Website Design
Search Engines and Directories
Search Engine Optimization for Small Businesses
Internet Marketing for Small Businesses
Website Design
... and the Importance of Search Engines.
Too many corporate executives put the design and maintenance of their company website in the hands of the IT Department because it's "something to do with computers". This is totally wrong!
The planning, design, maintenance and general care of a website design should be a synthesis of Creative, Marketing and IT, but mainly Marketing. A website is a marketing tool. Your Marketing people MUST understand this. It's not something you throw away to IT. Ideally, Marketing should have a say in what the website does, with input from Creative and IT as and when the need arises. The many related aspects of achieving good visibility on the Internet should be as much a concern of Marketing as it is of Creative; the Creative people have to understand that, because embedded in their artfully skillful designs are things like META tags, ALT tags, keyword density considerations and link relevance (qv.), all of which are essential to the marketing process.
To learn more about website design click here.
Keyword Research is Invaluable
It is critical at the start of the design stage to find the keywords that people are searching by on the Internet, which you should include on your website, both in your visible text and your METAtext.
To learn more about keyword research click here.
Web Design: Simplicity is Best
The visual aspect: the basic rules of good design are to keep it simple, easy and FAST to load (how quick was this page to load? People will just click the Stop button if the amount of graphics files and Flash animation slows it down to an intolerable level). The site must be easy to navigate (have a menu, or navigation bar on every page of your site, on the left hand side and at the top of each page - ideally people should not need to scroll down to see the whole menu, although sometimes this is unavoidable), always check your links, and always check for typos. Keep in mind that what you see on your own computer may not be what other people see on theirs. What is shown in Internet Explorer is not always the same as in Netscape Navigator (and there are other browsers out there, too, including AOL and Mosaic). Also, if you design your website on a PC, don't forget to check how it looks on a Mac. Thirdly, there's the question of screen resolution: what will look great in 800 x 600 pixels will look very different in 1280 x 1024 pixels, and all gradations in between will be different as well.
To learn more about web design click here.
Check Your Basic Website Design Code
How many errors are in your HTML/XHTML and CSS? You'll be surprised.
Logos and Graphics in Web Design
You may have arrived at this section from our Internet marketing ebook, Applied Web Marketing.
Logos are an important part of brand awareness for your potential customers or clients. They don't have to be expensive. There are also a multitude of websites which offer free graphics to download. Check out Freeimages.co.uk and Allfree-clipart.com. A useful utility for editing your own icons can be downloaded from the IconEdit website. This is free to use. Click here for more details. A much more comprehensive, upmarket option is the Trellian Button Factory, where you can create your own web buttons, icons, etc. Click here for this facility.
When using graphics on your website you will need to be aware that these files (usually with GIF or JPEG extensions, more rarely BMP) will take up space disproportionally to the actually space they take up on a screen. This will impact on the speed at which your page loads on your visitors' screens, and therefore the extent to which your visitor will want to "click out" of the page as it loads. Who wants to wait forever for a page to load. The good news is that there are tools for crunching the size of graphics files without actually reducing the quality of the images they show. In some cases this can mean a 90% reduction in file size (hence much quicker download time) with no subjective loss in picture quality. A good tool that you can use for free is GIFCruncher from Spinwave. Here it is:
If you want to reduce the size of JPEG files by up to 90% then below is JPEGCruncher, also free for you to use. For greatly reduced file sizes Spinwave ask that you pay a membership fee, which starts at $5 (one-off payment) for your usage of the entire system for life.
Contact Us:
Our Group company Inteltab can be reached by post at:
Inteltab
Suite 323
258 Belsize Road
London NW6 4BT
United Kingdomemail: support @ inteltab.com
Tel. +44 (0) 208 421 3194
Fax. +44 (0) 208 428 8280
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