Web Development Articles

There are six important characteristics that can play a major role on the impact your website has on prospects. Outlined below is the importance of each characteristic and tips on how to maximize your potential. It is always important to tailor everything you do to what your customer is expecting, doing so will help keep you one step ahead of the competition.

Convenience ? Allowing your customers to make decisions at their convenience is a very powerful element. Nobody wants to feel pressured or hurried into making a buying decision. When a customer can go to your website, browse your products and services, and make a purchase at their convenience, you are satisfying a crucial consumer obstacle — time. They don’t have to keep returning to your storefront every time they wish to evaluate your value. In fact, most customers do not buy something the first time they see it. Instead, they must see and consider it several times before they finally talk themselves into purchasing. A website allows customers to quickly review their reasons to purchase something, leading to a greater number of impulse buys.

There are millions and millions of websites on the Internet. You NEED to be different in some way from all of them! If you could get a visitor to your website, that means nothing. Only returning visitors must be counted. When they return the second time, “branding” starts to occur. Huge companies advertise not because they want to provide you with information about their product. They do that because they’re trying to “brand” its name and image. Actually, it is the brand you are paying the money for when you buy something from “Adidas", "Nike" or "Coca-cola". People will actually be willing to pay for the brand they know, so make it as bright and memorable as possible. However, it is useful to remember that too complex logo will definitely slip out of peoples’ minds.

Think up a name and check if yourname.com is available. Personally, I like to use http://www.whois.com to check if a domain name is available. You may also check the registrant contact information using "whois" service if you want to negotiate about purchasing the domain you like from people who registered it first.

To register domain name for our customers we use: http://www.godaddy.com We are not affiliates with Godaddy in any way, but I think this is the best online company which provides this service. Their rates are low and you will have 24 hours access to your control panel to change the domain name information in case your office moves or phone number changes. This is very convenient.

Your web site should be-

• visitor friendly to navigate
• search engine friendly for the crawlers
• Automated with ecommerce and subscription forms…

Your visitor should get the feeling that you know your ’stuff’.

Here are few tips to show your web site professionalism:

1. Uniform Layout and colors:

When you see Arial font on one page, Verdana on another or some other on different page and top menu navigation on one page and sidebar navigation on another… How do you feel about the site? Immediately what strikes your mind is ‘Newbie webmaster’. Keep a consistent lay out through out the web site. You can use SSI(server side inclusion) to update the whole site with in seconds. http://www.webmasters-central.com/wd/ssi-content.shtml

2. Links:

Check links for 404 page not found errors. When your visitor clicks on order link and found ‘page not found error’ and come again after two days to see the same error… Means you noway care about your web site.

3. Start Your own opt-in list:

Ezine or a free course opt-in lists gives you good credibility. You can also have mailing lists for updates of your products.

http://www.scripts4webmasters.com/arpproadv/index.shtml

http://www.autoresponseplus.com/

4. Customer support:

August 8 2005, Macromedia announced a release of Studio 8. Based on the feedback of previous users, Macromedia made it’s already very powerful software even better.

Dreamweaver 8 improvements include:

CSS panel

With the new CSS panel it is very easy to add, view and edit CSS styles.

XML integration

In Dreamweaver 8 you are able to click and drag XML files into the layout. And if you are using XSLT to format the XML, the code hints will help you do that easily.

Guides

Use guides to help you align your web page elements

Zoom in-out

This is the new feature which helps you zoom in and out of the layout, helping you focus on specific elements of your web project. This may be very helpful to people who are working with print.

Coding toolbar

This is a feature that was available in Homesite. It is a bar to the left of the code view that helps you comment, un-comment, collapse and expand code, display or hide line numbers etc.

Web Development

Dreamweaver 8 now supports digest authentication and SSL for secure servers, PHP 5 coding standards, updated support for ColdFusion MX 7 etc.

Participation in B2B Exchanges is increasingly becoming one of the fastest growing marketing methods for businesses looking for augmenting their client base beyond their local markets. Any good B2B Exchange offers direct contact with thousands of prospective buyers in a single location. For some new participants of a B2B Exchange, it appears to be a goldmine as they discover unexpected quantity of readymade clients without much effort from their side. Of course, there are many other great benefits companies can reap from getting involved in a B2B Exchange.

What is a B2B Exchange?

In a broader sense, Business to Business Exchange is an online platform where buyers and sellers come to communicate, collaborate and make business transactions. B2B Exchange caters a large number of participant companies as a community. The main objective of a B2B Exchange is to create a venue, filled with features that allow members to efficiently conduct business processes through the Internet. B2B Exchanges are also known as e-marketplaces.

What are the benefits?

B2B Exchanges are capable of helping companies in buying, selling and streamlining their business processes. The benefits of participating in a B2B exchange may include:

a) Efficient inventory management:

There are hundreds and thousands of websites on the internet today being bought and sold and there are many places you can sell your website such as ebay and website brokers. Though this article we will explore each of these possibilities in greater details.

Ebay - Selling a website on ebay can perfect for some and completely useless for others. As most people know ebay, it gets millions of hits every minute from people looking for everything from hair nets to race cars. For starters this is a great way to get word out that your website is for sale. It has lots of people viewing your ads but keep in mind your competition is feirce as so many people post sites for sale on ebay. To sell your website on ebay it has to stand out from the rest.

Forums - Forums tend to be a great place to sell websites. They tend to ask alot more questions about statistics and revenue than most other places but if you have a quality site you can sometimes get alot more for it buy selling your website in forums. Good forums for this include sitepoint.com, geekvillage.com and webhostingtalk.com.

Web Hosting ? Made Simple
What is web hosting anyway? What do I get when I buy a web hosting solution?

To make thing clear from start let’s just say how it all works.
Web pages basically consist of text and images. Generically, the information contained by these files is called content. The look of the web page is called design. In order to be accessible to online users, all these files must be stored on a web server. You can think of web servers as computers storing the files of tens or hundreds of web sites. These computers are all connected to the Internet through high-speed connection. When you access a web page, your browser connects to the web server that stores that page and downloads it to your computer.

So a web server is a must when you plan to share your web site content with online users via the Internet. There are thousands of web servers in the world, and there are companies that own them. Such a company is called web-hosting provider.

Well it is not Elvis, that’s for sure.

I am a firm advocate of good design but most of the time people tend to interpret design as amazing graphics and astounding visuals they tend to forget that design is the culmination of every aspect of good and effective presentation into one.

We all know that design and content have equal importance in regards to websites but if you must choose which one is immediately important, which will you choose, design or content? If you?re going to prepare an entire web marketing strategy on which of these two shall you focus on more? Why? Please defend your answer?

One of the things that many people overlook when building a new website is keywords. I have to admit, I did exactly the same thing myself when I started out. You can build the flashiest, most professional looking website, with lots of great content, but if you don’t think about keywords first your website is most likely to be doomed for failure - at least as far as search engines are concerned.

Visitors from search engines are the most targeted types of visitor that you could hope for. What you need to do is find out which keywords these people are using when they search in Google, Yahoo or MSN and ensure that your web page(s) are optimized for these keywords.

When researching your keywords you need to make sure that you

1. Choose keywords that people are actually searching for. Don’t optimize your site for keywords that people rarely search on.

2. Choose keywords that are not too highly competitive - unless you’re an SEO whiz that is

If you keep these two goals in mind when choosing keywords you will have the best chance possible of rising to the lofty heights of the search engine results pages.