What is the difference between a website that a user will navigate away from vs. a website a user will stay and perhaps purchase from? A professionally designed site will often install trust into the visiting user. It shows that the owners of the website have put both time and money to produce a site that is highly professional and appealing for their users. Chances are the vast majority of the sites will share a professional design where content is well defined, navigation is user friendly, and the page layout is visually appealing.
In an increasingly competitive market where literally billions of websites exist, websites without a high quality professional design will never reach their full potential. A site that is built upon a professional design and layout is more likely to succeed over a competitor without a professional design.
The Web Design Myth
Professional web design is expensive. Web design companies will charge you a base fee for the initial design and layout, and then charge an additional fee for each page in your website (usually starting at $75.00 per page). The only way to put forth a professionally designed website with beautiful aesthetics to draw a user in is to hire a professional company to do it. You can put out a professionally designed website without ever needing to enlist the services of a web design company!
Getting Ready for Your Design
Before the secrets of designing on a dime are revealed, take a moment to think about the website you want to create. Perhaps your website is going to provide SEO services. If so, your site would fit into an IT business category. Maybe you plan on selling beautiful wedding cards in which case your site falls into a wedding category. Try to narrow down the most relevant
category for your site content.
The Best Kept Secret for Web Design
Two words... Template Monster! Template Monster is revolutionizing the web by providing webmasters with pre-designed highly professional website templates at a fraction of what you would pay from a web design company. In fact, all the templates on Template Monster are designed by true professionals and rival that of any web design company.
At Template Monster you can browse thousands of high quality professional designed website templates in any number of categories. Remember that category you choose for your website earlier? Visit Template Monster and choose your category from the drop-down list that appears in the center of the home page. A listing of a hundred or more category-specific web designs will be displayed.
Chances are if the site is appealing to you, it will be appealing to your users as well. Now that you have your template chosen, purchase that template and you'll be WELL on your way to web mastering a high quality site that will rival your competitors!
The Competitive Edge
Congratulations! You've just gained the competitive edge over your competition and are now the proud owner of a professional website template! Of course, the web design templates are just one piece of the puzzle to designing on a dime. Next we'll walk you through the process of finding equally cost-effective web hosting and domain registration services.
Know Your Domain
Now that you have your website design, you'll need to secure a domain name. The domain name is the URL that users type into their browser to visit your site (ex: http://www.freelinksdirect.com). Chances are, you can get that domain name for free.
Hosting for Less, Domains for Free (and more)
When it comes to hosting, your goal is to find the hosting service that offers the most bang for the buck while also providing a stable environment and excellent customer service. Here we present two viable and cost effective hosting solutions. Our highest recommendation is Yahoo Small Business hosting. Remember your domain name? It's FREE when you sign up with a hosting plan at Yahoo.
Also included with your hosting plan (for as little as $11.95 per month) is an invaluable $50.00 Google AdWords credit, $100 Yahoo Search Marketing Credit, free search engine submission, 100 free leads on infoUSA mailing lists, and much more! You'll be doing yourself a huge favor by signing up with Yahoo Small Business hosting, one of the most respected companies in the business.
With Host Gator you pay $10.00 per month for UNLIMITED website hosting!
SEO For Free
As important as great content and a professional presentation are, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is equally important. SEO is what will drive traffic to your website. Since SEO is itself a huge topic to cover (and one often of debate), it's suggested that you visit Free Links Direct for free SEO articles, one-way links, Google AdWords hints and tips, and SEO services.
A. Tips For Professional & Search Engine Optimized Website
It should be properly coded and designed to give the site an optimized and professional look, so search engines can locate and categorize it in search engine listings. The following are the steps for building complete professional & search engine optimized website:
1. Graphic & Layout Designing
2. Optimize For Search Engine (S.E.O)
3. Domain Name
4. Website Hosting
5. Submitting To Directories & Search Engines
6. Search Engine Marketing
7. Web site Promotion
1. Graphic & Layout Designing:
All the pages need to be consistent in background,color usage, text format and screen layout.
Background and Text Colors-
The color scheme expresses the characters of your website and makes it unique
and attractive.Choose carefully a set of colors for background & text. While choosing, remember to use dark against light. In other words, use light text against a dark background or dark text against a light background.
Fonts-
One of the most important parts of a web page is text. Always be consistent In other words, avoid using different fonts throughout your pages. Formatting
Page-
Underline your links & use a different color for visited links, put a link to your homepage on all your internal pages. Provide text navigation links at the bottom of long pages, so users don't need to scroll back up.).
Page Contents-
It should give clear intention of the web pages. Load the top of the individual pages with most important and essential content with a brief header.Create a simple logo with captivating tag line on the top of the page as a identity of the website.
File Size-
Web page size is defined by the total size of text, images and supporting files (including JavaScript, flash etc.) within the page download from the server. So, try to keep the size of a web page small by keeping less use of bulky contents such as video, audio, flash animations etc, which slow down the display of the page.If the page has too many items to load and slows to display, break it into smaller pages and link them to a new web page, with link back from the second page.
2. Optimize For Search Engine (S.E.O):
Professional websites can be successful only if they receives most targeted traffic, the source for traffic are the search engines, hence the websites should be made search engine friendly or rather say optimized for search engine. Coding and writing content of the site, as to get sequenced in the list of search engines is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Below are the basic points for coding for search engines. Two or three main keywords are to be decided for each page (the words that most commonly search engine users will type to find the page) These words are to be repeated often say in the page title, description meta tag, links and page body.
Title of the Page-
The tag must contain keyword rich phrases, place name and company name respectively.
Meta Description Tag-
Meta Keywords Tag-
The tag should be placed after Title and Meta Description Tag. The tag includes the keywords and key phrases from title, description and some other phrases (believed to be typed by search engine users in order to track the page) but it should be tried not to exceed 1000 characters. It must contain company and place name.
Heading Tag-
Each page should have at least one heading tag at the top of the page with primary keywords/key phrases and subsections of the page with h2 tags, and so forth. all the heading tags have to be relevant to the title and content of the page. The tag should be short and descriptive.
Alt Tag-
The tag is used for images along with img src tag. When the cursor is placed over an image a text called as alt text is highlighted. The tag should limit to 70 characters.
Content Of Pages-
The content weighs heavily for all major search engines. The content must grab search engine attention by including all keywords and key phrases in a balanced ratio (keywords: Total text). Density for keywords should lay under 3% to 5% to the text of the page, excluding stop words (words which search engine automatically ignores).
Navigation-
Proper navigation carries lot of importance for optimizing search engine. The navigation tab must contain Keyword rich anchor text on the top of the page. It should have descriptive title indicating summary of the page. HTML hyperlinks that lead to major pages inside the website are to be added to the home page. A successful navigation design should include a sitemap for Search engines, so that they can scrawl all the links and this "Site Map" is to be placed on the home page of the site.
3. Domain Name:
Short Domain name having keywords and phrases of the website along with the company name should be chosen as, search engines do give importance to key word rich domain names. Hyphenated domain names are easy for search engine as can be distinguished for keywords occurring in domain name. Common TLDs (A top-level domain) the last part of an Internet domain name; the final dot of any domain name available are ".org",".net",".com" else country specific use.".
4. Website Hosting:
Web Hosting empowers sharing information, selling products and services, and interacting with people through a web site, so, a reliable Web Hosting Service that gives fast loading, 24/7 tech support, client owned domain name, minimum 20MB - 50MB server space, back-up system, Unlimited free access via FTP/Telnet, email accounts, Easy access to log files should be chosen.
Types of web hosting server that can be selected:
1. Shared Web Hosting.
2. Dedicated Web Hosting
3. Managed Hosting
5. Co-located Hosting
6. Reseller Hosting
7. Free Web Hosting
5. Submitting To Directories & Search Engines:
The next step is to submit website to directories. Directories are search
engines powered by human beings. Human editors compile the list of website in respective categories. Select the required category for the website and submit it to "add site" page with the required data information.
Submit only home page, as search engine will follow the links from the index page. Submit website to major search engine manually, don't rely on software; it may result in over submission. Actually, handful of major search engine and directories distributes their results or indexes to many huge portals and search engines, in other words there are many affiliated search engines. If you submit to every front-end search engine then you will be submitting the WebPages to same search engine, which can result you in penalty by removing from index or
de-ranking the site
6. Search Engine Marketing (S.E.M) :
Search Engine Marketing involves marketing of your Website through Goggle ad words, MSN Ad Center, banner ads and other keyword purchasing programs as well as purchasing links, ads, and sponsored listings.
PPC advertisements
are usually text written ads placed near search results or indexes.
7. Web site Promotion:
A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Above steps ensure a search engine optimized and professional website, which can probably gain good traffic and good page rank with top position in result pages.
B. Website Design - The Difference Between Success and Failure
Website design is the most important factor for any business starting out in the world wide web. Understanding and making sure you have the perfect website design could determine the difference between the success and failure of your online business.
The internet holds a vast amount of information and is probably one of the fastest growing networks in the world. Thousands of websites are being built on a daily basis and if the business is similar to yours these websites are now your competition!.
You may take comfort in knowing a majority of these websites are built without a specific plan or website design in mind, this brings your competition down. If and only if, you take the time and effort to build a website with good website design you are far more likely to succeed
Building a website is basically giving your customers an online catalogue by which they can view your products and obtain more information. Poor website design could discourage a potential customer, this is normally the case if your website is hard to navigate around and difficult for the customer to find what they are looking for.
When thinking about navigation it is important to remember that is determines the search engines will rate your website as well as affect the number of pages your potential customer will view. Most sites have some sort of menu and the easier and more visible this is the better!
If on the other hand, you have decided to enlist the help of a professional website design company it is important to play an active role so that your thoughts and ideas are taken into account. Make it clear you need a site that has structure, structure means having a clean and coherent hierarchy to the site and good page structure. This will mean that your visitors will be able to recognize the significance of different sorts of information on the page as well as access exactly what they are looking for.
Make sure you understand exactly what the professional website design company include in the package you have selected, it is common for a business to think they are getting a lot more than they receive. Do not assume that promotion of the site is included for instance.
Website design packages vary in price but lets face it you get what you pay for these days!, with this in mind it is worth paying that little bit extra for a more professional service. Most professional website design companies will offer you a free quotation so make sure you shop around and not only compare prices but what is on offer.
In an increasingly competitive market where literally billions of websites exist, websites without a high quality professional design will never reach their full potential. A site that is built upon a professional design and layout is more likely to succeed over a competitor without a professional design.
The Web Design Myth
Professional web design is expensive. Web design companies will charge you a base fee for the initial design and layout, and then charge an additional fee for each page in your website (usually starting at $75.00 per page). The only way to put forth a professionally designed website with beautiful aesthetics to draw a user in is to hire a professional company to do it. You can put out a professionally designed website without ever needing to enlist the services of a web design company!
Getting Ready for Your Design
Before the secrets of designing on a dime are revealed, take a moment to think about the website you want to create. Perhaps your website is going to provide SEO services. If so, your site would fit into an IT business category. Maybe you plan on selling beautiful wedding cards in which case your site falls into a wedding category. Try to narrow down the most relevant
category for your site content.
The Best Kept Secret for Web Design
Two words... Template Monster! Template Monster is revolutionizing the web by providing webmasters with pre-designed highly professional website templates at a fraction of what you would pay from a web design company. In fact, all the templates on Template Monster are designed by true professionals and rival that of any web design company.
At Template Monster you can browse thousands of high quality professional designed website templates in any number of categories. Remember that category you choose for your website earlier? Visit Template Monster and choose your category from the drop-down list that appears in the center of the home page. A listing of a hundred or more category-specific web designs will be displayed.
Chances are if the site is appealing to you, it will be appealing to your users as well. Now that you have your template chosen, purchase that template and you'll be WELL on your way to web mastering a high quality site that will rival your competitors!
The Competitive Edge
Congratulations! You've just gained the competitive edge over your competition and are now the proud owner of a professional website template! Of course, the web design templates are just one piece of the puzzle to designing on a dime. Next we'll walk you through the process of finding equally cost-effective web hosting and domain registration services.
Know Your Domain
Now that you have your website design, you'll need to secure a domain name. The domain name is the URL that users type into their browser to visit your site (ex: http://www.freelinksdirect.com). Chances are, you can get that domain name for free.
Hosting for Less, Domains for Free (and more)
When it comes to hosting, your goal is to find the hosting service that offers the most bang for the buck while also providing a stable environment and excellent customer service. Here we present two viable and cost effective hosting solutions. Our highest recommendation is Yahoo Small Business hosting. Remember your domain name? It's FREE when you sign up with a hosting plan at Yahoo.
Also included with your hosting plan (for as little as $11.95 per month) is an invaluable $50.00 Google AdWords credit, $100 Yahoo Search Marketing Credit, free search engine submission, 100 free leads on infoUSA mailing lists, and much more! You'll be doing yourself a huge favor by signing up with Yahoo Small Business hosting, one of the most respected companies in the business.
With Host Gator you pay $10.00 per month for UNLIMITED website hosting!
SEO For Free
As important as great content and a professional presentation are, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is equally important. SEO is what will drive traffic to your website. Since SEO is itself a huge topic to cover (and one often of debate), it's suggested that you visit Free Links Direct for free SEO articles, one-way links, Google AdWords hints and tips, and SEO services.
A. Tips For Professional & Search Engine Optimized Website
It should be properly coded and designed to give the site an optimized and professional look, so search engines can locate and categorize it in search engine listings. The following are the steps for building complete professional & search engine optimized website:
1. Graphic & Layout Designing
2. Optimize For Search Engine (S.E.O)
3. Domain Name
4. Website Hosting
5. Submitting To Directories & Search Engines
6. Search Engine Marketing
7. Web site Promotion
1. Graphic & Layout Designing:
All the pages need to be consistent in background,color usage, text format and screen layout.
Background and Text Colors-
The color scheme expresses the characters of your website and makes it unique
and attractive.Choose carefully a set of colors for background & text. While choosing, remember to use dark against light. In other words, use light text against a dark background or dark text against a light background.
Fonts-
One of the most important parts of a web page is text. Always be consistent In other words, avoid using different fonts throughout your pages. Formatting
Page-
Underline your links & use a different color for visited links, put a link to your homepage on all your internal pages. Provide text navigation links at the bottom of long pages, so users don't need to scroll back up.).
Page Contents-
It should give clear intention of the web pages. Load the top of the individual pages with most important and essential content with a brief header.Create a simple logo with captivating tag line on the top of the page as a identity of the website.
File Size-
Web page size is defined by the total size of text, images and supporting files (including JavaScript, flash etc.) within the page download from the server. So, try to keep the size of a web page small by keeping less use of bulky contents such as video, audio, flash animations etc, which slow down the display of the page.If the page has too many items to load and slows to display, break it into smaller pages and link them to a new web page, with link back from the second page.
2. Optimize For Search Engine (S.E.O):
Professional websites can be successful only if they receives most targeted traffic, the source for traffic are the search engines, hence the websites should be made search engine friendly or rather say optimized for search engine. Coding and writing content of the site, as to get sequenced in the list of search engines is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Below are the basic points for coding for search engines. Two or three main keywords are to be decided for each page (the words that most commonly search engine users will type to find the page) These words are to be repeated often say in the page title, description meta tag, links and page body.
Title of the Page-
The tag must contain keyword rich phrases, place name and company name respectively.
Meta Description Tag-
Meta Keywords Tag-
The tag should be placed after Title and Meta Description Tag. The tag includes the keywords and key phrases from title, description and some other phrases (believed to be typed by search engine users in order to track the page) but it should be tried not to exceed 1000 characters. It must contain company and place name.
Heading Tag-
Each page should have at least one heading tag at the top of the page with primary keywords/key phrases and subsections of the page with h2 tags, and so forth. all the heading tags have to be relevant to the title and content of the page. The tag should be short and descriptive.
Alt Tag-
The tag is used for images along with img src tag. When the cursor is placed over an image a text called as alt text is highlighted. The tag should limit to 70 characters.
Content Of Pages-
The content weighs heavily for all major search engines. The content must grab search engine attention by including all keywords and key phrases in a balanced ratio (keywords: Total text). Density for keywords should lay under 3% to 5% to the text of the page, excluding stop words (words which search engine automatically ignores).
Navigation-
Proper navigation carries lot of importance for optimizing search engine. The navigation tab must contain Keyword rich anchor text on the top of the page. It should have descriptive title indicating summary of the page. HTML hyperlinks that lead to major pages inside the website are to be added to the home page. A successful navigation design should include a sitemap for Search engines, so that they can scrawl all the links and this "Site Map" is to be placed on the home page of the site.
3. Domain Name:
Short Domain name having keywords and phrases of the website along with the company name should be chosen as, search engines do give importance to key word rich domain names. Hyphenated domain names are easy for search engine as can be distinguished for keywords occurring in domain name. Common TLDs (A top-level domain) the last part of an Internet domain name; the final dot of any domain name available are ".org",".net",".com" else country specific use.".
4. Website Hosting:
Web Hosting empowers sharing information, selling products and services, and interacting with people through a web site, so, a reliable Web Hosting Service that gives fast loading, 24/7 tech support, client owned domain name, minimum 20MB - 50MB server space, back-up system, Unlimited free access via FTP/Telnet, email accounts, Easy access to log files should be chosen.
Types of web hosting server that can be selected:
1. Shared Web Hosting.
2. Dedicated Web Hosting
3. Managed Hosting
5. Co-located Hosting
6. Reseller Hosting
7. Free Web Hosting
5. Submitting To Directories & Search Engines:
The next step is to submit website to directories. Directories are search
engines powered by human beings. Human editors compile the list of website in respective categories. Select the required category for the website and submit it to "add site" page with the required data information.
Submit only home page, as search engine will follow the links from the index page. Submit website to major search engine manually, don't rely on software; it may result in over submission. Actually, handful of major search engine and directories distributes their results or indexes to many huge portals and search engines, in other words there are many affiliated search engines. If you submit to every front-end search engine then you will be submitting the WebPages to same search engine, which can result you in penalty by removing from index or
de-ranking the site
6. Search Engine Marketing (S.E.M) :
Search Engine Marketing involves marketing of your Website through Goggle ad words, MSN Ad Center, banner ads and other keyword purchasing programs as well as purchasing links, ads, and sponsored listings.
PPC advertisements
are usually text written ads placed near search results or indexes.
7. Web site Promotion:
A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Above steps ensure a search engine optimized and professional website, which can probably gain good traffic and good page rank with top position in result pages.
B. Website Design - The Difference Between Success and Failure
Website design is the most important factor for any business starting out in the world wide web. Understanding and making sure you have the perfect website design could determine the difference between the success and failure of your online business.
The internet holds a vast amount of information and is probably one of the fastest growing networks in the world. Thousands of websites are being built on a daily basis and if the business is similar to yours these websites are now your competition!.
You may take comfort in knowing a majority of these websites are built without a specific plan or website design in mind, this brings your competition down. If and only if, you take the time and effort to build a website with good website design you are far more likely to succeed
Building a website is basically giving your customers an online catalogue by which they can view your products and obtain more information. Poor website design could discourage a potential customer, this is normally the case if your website is hard to navigate around and difficult for the customer to find what they are looking for.
When thinking about navigation it is important to remember that is determines the search engines will rate your website as well as affect the number of pages your potential customer will view. Most sites have some sort of menu and the easier and more visible this is the better!
If on the other hand, you have decided to enlist the help of a professional website design company it is important to play an active role so that your thoughts and ideas are taken into account. Make it clear you need a site that has structure, structure means having a clean and coherent hierarchy to the site and good page structure. This will mean that your visitors will be able to recognize the significance of different sorts of information on the page as well as access exactly what they are looking for.
Make sure you understand exactly what the professional website design company include in the package you have selected, it is common for a business to think they are getting a lot more than they receive. Do not assume that promotion of the site is included for instance.
Website design packages vary in price but lets face it you get what you pay for these days!, with this in mind it is worth paying that little bit extra for a more professional service. Most professional website design companies will offer you a free quotation so make sure you shop around and not only compare prices but what is on offer.
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