Core Web Solutions Articles

To have an idea for a website is just the beginning, the actual process of building a website that will hold people’s attention is an entirely different thing. Studies show that you have no more than 30 seconds to secure your visitor. If your presentation, site layout or content don’t grab peoples attention within that 30 seconds then its likely your website will not be running at full efficiency. There are ways to analyze your website. A proper look and feel should be your concern as you work to build your niche on the internet.

Let’s look at some ideas that you can reflect on while thinking about the design of your website. If you don’t have a website these are useful tips you can use while you work to create your own site. Did you ever think about your sites…

Web Site Tips to Increase Visitor Conversion

Layout- Most of us are very experienced website visitors, we have seen thousands of websites in our lifetime. During this time we have learned how to scan a websites homepage to determine if the site is worth further exploration. Because of this you need to plan the layout of your site, if the site does not offer value to the visitor there is little chance that they will stick around. A quick way to turn people off is by overusing ads, if your website has more ads than content this is a huge turn off.

Don’t make people search for what your site is about. If your website is there to sell a product make sure that most of the links are teaching people about the product or leading people to information related to ordering the product.

Ease of Navigation- When you are thinking about how people will navigate your website, start with the basics. Start with a clean canvas and then add the most valuable points. Each of these points needs to have a link in highly visible location There should be an area where people can easily learn about your company, contact you and view what products and services are being offered. If these things are not easily visible to your visitors they may not find the best part of your site before they click off to some other part of the internet.

Make sure that your that the most relevant pages of your site have links to one another. If someone clicks on your products page there should also be a link there which will allow them to contact someone if they have a question.

Page Load Time- I’m sure that everyone reading this has had a time when they visited a website and the page load was just too slow, after a few seconds many of us will just give up. Remember that not everyone has high speed broadband access and often those that do may not have patients for a slow loading website. It is important to minimize the size of your web pages. Extras like large photos, Flash and ads are not needed and can cause people to never return to your site. Besides this Google is now beginning to put weight on search results according to their page speed download. It is understandable that search engines would want to serve WebPages that are more optimized than full of excess baggage. This is a very deep topic that will be covered in another article.

Browser Compatibility- What could be worse from a webmasters perspective than working to bring visitors to your site and they are not able to view the page or view it in a distorted way? If your website is not correctly setup you will have exactly this problem. How many users will you loose? Your site should display the same way whether you visitors are using Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer or Netscape.

Designing a successful websites can be complicated. However if you think like a consumer and use common sense it will help you to create an idea of how your users experience should be. By using these ideas you can make improvements to your current site or get an idea of how to setup a correctly layout site. Either way a website is a very powerful ally, jut make sure you set it up with some consideration.

In search engine optimization (SEO), one of the most important things to do is acquire backlinks. Backlinks are simply inbound links from other websites to your website. These are important for many reasons, but did you know that backlinks can serve different purposes? Below I will discuss the most important purposes for acquiring backlinks.

Indexing Frequency

Often people are so focused on how to obtain one-way links in order to boost a site’s Page Rank (PR) that they forget a very important purpose behind the backlink. Indexing frequency relates to how often a search engine spider visits a site. The only proven method for creating more frequent visits by spiders is to have lots of inbound links. As most people know, the search engines come to your site by following links from other sites. The more links you have coming from other sites, the more often they will come. Therefore, with regards to indexing frequency, the more total links one has the more often the spiders will come. What this means is that there is still reason to get as many “whatever” links as possible. They don’t have to be related, or one-way. Unrelated reciprocal links that are ‘follow-able’ will serve this purpose well. That is not to say this is all you need to do. (SIDEBAR – Watch out for ‘no-follow’ links. These are useless because the SE spider will not follow it. It serves no purpose for SEO. Always maintain your list of links and keep an eye the ones that CHANGE to no-follow later. This is the new trick; offer do-follow links at first, then change them to no-follow later.)

Page Rank

This concept is often misunderstood. Google is the only search engine for which page rank matters at all. The key thing to understand is that Page Rank has little to do with where the site will rank on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). It is rather a cumulative ranking based on other sites that link to your site. Page Rank affects page rank. The more higher-page-rank sites link to you, the higher your page rank can get. But… so what? This doesn’t directly impact your SERPs. However, to build page rank you need to find quality one-way links that have high page rank. So for this purpose, specifically targeted links are necessary.

SERPs

For the previous two purposes, related content is not very important. It is, however, extremely important with regards to SERPs. This has to do with where your site ranks in the search engine for specific keywords. It is the ultimate goal of SEO in the first place. Having good links from sites with related content affects SERPs more than anything else with regard to linking. Having one-way, contextual links work best for this purpose. A link coming from an “Authority” site of related content is supreme. Never mind all those offers to submit you to 1200 directories, or get 1000 blog comments and social bookmarks for you. That sort of rubbish “may” help with indexing-frequency, but certainly not SERPs. Only high quality links from related content sites will truly help your ultimate goal of stable SERPs top positions. Such links are definitely not easy to get, but only a few of these can make a great difference.

So, when evaluating your link campaign, you have to understand that you can do many things as long as you understand the purpose of what you are doing. Acquiring lots of random directory links and reciprocal links will increase spider visits. Seeking out high Page Rank sites will help improve your site’s Page Rank. And finally, acquiring valuable one-way related content links from established websites will help improve your SERPs. That’s all there is to it; easy, right? Not really.

A slow website can often lead to a poor user experience, people don’t like to sit around and wait for overweight web pages to download. If your website is serving up large photos, Flash intros or excessive graphics it can turn off your visitors and even cause you to lose customers. As you probably know this is not the best way to treat the customer and apparently now the search engines have figured this out as well.

As of April 4^th of 2010 Google announced that they are going to start evaluating page speed as part of their search determining algorithm. This means that if your website is optimized in many ways yet your homepage is a 300kb or larger sized download, you will be suffering with your Google search engine rankings. If you are currently ranking on the 4^th page for a desired keyword will cutting your page download speed in half move you up 1 or 2 pages? This remains to be seen. How much emphasis Google will place on this analysis of speed is still somewhat of a mystery.

Monitor Your Page Download Speed

Google offers an area for website owners that is know as the “Webmasters Tools”. In this area you can see many details about your sites ranking and search results on Google. In the webmasters tools areas there is a chart that is used to analyze and show to your websites download speed. If you are want to track the speed of your page downloads this is a great place to go to watch the change week by week. Google often is secretive about how their ranking algorithm. However the fact that they are offering an area to monitor your sites download speed is an indicator that this is an important part of optimizing your site.

According to Google they are evaluating page download speed to create a better user experience. This is understandable yet it does put certain restraints on people who want to display media on their website. If you have a site and you are in a competitive niche will you create a “plain Jane” site that is devoid of pictures and graphics? If you want to be highly competitive you probably will, although how much will this cost you in the end? If your site does not properly convey the right explanation and visual description, this can become a serious threat to customer conversion and profits

What does this mean for you? Reducing page download speed should be something on your mind as you work to optimize your site. It is definitely wise to double think hosting your own videos on the front page and using large image files. Now is the time to be more aware of these things, as the internet is becoming more competitive those who ignore the changes may be left out in the cold. If you are designing a new site these are some things to think about as you plan out your pages.

As a business owner you may have considered using a website to boost your sales and customer base. Many business people know that a website can bring a new dimension to their businesses presence yet they simply do not known where to start.  Once you begin using your website it will be like most of technology, you look back and think “how did I make it without this?”

Most of us use our Internet enabled computers and cell phones daily to check stock quotes, send emails and make purchases. If you do not have a website then you are restricted from the most powerful web of customers and sales on the planet.

Due to my experience working with people who are looking to create a business website, I have learned that one of the main reasons people hold back… is fear.  It seems like a complicated process or very expensive. But a website is a functional tool to help businesses thrive and serve their customers; the cost is an investment.

In the early days, 1995 -2000, to plan and build any professional website could set you back tens of thousands of dollars. Back then many companies were rushing to build their Internet presence. Because there were a limited number of qualified web professionals, projects were priced in a range that was out of the reach for many small companies. The high prices of these business websites restricted many from participating in the e-commerce world.

Today things have changed, a business can out source a fully functional e-commerce website for far less. Small businesses can benefit from the use of a website at these affordable prices. There are a number of things that a professionally designed website can offer your customers, here are a few things to consider:

Customers Convenience:  We are all busy today and most of us enjoy the convenience of shopping from home. Whether you are looking for information or merchandise, people are always looking for a way to get what they need fast and cheap. Having even a basic website available for people to visit is a great way to build your customer base and making new business contacts.

Competition: Not convinced yet? Look at your competitor’s website. If he’s got one and you don’t… you’re already behind. Putting your business out there is necessary now. If you do not offer this convenience there is an excellent chance that a competitor already does. Your not even in the game.

Increase Your Market Size: If you have a traditional brick and mortar business you are limited by the number of cars that drive by your location or the amount of foot traffic you receive. There is no reason to stay in the dark ages. There are so many ways a website can help to broaden your customer base and in turn, increase your sales, I could go on forever.

Reduce your Distribution Cost: Most businesses will need to produce some sort of brochure, catalog, proposals, etc. and they all cost money to print.  Using your website to provide your customers immediate access to this information at next to no cost per use is an ideal way to reduce overhead.

Your website is your public image.  Let the customer check out your website first before visiting your store or office, saving them time, money and in the long run creating a more reputable relationship with the customer. This is what people want these days. If you look into using a website for your businesses growth you will quickly see that there is massive potential, so much so that it may create an entirely different and larger business entity in itself as many now web only businesses have learned.

Basic Website with minimal customization:  $1000 or less, up to $1800

A basic website site will start a client’s web presence. It can be used for simple marketing  like a three-fold brochure, showcasing products and services and also as a lead generating tool.  Unfortunately, the design of the website will usually be created from a template. This means that your site will be made from a “canned” design that other websites already use.  If not a template, than simple structure and color scheme will be the best one can expect. Usually, there is minimal graphic design and sites can often be quite boring.

Standard Website with Limited Customization:  $1800-$3500

The range in cost is a bit higher here due to the additional time it takes to perform the tasks required.  Although usually not from a template, templates may be used as a basis to save time in the conception phase. Also, higher-end templates that are not widely used may be used for a standard website to get higher quality graphics than the budget would normally allow.

This type of site will serve the same necessary purposes that a basic designed website will but will be far more visually pleasing and much of the design will be customized to the client’s wants.  Additional enhancements such as web forms, downloadable pages, additional pages and even a blog or photo gallery can usually be accomplished with a standard website budget.

The limitations are in the graphic design and in any customized programming or functionality. That sort of service is reserved for Premium Websites.

Custom eCommerce/ Content Management Website: $3500- $10,000 and up

There are eCommerce and/ or content management services where a person can buy a subscription and have use of a hosted solution. These services range from $39 – $500 per month, depending on what you are looking to do. However, this option is far from customized. You are typically locked-in to the host’s software and may even have to use their domain.

A Custom eCommerce or Content Management solution offers much more control over the website design and functionality. The price is driven by three factors: the cost of the eCommerce or Content management software used the level of graphic design detail and quality, and the amount of programming customization.

Custom Premium Website:  $5000 and up

This category is the high-end full service solution. Projects can be as much as $80,000 depending on the project requirements. This is a “the sky’s the limit” type of project, where every aspect of the website is of the highest quality and detail. Everything is customized, and made to order. Additionally, the best talent a company has to offer is assigned to such a project, and various aspects are delegated to specialist-experts such as graphic-designers, navigation experts, copy writers, photographers, programmers, lead designers, marketing experts, and project managers.

All the possibilities with web design costs are not limited to what I have written here; but this should offer some guidelines on what the real world costs are. For some, it’s all too pricey and they would be better off using a web-building service where they can point and click and make their own. But even the small start up would be better off putting aside some capital to invest in a solid, customized website that fits their image. For others, the sky is the limit and anything is possible.

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It is important to know why you should hire a professional website developer to create your website. There are many website design tools available to anyone, but most business people don’t have the time or patience to create their own website. And for those who think they do, the end result is often amateurish and weak. A professional web site designer will save you hours of valuable time and produce an original and attractive site. Hiring a company with skilled resources to do the job well and do it right is always the better option.

Experience. Most business owners do not have any experience with web design. Hiring a professional gives you instant experienced people to help you organize and deliver the project.

Expertise. Have you ever seen those websites that just pop out at you with smooth detailed graphics and that certain high-end look? That’s not easy to do. It takes specialized talent to produce each graphic and then to place the graphics on the page so that the entire page looks like a professionally produced TV commercial. Every functional component of the website has to work well and work smoothly. This is only accomplished with well-trained experts.

Efficiency. A well organized professional service can streamline the entire process and do the best work in minimal time. This does not mean they do it fast, just a lot faster than an amateur would. Also, they know what they are doing, so there need not be a lot of redoing of work. They tend to get it right much faster than an amateur trying to learn.

Best Practices/ Conventions. Like anything, there are always the right way and many wrong ways of doing things. Web design is no exception. There are conventions that should always be followed even with the most creative ideas. There are best practices for accomplishing things with your website that most people are not even aware of, but once a professional points it out, it becomes very clear. Real professionals know about these things, and get them done the right way.

I suppose I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Hiring a professional is the way to go for anyone who wants their website to project the professionalism and expertise that represents their business. A website is an important business image that projects far more than the words on the page. Doing it yourself is usually a bad idea, unless costs force you. Otherwise, hire a pro, and you’ll be investing in your business the right way.

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Does it really cost that much? You know what I mean; your friend told you he could get your website built for $200. While the guy from the web design company said. “It will be around $3500 to $5000 based on your requirements.” So you go with your friend’s cheap price. Now, you’re stuck with a junk website that nobody visits and it’s not helping your business at all. You start thinking about the quote from the design company and think out loud… “Does it really cost that much?”

Well, the short answer is… it ought to!

My colleague likes to use the analogy of cars when talking about web design project costs. How much does a car cost? That depends on a lot of factors; maybe $500, maybe $50,000, maybe more. So it is with website development costs, but I think it’s even less cut and dried than a car.

I think it’s more like building a house. How much does a house cost to build? A trailer-park home is pretty cheap. There are more elaborate modular homes of all shapes and sizes that are shipped in sections at a time by truck and constructed in a week or two. Those are much cheaper than a custom home. If your friend said he could get you a nice custom home built for $20,000 while the four general contractors gave average quotes of $280,000 would you take your trailer-park friend seriously? Why would you do it with your business?

The truth is, seriously professional websites cost seriously professional money. There are a wide range of providers out there that can be all over the planet with the variance in prices. Some provide cheap solutions for under $1000, while others will not talk to you for less than $10,000 to start. Then there are recurring costs that many business owners don’t even realize. You have hosting, website updates, domain name purchasing, marketing, and so on.

Basically, you have to be ready to supply the right budget if you want the job done right. If you have a really low budget, there are options to do-it-yourself or hire a student or part-timer. But serious businesses should realize that a custom, professional website will cost some real money and the budget should be wisely spent.

See Part 2 of this Article »

There are few things worse than a poorly designed navigation system for a website. Even with the simplest of websites, the importance of the navigation can be seriously underestimated. Remember, with any website, it is very easy for your visitor to leave in one click, so frustrating them with poorly designed navigation is to be avoided at all costs.

Some basic concepts for good website navigation

Build a consistent navigation system throughout the web site. Ideally a website menu consists of links to the homepage, “About Us”, “Contact Us”, “Site Map” and other most important pages of the web site. For larger sites a well thought-out dropdown menu may be required.

Create a sitemap. This is a page where the structure of a website is displayed in a clear manner. It also helps search engine locate all the pages of your site. Large web sites may have hundreds or even thousands of pages. A sitemap may be done at the beginning of the website project to help plan the structure of the site and then used as a guide available online for visitors and search engines to use.

Use in-page or in-text links to drive visitors to the next page you want them to see; keeping in mind that you should have a “goal” for the visitor to achieve. This could be driving them to the contact page to complete a form or make a phone call to your office. If you are selling something online that requires payment, the goal would be to get them to the checkout and pay for the product. Your navigation should smoothly and cleanly work with this idea of driving the visitor, without being overly pushy about it.

Always have an easy way back home. As well as you may plan your navigation system, someone will get lost or bored. Always make an easy option to get back to the home page. A clear top-menu “home” button will do. Linking the logo in the top banner to the home page is also a modern convention. Just remember to make it real easy.

Other considerations

A good navigation system can help the ranking of your website prominently on search engines. There is a lot more to it than just that, but making sure that all the pages of the website are somehow linked via “hyperlink” so that search engine indexer bots can follow them is key.

Don’t try to have too much on the home page or any page. If you have a complex website of several hundred pages, trying to have drop down menus to accommodate all of those pages is too much for anyone to handle and they will get lost.

Having an internal search engine will work best with complex sites. Your most important pages should be clearly in the main navigation, but what about the other hundred or more pages? Search! Using a good search engine program (not public search engines like Google), will help visitors find what they are looking for with ease, rather than searching manually through drop-down menus.

The bottom line is that website navigation is extremely important to do right. Don’t overlook the importance and consider hiring an expert who does this for a living. It will save you time and headaches of a poorly performing website.

Many small business owners struggle with deciding on how to make the right choice for designing their website. They search the web for help with their website and find that the choice is harder than they thought. Currently there are (literally) millions of websites who claim to be professional web designers. However, one must be careful in choosing the right person or people in which to trust their company image. In this article, I will attempt to categorize web designers into manageable groups, and teach the reader the difference between the types.

Web designers fall into four general categories: freelance amateur, freelance professional, Web Design Company, Web Development Firm.

Freelance Amateur

The majority of web designers you will come across, especially searching the Internet, are freelancers. That is, individuals who do web design but are not employed by a web design company. Some are self-employed professionals but most of these freelancers are amateur-hobbyist types. They find a copy of FrontPage™ came with their MS Office™ Suite. They discovered how fun it could be to make web pages so they started telling their friends that they could “design” web pages.

The “pros” of using an amateur is that they are very cheap. The “cons” are too numerous to mention, but I’ll point out a few. They have no training; they have little knowledge of what makes a good website work; they do not understand HTML code or CSS but only FrontPage point and click; they do not understand general design and layout concepts and they have little real experience. The biggest reason they should be avoided for the serious businessperson, is that their work looks amateurish, which makes your company look amateurish. Who wants that?

Freelance Professional

A professional is often defined by simply being paid. People think that if you are paid for something, then you are professional. Maybe that’s true in the Olympics, but for the business services world, you are not a professional until you are established and respected as one by your clients and peers. Freelancer professional web designers are a giant leap from the amateur in that they have established a portfolio of respectable work. They have some sort of qualified training and experience and they have credentials that can be verified by contacting references. They have a good reputation with their clients and other professionals. In general, a good freelance professional web designer can be good person to have doing your site. But they are hard to distinguish from the amateur when you are just searching the web.

The upside is, if you find a good one they are significantly cheaper than a web design company. But that is usually the only upside. If the budget limits you, then a freelancer will do for a small project. But anything seriously important should be left to a professional company.

Some downsides to using a freelance pro are that they are usually part-time, meaning they are limited in how much time they can devote to your project. They are also limited in what they can do for you. Most freelancers are specialists in one area and generalists in everything else. Some have no skills in anything except their one specialty and often you will have to find others to fill roles. In addition, freelancers are not always cheap although many of them are aspiring to create their own company; some are highly sought after and charge $100 per hour or more for their work. My advice here is, if you have that much to spend, go with a company that has a team of professionals to get the job done in a timelier manner.

Web Design Company

This is the next step beyond a freelance professional. The web design company offers the “whole show”. They provide real project management and have pulled together a team of web experts to get a wider range of jobs done. A company can provide a much higher level of expertise in web design, programming, content development and more.

Such a company is usually very small, yet large enough to handle larger scale projects. Compared to the most highly qualified freelancer, a company has a diversity of talent and collaboration working for them. The end-result is usually a much higher quality product.

The only real drawbacks are on the one hand, the web design company is more expensive than a freelancer because there are many more people on the job. However, you get what you pay for rings true. On the other hand, for very large projects or long term development, web design companies may be too small and usually do not have the human recourses to accommodate that $500,000 contract. In the end, for serious business people looking for quality and professionalism and who can’t afford the big firm, this is the way to go.

Web Development Firm

As the title implies, a web development firm is like any traditional company. They have a staff of office workers, they have owners and officers, and they have a team of talented professionals who are paid a good salary for their work. They usually have a sales force that do inside and outside sales. The quality of their work goes without saying, as you could not be so well-established by doing shoddy work. These firms offer teams of very talented professionals who work on your project and get the job done in a timely and extremely efficient manner. Additionally, they usually cover all aspects of website development including marketing and advertising. They may have teams of specialists that they can deploy to your location and work in-house under a temporary contract. The possibilities are endless.

If cost is not an issue and the highest quality work is necessary, then this is who you want to do the job. For smaller budget businesses, a quote from an established web development firm might knock you off your chair, but know that companies who have project requirements that reach hundreds of thousands of dollars know the score. Thus, the only real drawback for a web development firm is that they are usually very expensive. Then again, cost is relative and bigger companies like to work with bigger companies.

In summary, the choice is yours. I would recommend for the serious businessperson, that you budget a decent amount of dollars to properly design and execute a professional website. I would avoid the amateur and find an individual or company with good experience and reasonable rates to create my web presence. If money were no object, then I would only deal with established firms and pay the big bucks to get the job done right and done well.