Since you can’t pop out and shake hands when someone searches for your business online, your website stands in to tell people who you are. As your online ambassador, you want a website that makes a good impression. In this respect, your web design is as important as your content. An easy-to-use, visually pleasing website keeps your visitors sticking around for longer. The more time they spend on your website, the better chance you have of converting them to a customer.

There’s no mystical secret formula for creating a winning web design. Just follow these simple guidelines. Implementing these principles into your web design will give you an instant leg up in the competition.

* Design a user-friendly navigation system. Place navigation buttons on the left hand side or top of the page. That’s where your visitors will expect them to be. Also, choose obvious navigation buttons.

* Make sure your navigation system stays consistent from page to page. Position your navigation buttons in the same location on every page. Use the same graphics for your buttons and list them in the same order. Your visitors will have an easier time navigating your site, and you’ll be enhancing the unified theme of your website.

* Allow visitors to retrace their steps with a breadcrumb trail. Part of being able to navigate a site is knowing where you are. Your visitors should be able to clearly see where they are and where they’ve been. Breadcrumb trails enable your visitors to go back and find information after they have navigated away from a page.

* Keep lines of text short. Because they are being displayed on a computer monitor, web pages should use shorter lines than you would see in a book or magazine. Group your text into blocks, leaving a good amount of white space in both margins.

* Group together similar content. All of your content should be displayed in a logical, organized manner. Include only one general topic per page. For instance, don’t place your company history, customer testimonials and contact form all on one page. It’s confusing for your website visitors, and important information winds up getting lost or buried. Your visitors shouldn’t have to jump back and forth between pages in order to find the information they need. New information should build on the content that came before it, increasing their knowledge of your company and their interest in your products or services.

* Maintain a common theme throughout your website. If just one page of your website is too different from the others, your visitors may think they’ve left your site and clicked onto another one. To avoid this problem, be consistent with your use of design elements such as color schemes, layout, font style and buttons. Visual repetition makes each page flow naturally to the next.

Select colors that complement the business image you want to portray. These are the colors you should continue to use on each page. Stick with the same size and style of font for all of your content. That makes for an easier, more pleasant reading experience for your visitors.

* Use images and graphics that suit both your audience and your business. A plastic surgeon probably shouldn’t feature a glittery Mickey Mouse graphic on his homepage. On the other hand, if you’re catering to a more free-spirited audience, you don’t want to seem stuffy. Choose graphics that are appropriate for your image as well as the products or services you sell.

Most importantly, know your audience. Think about your key demographics. What are they looking for in a website? The first thing your visitors should see is your business message. Overall, your web design should accomplish one major goal, which is conveying your sales message quickly and efficiently. Potential customers want to know two things — what do you have to offer me? How will I benefit from it? Presenting these two pieces of information succinctly in an attractive format is the objective of good web design.

A visitor is more likely to check out a site that’s aesthetically pleasing. To keep them there, however, the site must also be easy to navigate. The goal is to encourage exploration which will ultimately lead them to your website’s virtual checkout counter.

In order to operate efficiently, a business needs a way for its employees to share information. No matter the size of the business, an effective, easy to use information sharing solution is critical to success.

Information sharing is relatively simply for a business with only a few employees. Memos, e-mail exchanges and informal meetings are enough for keeping everyone the same page. For businesses with hundreds or even thousands of employees, however, information sharing is more challenging. These businesses might even have team members located in different countries. How can they ensure that everyone has the ability to access and contribute to major collaborations?

Content management systems were created to solve this very problem. With a CMS, multiple team members can access, create and edit content from anywhere. No matter what type of business you have, a CMS offers you limitless possibilities. Individuals living on different continents can work together as a team on the same project. Even when working at completely different times they’re actually still working together.

Though the benefits of collaboration and company-wide accessibility are enormous, it might seem like they could pose problems as well. Important information and progress could be lost if each user could unilaterally make permanent changes to the content. Quality control would be greatly diminished if changes could be instantly published without some type of review process.

To prevent those types of problems, system administrators have the ability to limit access to certain functions. For starters, a review process can be put in place. Content changes would have to be first approved by a designator editor before they can be published to the intranet. To ensure that crucial content is not accidentally lost, authorization to delete files can also be restricted to designated individuals.

Making a Content Management System a Part of Your Business

With telecommuting and globalization of businesses ever increasing, a good CMS is indispensable. An intranet CMS, however, is just as essential on a day to day basis for handling routine tasks.

An intranet CMS is made up of two parts: an intranet and a content management system. Intranets are private networks made up of connected computers, accessible only to authorized individuals within an organization. Combine a content management system with your company’s intranet, and you’ve got an intranet CMS.

An intranet CMS works much like a standard CMS but with one important difference. Only authorized individuals within the company have access to the intranet CMS. Limited access enables companies to keep their information private and secure.

With an intranet CMS, each and every employee, no matter where they are located, can work together on a single project. The intranet CMS enables each employee to work on the project at different times. In fact, the team members need not ever meet in person in order to collaborate effectively. All of the work is saved in one place where it can be easily viewed by each person working on the project.

Using an intranet CMS enables your employees to bounce ideas off of one another. Ideas and creativity flow freely, giving everyone the opportunity to tap into each other’s expertise.

An intranet CMS is ideal for everyday use as well as for special projects. All of your company’s essential information can be stored in one centralized area. The research process is streamlined, eliminating the need for endless phone calls and e-mail. Information can be obtained quickly and easily. Important facts and figures can be called up at a moment’s notice.

Best of all, you don’t need any specialized technical knowledge in order to use an intranet CMS. All employees, regardless of their technical skills, will be able to utilize its various functions. The more technical end of the process is handled by a designated administrator. This person sets up the system, assigning duties and granting access rights to various employees. Once the initial set up is complete, virtually no specialized technical skills are needed to use the CMS on a day to day basis.

The growth of the Internet, the rise of telecommuting and advances in computer technology have provided businesses with new opportunities. At the same time, it poses new communication challenges. With an intranet CMS, businesses can connect and collaborate with people all over the world. Information is simultaneously shared and protected through the implementation of an intranet CMS.

As the owner of an e-business, you can think of the Internet as a mall. Your website represents your individual store within that mall. Obviously you want a storefront that encourages customers to come inside and take a look around. Website design is the key to building a storefront that’s inviting, entertaining and easy to navigate.

You don’t just want your potential customers to linger in the doorway. Entice them to come inside, and once they do, be sure you’ve got a website design that will hold their interest beyond the homepage. Here are six of the top tips for creating a winning website design.

* Don’t use a website template. There can be a temptation on the part of e-business owners to build the website themselves with a template instead of hiring a professional website designer. Templates, though, greatly limit your ability to customize your site. Certain elements may not work within the predefined parameters of the template. When restricted in this way, you’re unlikely to wind up with a finished product that truly represents your unique identity as a business. Given that a website is all that potential customers have to judge an e-business on, a poorly designed website is not a chance you can take. By far the wisest course of action is to hire a professional website designer who can build you a site that will keep the customers coming.

* Include “hands on” features in your website design. Interactive features engage your visitors and encourage them to spend more time at your website. Elements such as comment sections and message boards send the message that you care about what your customers have to say. Surveys and blogs are two other ways to make visitors part of the action.

* Be judicious in your use of flash player. Flash player provides you with opportunities to present your marketing message to visitors in creative ways. However, it can also interfere with the functionality of your site. Because flash player takes several seconds to load, your opening page is probably not the best place to use it. Visitors can quickly lose their patience and move onto another site. If you use flash player, make it optional, so that it only loads if a visitor clicks on it. Also, use flash player to enhance your site, not as the main mode of communication. That way visitors who choose not to not use it will still understand your sales message.

* Be selective about including pictures and other images. Large images, or too many images, can cause your page to load slowly the same way that flash player does. Thumbnails are a good alternative for a website that has a business-related need for a lot of pictures, such as an online catalog. Thumbnails take very little time to load, and your visitors can still see the larger picture by clicking on it.

* Limit the amount of text on each page. Ideally, each page of your website will contain between 500 and 1000 words. The problem is not only that you’ll overwhelm your visitors with text, it can also hurt your search engine rankings. Typically spiders crawl only the first few paragraphs of a long page. The rest of the text is wasted for SEO purposes.

* Hire a well-rounded website designer. In addition to website design, you need a designer who understands the principles of search engine optimization. A fantastic-looking site won’t do much for your business if it isn’t ranking well in the search engines. All search engines care about is content. Your website designer should know enough about search engine algorithms and SEO to help you develop the right content. This includes the proper use of tags and meta tags.

* Before you hire a website designer, review the websites they’ve already created. It’s the same as asking a potential employee for references. When looking at the websites, put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Are the sites visually appealing? Are you coming across glitches, errors or broken links? How long do the pages take to download? Are they easy to navigate? To test the designer’s SEO skills, select a few keywords from the site and perform a Google search. How high does the site rank? Whatever your final assessment of the designer’s work, that is about the same quality you can expect for your own site.

The success of your business is firmly tied to the effectiveness of your website design. A site that’s attractive, interesting and error-free encourages visitors to browse. The longer a visitor stays on your website, the better chance you have of making them a customer!

Ever since the first business established an online presence, marketing websites has been a major topic in the world of advertising. Like a teenager reaching adulthood, the Internet has matured as it’s grown in size. Internet marketing has truly come along way since its shaky beginnings.

In the late 1990s, online marketing experienced a dramatic drop in popularity. The bursting of the dot.com bubble left disillusionment in its wake. Was Internet marketing a complete waste of time? Luckily, some forward-thinking web designers kept believing in its potential. They contributed to a massive overhaul of website promotion that resulted in Internet marketing as we know it today.

The Old Approach to Marketing Websites

No one wants to wait a full minute for an image to load. It was as true in the 90s as it is now. In a world without today’s high-speed Internet, accessibility was at the crux of the problem with Internet marketing. Web designers thought animated graphics, flashy images and all-around razzle dazzle were the key to marketing websites. Turns out all that those ads really accomplished was eating up tons of bandwidth.

The world shares a love of music, so web designers naturally assumed that adding sound to an advertisement would entice visitors. Unfortunately, just as with the flashy graphics, sound was slow to load. Instead of massive files, now the streaming process was interfering with accessibility. Internet users were as frustrated as ever.

Marketing websites is an art. It took time to strike the right balance between presentation and functionality. Technology progressed, and web designers are now able to use those sounds and animated graphics without bogging down the website. With Java and Flash programs as well as broadband, web designers can finally tap into the full extent of their creativity. Ads that sing, dance and play the piano can load in mere seconds.

The New World of Marketing Websites

An entire industry has grown up around marketing websites. Internet marketing has even created opportunities for generating additional streams of income through tools such as personal blogs. Website marketing has blossomed as webmasters realize that it gets the job done while providing an excellent return on investment.

Imagine what a full color ad in a Sunday newspaper would cost a business owner. Placing that same ad online cost a mere fraction of print advertisements. Plus, website marketing has a global reach. An ad in your local paper won’t reach people in Europe and Asia the way, but an online ad can. Online ads cost less, and they’ve proven to have a far more extensive reach.

Few limits exist on the possibilities for marketing websites. With the ability to combine text and graphics, business owners have more choices than ever before. DHTML has been replaced by extensible hypertext markup language, XHTML for short. XHTML has made it possible to utilize visually stunning techniques, such as cascading style sheets, while still keeping the site computer-friendly.

Ways to Approach Internet Marketing

Any website owner can start with general advertisements, which can be highly effective. Bold, colorful ads capture a viewer’s attention and work today because of high-speed Internet. You can also use text-based ads to reach those using dial-up.

The Internet opened up a whole new world of Internet marketing opportunities not previously available to business owners. One new method of marketing websites is the e-zine. With an e-zine, people sign up to receive periodic emails containing useful information relevant to your business. A similar technique is starting a blog that offers insights into industry trends and interesting tidbits from the news. Blogs give you an opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in your field.

Search engine optimization is the hottest thing going in website promotion. Now there’s software to help webmasters take the proper steps to increase their search engine rankings. Also known as website promotion software, these programs provide website owners with a variety of tools for driving targeted traffic to their site through search engine visibility. Tracking services enable you to assess the effectiveness of your approach.

Marketing websites is nothing like it used to be. Now website owners can implement their ideal marketing campaign without sacrificing accessibility. Internet marketing has helped online business owners become part of the global economy.

E-marketing solutions aren’t a fad. They’re a proven method for marketing your business. E-mail messages are a simple way to harness the power of e-marketing solutions. The hurdle you have to overcome is getting your potential customers to look at what you have to say. A compelling subject line is the secret to convincing your prospect to read your e-mail.

Research consistently shows that checking e-mail is the number one online activity. In fact, that’s the only reason that some Internet users log on at all. At first this information may leave you feeling frustrated. How will you ever get these people to learn about your products if they’re not looking at your website?

It’s time to rethink e-mail! Communicating with potential customers via e-mail is one of the most effective e-marketing solutions available to you. The key is knowing how to get their attention. You have to make sure that you don’t blend in with the scams and spam that inundate our inboxes these days. Your objective is to make your e-mail stand out so that it turns prospects into customers.

The right e-marketing solution can get someone who’s never even heard of your product to realize it’s something they can’t live without. The first step is to capture your reader’s attention. Once you’ve got them intrigued, they’ll read your e-mail and take in your full marketing message. By the time they’ve reached the bottom of the e-mail, you have convinced them that your product will make their lives better. That’s the power of an effective subject line.

Don’t just dive in and start typing away, though. In order to craft an e-mail that gets the job done, you need to know the components of a successful e-marketing solution.

The important element of your marketing e-mail is the subject line. With an inbox full of messages to deal with, the subject line of an e-mail is one of the ways that a person decides whether to read it or trash it. The best way to get them to do the latter is to ask a question in the subject line. This question should be carefully crafted. It should create a sense of urgency by promising an answer to a specific question.

Here’s an example. Suppose you own an online business that sells gardening products. An intriguing subject line would be something like “Are squirrels taking over your vegetable garden?” By comparison, a subject line such as “Keeping rodents away from your vegetables” is less likely to capture someone’s interest.

The question should be a teaser. Once they’ve read it, they just can’t ignore it. They want to know the answer. You’re drawing them in with the promise of information that will improve their lives or their business.

Remember, whatever the e-marketing solution, it should always answer this question: what’s in it for me? A busy person (and everyone is busy) needs to be convinced that they should give you some of their valuable time. By tacking on an extra tidbit after your question, you increase their interest. Now they know that you’re not just asking question. You’re going to provide them with a useful answer to that question. For example, you could use something like, “Are squirrels taking over your vegetable garden? 3 simple ways to keep out the rodents.”

When you receive e-mail, you have three choices. You can open it up and read it, save it for later or delete it. A hum-drum subject line, or one that’s blatant self-promotional, won’t get your e-mail read. An e-mail that winds up in the virtual trash bin isn’t a successful e-marketing solution. The importance of a compelling subject line can’t be overstated. Your e-mail might contain top-notch content, but it doesn’t mean anything if it’s never opened.