Web Development Articles

How Best To Stand Out In The Crowd
 by: Florie Lyn Masarate

Promotional products and quick printing are made for each other. For obvious reasons, printing has been the primary source of promoting, marketing and advertisement even way back then. It also follows that quick printers are turning their attention of improving their services in order to make more opportunities for themselves. A quick print shop has the advantage over others because they have a storefront. People come in to buy other things from them and having a direst person ability to sell right on the spot. Displaying promotional products while on the process of doing that business is the style they use in order to show things to this people. What better way to market a product or service than have them in their best appearance and have them visible? Chances are people with need of them right now would think of it later on and remember having seen one.

If only I had known that autoresponders are a necessity to your online business when I first ventured online, I would have saved a lot of time and money. You have to automate in as many areas as possible and if used responsibly, autoresponders can be your best friend.

Your customers expect prompt replies to their email inquiries. But finding the time to answer every inquiry by hand will quickly eat all your time. The good news is an autoresponder is an inexpensive - or even free - method of quickly responding to your customers and prospects email.

Autoresponders are an effective and powerful marketing tool, allowing you to make contact with thousands of potential customers. This is an invaluable asset considering how many potential customers you usually have contact with before you make an actual sale.

Use your autoresponder to:

1. Publish a newsletter. Your newsletter can keep your visitors informed about your services or products, while building your reputation as a credible expert in your particular business.

2. Publish a newsletter only for your affiliates. Inform them of current sales you are running and of promotional material that your affiliates can use to increase their commissions. Include tips, advice, and techniques that your affiliates can use to successfully go out and promote your business.

If you think it’s simply a case of who will do it for the best price, think again.

As with many things we buy there are several important factors to take into account. For a moment let’s compare setting up a website with buying a house. When you are looking for a new house it’s not simply a case of comparing how many rooms you get for your money. In fact there are lots of factors outside of the property itself. What is its location like? How will it stand up as an investment? The same is true of a website.

Here are the things you need to consider:

• Cost
• Hosting
• Domain
• Design
• Accessibility
• Marketing
• Support

Cost

Cost is by no means the be all and end all but in a competitive market place it has to be a decisive factor. Before you start looking you should work out what you can afford to invest in a site. You should look not so much at the one off cost of having it built but the ongoing costs. When you get a quote for having a site built you should ask about ongoing costs. Find out what you have to pay for your domain name, for hosting, what they will charge you for making changes to your site or adding new pages. Also, find out what marketing if any is included in the cost.

Give And You Shall Receive, More Links
 by: Jeff Hendrickson

Link exchanges can be quite a time consuming task when it comes to search engine optimization. After spending time researching potential link partners you must add their link to your site and then send out an email asking for a reciprocal link sometimes to never hear back. Although key link exchanges are still important in search engine optimization there are ways to increase your incoming links that prove to be more rewarding.

There are great ways to get people to link to you and the overall idea you should remember is “give and you shall receive”. Well what is it that I can give you may ask? Give away free content! Offering free content does three important things. First it says that you are a generous and knowledgeable individual which everyone appreciates. Second, it allows people to freely publish your content which spreads your name and site link. The third important thing is that the longer your content is circulating the more people will use it which means it keeps on generating incoming links.

Creating a website is not just about designing your pages and including all the important information, it is also about creating a domain name that relates to your products and services and that is also easy to remember and spell for your customers. A domain name that is easy to remember will have more return customers and more word of mouth advertising than domain names which are hard to spell, remember, or both.

When it comes to searching for a domain name, all you have to do is go online and search for ones that you are interested in to see if they have been taken or not. There are hundreds of sites that will let you search domain names in hopes to sell you the domain name and then get you to buy their web hosting services as well. To start your domain name search, however, you should follow a couple of basic steps.

* Come up with a variety of domain names you are interested in. When you have a variety of unique domain names, you can start searching to see which of them are available.

Learn The Truth About Your Web Design Company By Its Portfolio
 by: Julia Ramyalg

When you start building your online business and search for a web design company that will implement all your needs for the web site you must understand that it is very serious step because you are entrusting your business along with its reputation and future.

That’s why it’s very important to make the right choice.

There are several factors that must define your choice, and one of them is portfolio of previous web design works the company has done. It can tell you more than all words and promises, just be attentive and try to analyze. I will tell you what you must pay attention to.

1) Presence of portfolio

Yes, it seems to be obvious that web design company must have own web site with portfolio of previous works. But don’t be astonished too much when you see one without it. There can be various reasons for this but I wouldn’t recommend you to tempt fate. Portfolio is like a “face” and it’s pride of web design company, it must be full, substantial, and routinely updatedand IT MUST BE!

Making your site accessible means making it available to be used by all. It’s too easy to think that what looks ok to you will do for all. Unfortunately, things aren’t that simple.

Websites are no longer just looked at by people sitting down in front of a PC. Today, websites are viewed on PCs, laptops, palmtops, all manner of mobile devices, digital TV, they are viewed by non-human automated systems or robots and are read aloud by special software to the visually impaired. If your site cannot be used by all these browsers you are reducing your audience and it’s not a small minority you’re losing.

Content is king

The essence of accessibility is to put the content of a web page first and the design second. As an example, if you want to find out the opening time of a museum, you go to the site, navigate to the opening times page from the home page and read the time. You’ve got what you came for. Whether the times are set out in a table, in a stylish font with an attractive colour scheme really isn’t that important.

Reciprocal Links: Look Before You Link
 by: Robert Raught

A reciprocal link is when a web site links to you and you link back to them.

If you own a website, I’m sure you’ve received emails asking for link exchanges. This article’s purpose is to help you decide who you should be linking to and why.

Look before you link!

Indiscriminate linking can be harmful to your search engine rankings and your reputation. When considering another website for a link exchange, always check out the potential link partner’s web site and the page that your link is going to be placed on.

Five essential rules to follow when choosing a link partner.

1. Make sure that the website is related to yours. For example, if you’re a real estate agent, don’t exchange links with pages about diet pills or casinos. Link to other real estate related web sites, like mortgages or real estate agents in other areas.

2. Don’t link to link farms. You can tell a page is a link farm by the fact that there’s usually no company logo, hundreds of links and no real content.

If you have ever used EBay then you know how important pictures are to a listing. By nature, people tend to pay more attention to the items that have pictures in the items for sale. The old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” has never been more true but in EBay’s case a picture is worth $1.00, $2.00 or more…to EBay! If you want to add more than one picture to a listing or want additional features then you must be willing to pay EBay. Here is just a small list to illustrate the point:

Additional Pictures: $0.15

Picture Show: $0.25

Supersize Picture: $0.75

Picture Pack: $1.00

These fees mean less profits for you. You already pay EBay for inserting the listing or selling the item. An alternative is to use an image hosting service. Quality image hosting sites, such as Image4U.org (http://www.image4u.org), will allow you to upload your pictures and link to them on EBay. This type of service can save you a lot of fees and increase your profits. You pay a set monthly rate and can host as many pictures as you need, up to the limit of your account. Image4U.org even offers unlimited bandwidth so you can be assured that your images will always be available.

The Site Map - Important or Not?
 by: Halstatt Pires

Have you ever visited a web site and noticed the “Site Map” button jammed somewhere near the bottom of the page? Ever click on it? Probably not. So, why do sites have site maps?

The Site Map - Very Important

In the old days of the net [about three years ago], experts proclaimed every site should have a site map. From their ivory tower, they proclaimed the site map as the extraordinary method to assure potential customers could easily navigate the site and find what they needed. Once they found it, they would buy it and you would be rich, rich, rich!

As is typical with such universally accepted proclamations, this one was wrong. Anyone remotely paying attention to server statistics realized very few people were visiting site maps. The proclamation stopped being shouted and evolved into criticisms of sites which still have site maps. These criticisms, of course, also miss the mark.

HTML site maps are archaic. Visitors to your site will almost never use them. You may even forget you have one. You will certainly forget to update it as often as you should. Still, the site map is a critical component of the site.