With so many websites, for so many businesses, it is important to create one for your business that is as unique and personable as your company. A custom website is a great way to show your customers that you are not a cookie cutter operation. If it is personalized to suit your needs, and engages your customer in what they want, then it is one that will be successful.

Although a custom website used to be extremely expensive and one always suited for a small business, they can now be done at an affordable price, which allows even the smallest of companies to showcase their goods and services in a way that that is a closer representation of what they are really about.

With the internet business being as competitive as it is, and so many companies offering websites, it is not only important to be unique, it is practically a necessity. A custom website gives the company the opportunity to show more than a black and white version of what they do, and what their goals and visions are. It not only provides the difference, it adds more dimension to the business by offering something that their competitor perhaps, may not. A custom website could be the difference in a sale or someone that just looks quickly at the website. It shows that the company is serious about their products and is willing to go the extra step by giving their customers more than a basic version of their company.

As the economy tightens, and the market becomes more and more competitive, it is crucial to not only give the customer what they want, but do so in a way that will bring them back again and again. A custom web site has the ability to do just that.

A custom web site also gives the company a way to add their personal touch to their virtual storefront. With a site that is designed specifically for them, they can not only have a high performance website but they can offer something their competitors cannot, their personality.

Although custom website designers used to be high priced luxury, with so many companies out there, it has become very affordable. The money spent on hiring a website designer for your custom site will be money well spent. If the customer can not only easily navigate the site, and see other goods and services that are available, in a way that is different than anyone else, they will be more likely to not only buy, but to return to you in the future.

When you design a website, it’s easy to focus on what your visitors are going to see. The main reasons that people produce websites are either to make a profit, provide information on a subject area or to entertain. A best designer is the person who can draw the dream concept of his customer in his art and can make the site as it is as his client wishes for and there is no secret for it at all, just you make to sure that you are not enforcing your professionalism over customer project.

What you have to realize, though, is that you’re going to have another kind of visitor with a completely different agenda. So if you want your website to be truly successful at what it does then there are certain points that you need to take into consideration when it is being designed. They’re not going to be looking at your pretty logo and they’re not going to be passing judgment on your background color. Just by applying these simple rules to your website you will be giving your business more of a chance of being successful. What they’re looking for is the content and structure of your page.

The main purpose of the web designing is to create a web site. Sadly many websites suffer from lack of design variation, a lack of imagination and/or development ability. Web site interprets the information about particular topic and website design is creation and arrangement of web pages that can be done by web development that includes but not limited to. Having a website designed in the correct way means it is accessible and usable as well as being search engine ready.

Web Development, ecommerce, CMS, Content Management System, shopping Cart, Business Website Design, Flash Website design, and business development. These can help your site from getting stale and we make sure they are not too different from one another, so as not to confuse potential customers.

Main intent of designing/developing a website is to promote the business, advertising, access of online products, publishing news, giving information, education, money matters, etc. Many of the web developers around have a graphic arts background, meaning they may pay more attention to how a page looks. It is important that the website must be well developed and designed, not under construction, and content must be specific and near about the particular topic, otherwise, rather than considering other issues such as how visitors are going to find your site via a search engine.

Many sectors of the media are experiencing a decline in advertising revenue, as people fast-forward through TV ads, and wonder about the value they’re getting from magazine advertising. Online marketing is still on the increase, and as more people become aware of what can be achieved online, there’s a need to start providing different styles of offerings for the very different customer profiles out there.

SEO Search Engine Optimisation (Optimization in the US) is one area that has tremendous growth potential, but many people think it is super-technical and it needs re-positioning if it’s going to appeal to the masses.

Of course SEO is not very technical at all. The process is much more about marketing… understanding the keywords people are putting into the search engines, optimising the web site and submitting press releases, articles and link submissions. It really is a marketer’s job. If only more of the marketing industry understood that, they’d be on to a goldmine.

Then there’s the SEO offerings in the market. Many SEO ‘experts’ prefer to let people think that it is highly technical, or a black art.. something they’d never understand. What’s really needed is a response to the marketplace, which caters for all sizes of companies in all kinds of competitive markets.

Perhaps larger companies, with complex websites, and very competitive markets, require a consultancy approach where they can involve their marketing and IT people in the process and build their own in-house capability in the longer term?

Perhaps there’s also a place for the ‘Do It Yourself’ approach for some companies. Maybe they could use computer aided training to learn the fundamentals, and then have someone on hand on the phone to help when they’re stuck.

You see, the potential marketplace is huge, but there will always be a large part of that market that would be put off by large up-front fees, and on-going monthly maintenance costs. The SEO specialists are actually missing out on a large portion of the market by restricting the way they do business.

So this is a rallying call to the SEO market. It’s time for some evolution. This isn’t a time for the misguided notion that ‘knowledge is power’. Let people know what it’s about… You would ALL benefit.

If your purpose is to design a web page that is a profile type web page that will be used primarily as an informational web page for friends and family. Avoid cluttering up your page with too many graphics. You will also want to put photos on your web page. The more images you have, the more time it takes for downloading. Strike a good balance between graphics and text. This type of web page design can be accomplished with just about any type of web page design program.

The best web page design in this circumstance is generally to design a web page with multiple images and scripts. If the page is too cluttered with information and graphics, it will annoy the viewer. Try to make the page look clean and simple; it must be both legible and navigable. This type of web page design is done with a more advanced web page design program and requires quite a bit of experience. The proper use of white space is one of the critical elements that distinguish a professional design from an amateurish one.

For those of us who market products as an affiliate they are many approaches to use, figuring out the best web page design can be a bit tricky. Plan the design of your site before you start building it. All the content, graphics and links must be carefully thought out during this phase. One way to accomplish your goal is to create a review web page. Always use a light background with dark text. If you are ever in doubt, use black on white. This type of web page can be built with much different type of web page design programs.

Many companies in early 2000 rushed to develop an online presence. Basically, companies reproduced their printed brochure with content and placed it in an online format. For most companies, their brochures and direct mailers was the number one marketing tool used to solicit new business and maintain current relationships, so it made sense to create their online presence out of this material. Webmasters and agencies across the country launched websites for their respective companies and clients and waited to see the results … many are still waiting to see them.

Most companies launched an official website, but didn’t create an official web presence. A website contains information about your company. It has information that may or may not be current and is somewhat stagnate related to content. You and your close associates know about your website, no one else does. A web presence is a living entity, a marketing tool, which interacts with your potential and current clients 24/7, 365.

What turns a website into a web presence?

Effective Search Engine Optimization
Potential clients can’t find your website unless you tell them. The best way to get the message out that you exist and can fulfill their need for a particular product or service is to get ranked on the search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Ranking on the major (and minor) search engines is strategic process which can take anywhere from 12 weeks to eight months. There are a lot of factors involved. If anyone tries to tell you they can get your site ranked at the top of Google in six weeks, it’s a scam.

Search Engine Marketing
Take your product or service directly to the top of the search engines, in the form of sponsored links. This is by far the easiest way to rank high on the search engines, but there is a “cost per click” for each potential customer. Google, Yahoo, MSN and many other search engines offer a paid listing on their engines. Although it is easy to sign-up for the paid listings, there is a strategy behind the development of the actual text or image ad, how much to pay for each click and which keywords and key phrases to use. You also need to have a marketing budget in mind.
Now that your audience knows you exist and where to find you, you can begin utilizing the full potential of your website.

Add Ecommerce
Now that you have reached a new market; sell them your product or service. Selling online has not only become commonplace, but quite inexpensive. If you take credit cards at your physical location, you can easily accept them online through your website.

Collect Information
Offer your audience a free report or some other small gift in return for their email address and contact information. This data will come in handy when you want to reach a large audience with an announcement about a new product or service available at your website.

Get Feedback
Want to know what your audience thinks about your product or service? Collect the information online. This data can be valuable in several ways. Number one, you can use this information to contact potential customers at a later date. Number two, you can use this to create a testimonials section for your website. Potential clients always want to know what other customers thought about your product or service and will use this information in their decision process.

Add Interactive Elements: Flash Video
Create an experience for your customers by providing an introduction to your company or demonstrate a product or service.

Update your Content
If your content doesn’t change on a routine basis, you won’t receive return visits to your website. Search engines also keep an eye on content and rank sites accordingly.

Use a Reliable Host
Don’t waste money on “fly-by-night” hosting companies. Most cheap hosting companies who offer 99% uptime with their hosting package know you don’t check and you wouldn’t know if your website was down. Use a company that provides uptime reports or a company that you can trust to monitor your site. If your audience can’t find your site because it is down, you have wasted marketing dollars.

The Next Step
There are literally hundreds of ways you can interact with your customers online and the few above should help you get other ideas rolling your way. The next logical step is to review your own website. Is it providing a source of revenue, or is your site simply a bill you pay every month? If the latter is true, you may want to rethink your current online marketing strategy.

1. Perform a Business Analysis. What is a business analysis? Simply put, review your business requirements and your objectives. What do you want to accomplish? How does your website fit into your overall business plan? What … no business plan? Develop a business plan first before you go any further into the process. Your business plan will be your roadmap to success, so make sure the objective of your website fits into your overall business plan. I’ll say it again, BUSINESS PLAN, don’t have one? GET ONE!

2. Perform some research, also known as, the Research phase. Research your competition and industry sites. See what kind of competition is out there. What kind of marketing does your competition engage in? Don’t look to “reinvent the wheel”, take a look at how the current market works; develop a list of pros and cons about your competition and then make your web presence work better.

3. Develop a concept and a design. Finally time for the creative and fun stuff! This involves the selection of specific content, the layout of the site structure and navigation and the overall “look and feel” of your website. Remember to pay special attention to your navigational structure!!! If visitors can’t navigate your website or feel lost when doing so, your “pretty” site will have been a waste of time; don’t go there, keep the navigation simple and for SEO purposes, make sure your navigation is text based. Although Flash driven websites look cool, they are not SEO friendly and can create more problems than the “coolness” factor they express (we’ll discuss Flash sites in another article).

4. Develop your website. When considering which technology to develop your website, think cutting edge technology, not bleeding edge. Make sure the technology you use, such as ASP, PHP, HTML, CSS, will be useful for the next three to five years. Database driven website are ultimately the easiest to maintain through the use of a content management system, but make sure the CMS you use is SEO friendly. An SEO friendly CMS will utilize real URLs, not strange looking query strings with lots of strange characters and question marks. Search engines despise query strings and rank these site accordingly.

5. Choose a host provider and implement your website. When deciding on a host provider, make sure the host is not only reputable, but has been in business long enough that you can be sure they will be in business next year. Also, ask about site uptime. If your site is down for any reason, this will not only affect your potential and current customers, but the search engines as well. If the search engines decide on a given day to spider your site and it is unavailable, it could cost you your rank.

6. Promote and market your website. Register your site with the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Initiate other marketing activities such as an email blasts to prospective customers. Consider Pay per Click advertising with the major search engines and don’t forget about a long term SEO campaign to drive targeted traffic to your site.

7. Finally, maintain your website. Probably the most important long term step is continuing to provide current and relevant information on your website. Keep your site content current to encourage return visitors and give them something to return for! Related to SEO, search engines just LOVE sites which provide new content on a regular basis and rank such websites accordingly.

Overall, remember, your website is not just a marketing tool, it’s a business tool, and it should be generating a revenue stream for your business.

Many people who start their own websites make the mistake of thinking that they can do this themselves. They may purchase software for web design or even try to download free web design software from the internet that offers templates that they can use to make it easier to design their own website. This is usually a mistake, especially if you want to have a business that others will take seriously online.

No one is going to think that a website designed by do it yourself software looks professional. In fact, it can be detrimental to your business and reputation. People are inclined to think that if you have an unprofessional website, you may be unprofessional yourself. If you are close to the Liverpool area, it behooves you to check out web design in Liverpool so that you can get a website that not only looks professional, but performs in the same manner.

Do you know how much bandwidth you need for your website? Do you need a database? Many people will put shopping carts on their websites when they are only selling one product, a colossal waste of money and space online. By choosing web design in Liverpool, you can eliminate costly mistakes that can end up causing you to pay for products that you do not need and skip some products that can be beneficial to your business.

Whether you have a business or simply want to put your best foot forward on the internet, it pays to get web design in Liverpool so that you can show the world an impressive website. When you think about it, a website is a reflection of who you are and is very instrumental in how others will view you. You only get one chance to make a first impression, so you do not want to make a poor one by using a template oriented website off of some free software that you downloaded online. If you want your website to reflect your professionalism and integrity, choose a web design in Liverpool company to help you pave the way for success on the internet.

All such changes can be beneficial, but they do not come without risks. So before you make a move, consider how such a move might affect your business in particular.

1. A Change in Domain Name. Many business owners feel that a change of domain name is appropriate since a domain name relevant to website content can have a positive effect on search engine rankings. Some businesses change domain names because they have been acquired by other companies, and some businesses change domain name because the name of the company itself changed. So what should you do if you plan to change your domain name, for whatever reason? If you are only changing your domain name, 301 redirects are a good start. Once those are place, contact the owners of all your top referring websites and ask them to update their links to reflect the change in your domain name.

Your primary concern in changing your domain name should be to communicate to other search engines that your change is permanent in order to retain as much link equity as you can.

2. A Change in Web Design and Content Management Systems. These are the two factors that can most dramatically effect your visibility. Before you undertake such a change, be sure you understand exactly how search engines will treat your website in the aftermath. When companies make a change to a website, their primary concern is making the transition smooth for potential customers who visit the site. What they often neglect to take into consideration is the effect that a change in URL syntax will have on search engines.

Create a map of old URLs to new URLs, and use 301 redirects as mentioned above. And just as you did when changing domain names, contact the owners of your top referring sites and request that they change the URLs to which they are linking.
If you have pages that can not be mapped, use user-friendly and search engine-friendly 404 error pages. Once you have finished the CMS and design changeover, beware of the need to constantly monitor broken links.

3. A Change in Web Host. The only real issue with changing web hosts is timing. If this is your plan, you should start by putting your site at its new location. Then make your DNS changes so that your domain names points to the new location. Make sure your new location has been crawled by the search engines before closing down your previous location.

If you are considering a website change, your primary concern should be making a smooth transition both for your customers and visitors, and for search engines. Many companies are so concerned about making a seamless transition for users that they forget the impact a change can have on search engine rankings. Make it easy for search engines to understand what is going on.

If you are uncomfortable with making a website change, or if you are not sure how to make it easy for search engines to translate your move, consider hiring an SEO expert or internet marketing professional to help. These individuals have years of experience in helping companies transition from one web location to another. They can help you communicate a domain name change to search engines.

They can help you create maps and implement 301 redirects if you change your design and/or your content management system. And they can help you correctly time your transition if you change your web host.

If your purpose is to design a web page that is a profile type web page that will be used primarily as an informational web page for friends and family then the best web page design is something that allows you to customize the text and layout of the web page. The reason you need to know the basics of web page design is because the design of your website will actually influence whether or not people continue to visit your site and ultimately, whether they will buy from you or not. This type of web page design can be accomplished with just about any type of web page design program.

The best web page design in this circumstance is generally to design a web page with multiple images and scripts. Be careful about writing too much text and loading it to your website. This type of web page design is done with a more advanced web page design program and requires quite a bit of experience. Different types of writing are more appropriate for the Internet and in general bullet points, bold words, short paragraphs, and the like help break up a lot of text and make it easier to read.

For those of us who market products as an affiliate they are many approaches to use, figuring out the best web page design can be a bit tricky. Your website must be well organized, and not just to you, but to the average person who has never visited your site before. One way to accomplish your goal is to create a review web page. It should be obvious where the information is and how visitors can get to it without wading through a lot of other links and information they are not interested in. This type of web page can be built with much different type of web page design programs. however if you use too many graphics you cut out the text you can use which is how search engines find your website and rank you in search results.

Here are examples of action words and calls to action you can use on your Web site, in your email and in other marketing materials.

- Click here to instantly order hand-drawn Copy Doodles online.
- Order NOW before all copies of this limited edition are taken! – Pick up your phone right now and call our toll-free number at 1-800-444-1234.
- To join, click the PayPal icon for the type of membership you desire.

Examples of a Call to Action That Includes A Benefit

- See a demo on how you can use hand-drawn Copy Doodles to spice up your sales copy. Click here to watch the video.
- Join our Club today to start enjoying immediate benefits, including discounted event prices, event emails, annual newsletter, members-only events and more!

Capture Your Visitors’ Email Address with a Call to Action

- Copy Doodle marketing. Save countless hours drawing hand drawn graphics. Free samples. Enter your name and email address in the form below.
- Ten hand-drawn copy doodles to increase your Web sales immediately. Sign up now to get this $39 value FREE!
- Fill in the form below to subscribe to O, The Oprah Magazine for up to 78% off what others pay on the newsstand. That’s like getting 19 issues FREE!

Here’s other information you may consider posting on your Web site or in your ezine with a call to action.

Solicit Content, Participation and Feedback

- If your site offers information for webmasters, submit it today! We are interested in articles and tutorials about Web design and Internet marketing.
- Email us if you have resources our visitors can benefit from.
- Please report any additions, corrections, or dead links by sending an email to (your email address)
- Please send your comments about this ezine to (your email address)

Get Additional Exposure from Other Web Sites

- Recommend this site to your friends!
- Please forward this ezine to your friends and associates. Please keep the copyright notice intact.

A “Call to Action” is one of many strategies successful copywriters use. This proven copywriting technique can substantially increase your Web profits . . . so start using action verbs in your Web site!