flash considered a big jump to the World Wide Web information presentation. The key is that Flash uses Vector Graphics which are small in file size. It also mixes the use of text, graphics and audio which we can call multimedia. Now since the first time Macromedia introduced Flash, it has become revolutionary because it was hard for web designers to show multimedia on the web except for videos like Real Audio.

The major advantage of Flash against video or Real Player is interaction. Now you can make use of text, animation and audio in response to the visitors' actions. As a results, Flash is used for many things online that involves interactive multimedia like games, intros and whole websites. There are more advantages of using Flash as an interactive tool online but I will concentrate on the good and bad things and how to turn bad things to your advantage.

In order to make use of Flash you must know what you want from it to do. If you want to grab the attention of the visitor with a short presentation then make your site start with a Flash intro. If you want to go straight to the point and show your information, then use a normal website. If you don't have a lot of information on your website, then use a Flash site which has the menu and contents in Flash.

Now what are the disadvantages of Flash? The major disadvantage is file size which has its reasons. Remember when I said the advantage of Flash is using Vector Graphics and they are small in size. So, what makes your Flash file large? Here is a list of the most known factors of file size and how to make them to your side:

1- Audio: Try to avoid using many audio files. When you involve audio, try to change the export settings for audio in the publish settings. I prefer mp3 but you need to test your published file in balancing quality with size. If you build a Flash intro, I highly recommend using streaming audio for the background music by placing it in a layer. This will also make your motion synchronized exactly with your sounds and you can feel that while designing.

2- Fonts: When you use fonts and choose to include the fonts to Flash so that it shows up to every visitor, you should use one font. The reason is that Flash embeds the font in the file and each font is has its size. I know that many designers like to use special fonts to the titles or the menu, but here is a trick: When you choose to embed the font, don't embed all characters. Instead, embed the characters used in your titles and menu text. This will significantly reduce the file size. To embed the characters used in your titles and menus, you can gather them all in a text file then copy and past the text in the required characters in Flash font embedding window.

3- Duplication: Avoid creating Instances and shapes many times if you are going to use them again and again. Make one circle and use it for the eyes of the face by creating a circle then putting it in a graphic then use it as the white and black circles that shape two eyes.

4- Preloaders: If you have a long Flash intro, then it is a good idea to make a preloader where visitors see "Loading, please wait..." It is also recommended that you do not preload the whole movie which will increase visitors' waiting time. Instead, preload half or 70% of the movie and then let it start. The rest of the movie will be downloaded while the visitors see the beginning of it.

Finally, don't blame Flash but blame the designer. There are always some tricks to do that makes your Flash presentation full of music, action and interaction while maintaining the file size, preloading and therefore reducing the visitor's time waiting. So, grab that attention you want from your visitors using Flash the way it should be.

Happy Flash designing,

Eyad Makki

About the Author

Eyad Makki Web Designer, Web Developer and Web Marketer www.eyad.info

Web Design Using a CMS

There has been a big craze lately, everybody wants their site as a database driven site or Content Management System (CMS). There are many advantages to using a CMS over ordinary static page site, the main on is site structure. You can change the structure and the hierarchy of the site instantly.

A Content Management System could be best described as integrating elements of a web site such as design, content, media and database into one easy to use package. The System is normally controlled by using a web interface (a form) which will capture the data and store it in a database according to its attributes (title, category keywords, description etc.). Some of the better ones out there are Mambo / Joomla, and because it’s open source there is a large community are continually contributing updates and addon’s to the system. Here’s an example http://www.ketec.net
The design of the site itself is controlled by templates and css style sheets making the design and development of the site is much more consistent especially larger websites. Another important factor is that because the whole site design is controlled by a couple of files it can be easily updated to give your visitors a themed season effect such as Christmas, Easter, Summer, Winter etc. This is important when it comes to repeat visitors, they know that the site is up to date and that the designer / developer is actually thinking of the visitor.
Finally, as you become use to working with a Content Manage System, you could spend more of your time concentrating on content and maybe farm out the design or purchase some templates for your site.


Damien Kettle is a Dublin based web developer. Visit: Web Design Ireland
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Damien_Kettle

10 Tips To Creating Fast Loading Websites

Seems to me like most web users (me included) are always in a hurry when browsing. Statistics show that, without a compelling reason, the average user will not wait for much more than 10 seconds for a page to load. So does that explain why your visitors seem to spend less than 5 seconds in your site? Probably your site is taking too long to load thus putting off visitors.

As you design your site, loading time should always be a priority if your site is to be an effective business tool. Balancing usability and aesthetics is a delicate matter when creating a fast loading site. You can have a colourful website but takes ages to load while on the other hand you can design a simple site that loads faster than you can brink. Below are 10 tips and tricks that I have found very useful that you can use while designing your fast loading website.


1. Use images sparingly.

Images may enhance the appearance of a website but it greatly increases its loading time. While optimizing images will make the pages load faster, overuse will not have the desired effect. For example, if you use over 75% of your page content as images chances are that your pages will load very slow.

2. Use HTML to design your pages

HTML when used well can be very effective in creating fast loading pages. You can create simple and elegant sites using plain HTML, CSS and few images.

3. Minimize animated gifs and flash usage

Wherever possible use very few animated gifs and flash files. As much as they enhance web page appearance they usually bog down the loading times so use sparingly.

4. Use background images

Instead of using full images, use background images for headers and footers. In this way you get to use a strip of the image of uniform design instead of using an image 779px wide.

5. Avoid using Javascript and flash scripts

Most of these scripts contribute greatly to slow loading pages because they usually have to load some items first before they are rendered. For example, Javascript drop menus are very useful in creating seamless navigation but unfortunately increase page load times significantly. Consider using CSS with which you can have drop down menus.

6. Optimize your HTML

One of the reasons why pages may load slowly is huge page size as a result of useless or repeated HTML tags. Validating your site is one way of optimizing your HTML.

7. Avoid using multimedia files

Unless your site is an entertainment one don’t use multimedia files especially as background music unless you absolutely have to. Providing a download link or an online player is better than using the files as background music.

8. Use Templates

Using templates will not only ensure uniformity throughout your site but will enable subsequent pages load faster because the structural images will have cached and thereby reducing the load times significantly.

9. Optimize images

Using an image editor like Photoshop, or Ifarnview, images can be optimized to load fast depending on their intended use. Appropriately resized and cropped images will greatly reduce the loading times of a page and at the same time maintaining their integrity.

10. Check your loading times

Finally check your loading times using plugins such as Fasterfox in Firefox to see how long your pages are taking to load.

About The Author

Hilum Mburu is the lead developer at www.simbahosting.net a web hosting solutions firm.

Fix for displaying Flash in IE

The Internet Explorer update in February 2006 requires users to click embedded or “active” content before they interact with it. This update also affects Adobe Flash files. This is one of several workarounds to fix your Flash content work normally.

1. Create and place the external javascript file on your website. In this example, call it RunActiveContent.js. The only function in this file is to document.write the content.

function RunContent(content)
{
document.write(content);
}

2. Add a Javascript include statement that points to the file from step 1 :

<script src="RunActiveContent.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

3. Replace the <object>
and <embed> tags in your pages with a Javascript which declares a string of your <object> and <embed> code. And call the function from step 1. For example :

<script language="'javascript'" type="'text/javascript'">
<!-- var flash_code = "<object classid="'clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000'" codebase="'http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=" width="'770'" height="'120'"><param name="'movie'" value="'foo.swf'"><param name="'quality'" value="'high'"><embed src="'foo.swf'" quality="high" width="'770'" height="'120'" type="'application/x-shockwave-flash'" pluginspace="'http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer'"><"+"/embed><"+"/object>";
RunContent(flash_code);
//-->
</script>

For users who have disabled JavaScript, you have to insert the standard <object> and <emboed> into the pages within a <noscript> tag.

<noscript>
<object classid="'clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000'" codebase="'http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=" width="'770'" height="'120'"><param name="'movie'" value="'foo.swf'"><param name="'quality'" value="'high'">
<embed src="'foo.swf'" quality="high" width="'770'" height="'120'" type="'application/x-shockwave-flash'" pluginspace="'http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer'"></embed>
</object></noscript>