There are some websites which you just want to keep on browsing, they are very informative, interesting and they make you feel good.

On the other hand, there are some websites which are very repulsive, boring or confusing. Some of these websites may have so many graphics or some have a very unappealing layout. These websites are not good for a business.

Your website makes or breaks your online business. A good and professionally designed website will bring you a lot of customers and sales and make your online business.

What are the factors that make a website uninteresting, dull and ineffective at creating you sales?

· Too many, and hard to load graphics. For many people websites with graphics that sing and dance are just annoying and unprofessional. These graphics do not add much to your website in terms of search engine rankings or user-friendliness, and are not therefore useful for your online business. What you need most on your website is unique, relevant and high quality content. A sleek layout that makes it clear and easy how to navigate the website is essential for your online business.

· Confusing websites. You know these websites – you visit them and you just can not tell what is on offer! The layout is not efficient, and you can not easily navigate the site. For some websites, the website name, URL and blog names do not reflect the website’s focus. These websites can also have a lot of products and services on offer that are not focused. Make sure that your website, as well as services and products you offer are as focused as possible. If you want to offer a range of products in your online business and want to sell them from one website; make sure that they are related and be creative in the way you present them on your website.

· A look-alike template that is mirrored off another website. Be original and creative. There are a lot of these ‘website in a box’ offers; although they make things easy for you since you get a ready-to-go website for your online business – they are not good for your business in the long term. Online customers do not want to see exactly the same website layout over and over. It is highly recommended that you hire someone to tweak and adjust your template to personalize it and make it your own. Personalize your online business’ website and be different!

· A website that lacks any ‘benefits’ to prospects. The internet is supposed to be full of useful and helpful information. Although you are selling your online business’ services or products mainly, your website must also offer the reader high quality unique information. Also, if you offer an e-zine or e-course on your website, it must also offer some useful information. It is also recommended that you get creative and offer many other ‘stuff’ that relates to your website. The idea is to make visitors want to bookmark your website and want to come back again. This is very important for your online business.

· Ineffective use of keywords and phrases. This is essential for your visibility on search engines. Make sure that your website is well optimized.

Your website is very important. Make sure that all the links are functional. Your website must be informative and easy to navigate. You must also offer various ways for payment processing for your customers.

It pays to hire someone to design or tweak your website for you. Avoid the mistakes listed above and have your website making money for you 24/7.

Do you often wonder how to develop your site so it doesn’t scream “small business amateur”. Business owners, not just sole-proprietors, are notorious for skimping on professional website development. Often the result is that their site is cheap looking and compels visitors to run or in this case, click in the opposite direction. Shouldn’t we know better by now? Even if your site gets some sales, why settle? A business owner should be constantly improving or he or she could run the risk of getting left behind by their savvier competitors.

Below are ten important questions to ask before launching your new site?

1. Does your site load quickly?

2. Does your site include a call-to-action?

3. Do you make customer service easy?

4. Do you have relevant and useful content?

5. Is your site simple, and easy to follow?

6. Is your site’s navigation simple?

7. Is your site visually effective, different?

8. Is your content and links regularly updated?

9. Do images complement or weigh down your message?

10. Is the text easy to read and the paragraphs short?

The great thing about this checklist is that it can be used to evaluate your site after a professional has designed it. Or it can also be used to evaluate the work in a designer’s portfolio before you decide to hire him.

There are many different web sites that are dedicated to enhancing the look of the web. Be sure to check them out. Remember, you’re not in this alone. Many of these sites contain forums where you can request other visitors to evaluate the look of your site. You can also find various examples and templates to help you get started. An example of a helpful web development site is http://webmonkey.com. Of course, a brief search in your favorite search engine should produce thousands of results containing other helpful sites.

Once your site meets these guidelines you can release it with confidence. Your newfound confidence, combined with your marketing efforts your site will be an invariable tool to help increase profits and learn more about your target market. Of course, as you learn more, you’ll have to update the site and go through the checklist again!

Website design, like any creative service varies considerably from company to company. You can find a web site designer that charges $50 for a site and then a few minutes later find one that charges several thousands of dollars. Web site owners who allow themselves to be swayed by price alone could find themselves with a poorly designed website with little or no functionality. This could drive prospects away rather than attract them. A business owner should follow several important steps before investing in a designer.

Use professional sites as a benchmark – compare the work in a design portfolio with that of established and professional sites that you like. Take note of which features you like that you would like to implement. Check with the firms you are evaluating and see if they would be able to duplicate similar features such as shopping cart, intuitive navigation system, etc. You may have to narrow your list to reflect your budget!

Diversity of portfolio – Has the designer created a variety of looks for it’s clients or do all the sites look essentially the same? You want a designer that can work with a variety of criteria to create different looks. Originality is important in establishing your visual image.

Project management system – How will you manage your web design project? What sort of client services system is set up? You shouldn’t have to spend too much time managing your project. After all you have a business to run. You want to make sure the firm of your choice has a fast and simple way to work with you. A project management system include should some or all of the following: phone number, e-mail, and ticket or online management system.

Pricing and Terms – Is the firm’s terms and conditions readily available? Make sure the firm has a set way of doing business so there are no surprises later. Seeing a page of terms shouldn’t scare you. In fact, it should comfort you because it means the firm has put some thought into their work practices. Their terms should include points such as payment schedules, material ownership, turnaround times, warranties, refund policy, etc. These are all things you should know before any money exchanges hands.

Quality of Portfolio – Are you impressed with the sites that are available? How does the portfolio look? Defective sites should not be in the portfolio (inactive sites or expired domains). Remember, the portfolio is supposed to represent the best the firm has to offer. It’s important that the firm takes considerable care with updating their site.

Review client list – Does the client list contain serious business owners or established businesses? In the world of small business, you may not be familiar with their clients but you can check out their sites and even contact them if e-mail addresses are available.

Selecting a web designer is a serious task and should not be taken lightly. Schedule a reasonable time frame for this selection period. Once you’ve created a list of web designers whose work you admire, begin contacting them individually asking specific questions about their work practices. Evaluate each designer based on your business needs, their client service skills, terms and agreement, pricing, and portfolio. By having a predefined set of criteria, you reduce your risk of having an unsuccessful project or experience.

When you have the daunting task of looking for a web design company, you may find that you’re not quite for sure what to look for. You may find yourself asking questions like “What qualifications will a good company have?” and “How expensive will a good web design company be?” There are several things that you should be on the lookout for in your endeavors.

1) Their Website

A good web design company will have a professional looking website. Their website will look like it is carefully maintained, and have a call to action on almost every page. The graphics on their site will look professional and high quality, and will load quickly. Their content copy will not have grammatical mistakes. Lastly, a good web design company’s website will be helpful and easy to navigate. If a web design company’s own website isn’t well managed, why trust them to work with yours?

2) Willingness to Work with You

A web design company should have content on their site that is geared towards you, the potential customer. If they display an eagerness to work with you on your needs, then they understand that you may have different needs than other clients. A “one site fits all” solution for one low price is not the answer when it comes to custom web design. The good web design companies have multiple ways for you to contact them, located in an easy to find area of their site. If a web design company doesn’t want to understand your needs, how can they satisfy them?

3) The Contact

If the company you’re looking at has satisfied both of the above descriptions, it is time for you to contact them. There are several things that you should look for within the first conversation you have. You should look for a company that has a personable representative who cares about your needs. They should let you lead the conversation, and respond with interest and helpfulness. A good web design company will be honest with you about what they can do and how they do it. Last but not least, the company should always advise you in your best interest, regardless of whether the sale is closed. If the company has your best interest in mind and is easy to work with, they will produce results greater than what you expect!

After you’ve found a company that satisfies the three descriptions above, you are on your way to having a great website. But more importantly than that, you will develop a working relationship with an expert that can give you good advice when you need it!

If you want to build an e-commerce website or any other website for your business, choosing from a list of web design templates can be a wise thing to do. There are so many web design templates available on the Internet that you could even be overwhelmed trying to point out one that suits your needs. Practically all marketers known that before fully committing to a website, it is better to create a basic site to see if the target audience starts arriving.

So, to get a better start, the easiest way to do so may be to use web design templates. Web design templates can be searched online hassle free. Some web design templates may be so professional looking that they might be the ones that you could use to get your business up and running. When creating a business, the actual concept of the business may still be vague in your mind. That is, you have no concrete idea about how to create the website for this type of business. So, browsing through the numerous amounts of web design templates can give you ideas about the features you could include in your website. Looking at a fair collection of web design templates can enable you to decide about creating a blog or adding a forum on your website.

Moreover, when looking for web design templates, the best way would be to choose websites that allow you to search category wise. So, if you are planning about building an e-commerce website, you could look in the e-commerce web design templates category. Some marketers might even shuffle a whole array of web design templates to find out ideas about new services. Once you’ve spotted your template from the list of web design templates, you are ready to start building your website. After properly planning your website, web design templates can make it even simpler to build. These web design templates can then be easily molded in your own way with software such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage.

Furthermore, altering these web design templates can cost you less money than having to pay a web design company to undertake your job. You could alternately modify the existing web design templates and find specific formats to make them your own creation. Then you could add your desired content and the website would be ready to be uploaded and promoted on a server online. The importance of web design templates is that they can give you the option of launching a website that costs less, especially if you are starting with a new product or business. Hence, it can be more cautious to use web design templates to promote your website until the product becomes a success online.

When the product becomes successful, then you might upgrade your website with better web design templates. There are a variety of web design templates that can suit practically any business style. You should be aware that the creators of the web design templates might be the same persons that offer custom web design services.

In a world where things are never quite what they appear to be, the internet has proven to be a very mysterious place. Large and powerful corporations like Microsoft, Apple, and Google are running the show, but their websites are surprisingly easy to imitate by any freelance artist for any teeny-tiny business owner. How is this, you ask? The web is an easy place to look larger than you really are. This is especially true for businesses around the globe. It is more simple than one might think to impersonate a company that has over 10,000 employees, even if you are a “mom and pop” shop based in the middle of nowhere-Kentucky.

For example, we have an aspiring musician. We take his or her website and make it completely stunning, along with a biography narrated in the second-person writing style. We take a few high-quality photographs of the musician, and add some embedded music, and flashy website affects. This web page automatically makes this musician seem like the up and coming celebrity, even though they’ve barely just begun their career out of their small home town. If you added a contact email address directed to the musician’s “agent”, (even if they don’t have one), it makes them seem like they are even a bit harder to attain for an act. The website radiates with brilliance, all directed at the musician. Such praise and hoopla over any one person is sure to make them seem larger than they really are, if you do your research.

If you know where you are going with your professional presence, you too, can have a website that makes your business, band, artistry, or venture seem larger than life. There are five essential steps to consider before even thinking of calling up a web designer or programmer to start your significant project.

1. Research Your Competition. – I cannot stress this enough. If you are a small online store selling designer handbags and purses, you will want to do your research on the big boys of the handbag and purse business. Not sure who they are? Take a look at Google and Yahoo, and you’ll know right away who your competition is. Size them up, because this is where you want to be ten steps ahead of! Take notes for your web designer or development team.

2. Perfect Your Professional Image- If you don’t have a logo, or you don’t have one that you are happy with; now is the time to fine-tune every element of who your business is. Thinking along the lines of who your biggest competition is, decide the best direction of your professional presence. Remember, if you are going to play ball with the big boys, you must be prepared to think like them!

3. Don’t Look for the Cheapest Web Designer- Good Web Design isn’t the cheapest you can find. This will NOT help your professional image, and almost always leads to disappointment and wasted money. When it comes to professional web design, you really DO get what you pay for. Look for someone who has a unique and very intelligent outlook on the internet and what is hot in it today. Be ready and willing to spend a good amount of money to get the job done right the first time around.

4. Don’t be Intimidated- If you are look at your larger competitor’s websites and feeling the urge to cry or give-up, don’t do it! The reason most people start small businesses, is because they want to grow into larger and more prosperous entities down the line. Prepare yourself mentally, and get yourself into the mindset that you already own a large and efficient business that makes over a million dollars a year. This leads us into our final step.

5. Prepare for Growth- I have witnessed many small business owners who decide to revamp their websites to make themselves look larger and more cutting-edge. About 90% of the time, this leads to tremendous growth for their businesses. By looking larger, they essentially pave the way to actually becoming a larger business or venture. This is the most important step, because you must tie in the “What if” factors. Like, “What if we exceed our sales, will we have more product inventory readily accessible?” This step is so crucial to actually succeeding, and not just having a prettier website in vain.

Remember that actually succeeding is something that is solely up to the business owner. However, finding the right development team also is critical in this type of growth. There are also small things you can do to make your appearance seem larger. You can obtain a toll-free “800” phone number, if you receive a large volume of calls. This usually indicates a large or quickly growing business. It is also wise to make sure that you own a “.com” domain name that indicates your business name somewhere in it. You should have an email address at this business domain such as, “sales@yourbusinessname.com” It is also wise to have a few email addresses that pertain to each issue, like sales, tech support, information, and any other relevant services that integrate into your business structure.

CSS is short for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is not new but only recently becoming utilized and its importance to the website design industry increasing. What is initially good about CSS is that gives both website designers and website users more control over how pages are displayed. With CSS, website designers and users can create style sheets that define how different elements, such as headers and links, appear. These Style Sheets can then be applied to any Web page.

CSS can reduce your server bandwidth costs

Because CSS website pages are usually much smaller file sizes than those using HTML table designs, it’s not unusual to see reductions in file size of more than 50%. Smaller file sizes mean reduced bandwidth, which in turn means reduced bandwidth charges.

Search Engine Optimisation – CSS improves your ranking

A little known fact about CSS is a CSS website design will appear higher in the search engine rankings. Why?

* There is dramatically less code and the code is cleaner and therefore more accessible to search engines

* You can make sure the content that is most important to the Search Engine Optimisation process is at the top of the code. It is bit like moving your best products to your shop window and front of shop to attract visitors.

* The ratio of content to code is greatly improved

This obviously makes CSS a big hit with a company who does Search Engine Optimisation like us.

Websites that download quickly means more business

People don’t have patience in most aspects of life. This is especially true of online browsing. There is lots of research on this subject, so it is safe to conclude that fast site make more money for your business. As far as CSS downloads times are concerned, CSS are much quick than those using tables. What’s more, with CSS you can control the order items download on to the screen and make the content appear before slow-loading images. We have all be on websites where we wished the images came later than the content.

Switching to a website design that uses CSS

How hard it is to move a website to CSS very much depends on the size of the site. For larger sites it could be a long process, but worth the transition. For new website designs, website re-designs or smaller sites just wanting to change, it is not too painful. You should choose a website design company that uses CSS, and understands Search Engine Optimisation.

In many cases, when we log on to the internet, we are looking for something. While our individual needs may vary, they are usually satisfied with the same instrument, a search engine. In the United States alone, the top search engines pull in over 200+ million searches per day and over 6 Billion searches per month. With statistics like this, it would only make sense to optimize your site to be as search engine friendly as possible to get a bigger slice of the search engine pie.

Search engine optimization is the key to greater efficiency. And there are several ways in which it can be achieved without hiring an expert.

1. Do proper research and planning for the keywords you wish to target. You will want to be sure you are targeting the correct keywords. You want keywords that are highly targeted to your site. For example, say you have a site that sells supplies for indoor/outdoor signs. When planning your content, you may want to target the keywords ‘ink and sign making supplies’ or ‘wholesale ink and sign making supplies’, rather than ‘sign ink’ or ‘sign supplies’.

2. Target the proper niches within your category. Several search engines identify specific theme, or niche areas of websites. By targeting certain niches within your target category, you can gain top spot for top niche keywords. Many times your subpages will hold top rank for these excellent keywords. This is very important, using the above example, if you do not rank as well for ‘wholesale ink and sign making supplies’, one of your subpages may rank well for ‘felt pens’ or ‘jumbo refillable marker’.

3. Review your site navigation and content. Once the targeting category of the website has been planned it is important to review the structure and content itself. After all, once searchers find your site, you will want quality content to keep them interested, and easy to use navigation to help them through their purchase. Poor structure and content will inherently imply loss of efficiency in reaching out to your customers in general as well as through the search engines.

To improve navigation, a site map is of great help to both the customers and the search engines. A properly designed site map will allow the search engine spider to index your site efficiently, while allowing your customer to find the exact page/topic they are looking for. Be sure to design it with care.

Good content has to appeal to both the customer and search engines alike. This can be extremely difficult to balance, as it is nearly impossible to satisfy both 100% of the time. However, a good rule of thumb is to cater to the customers first, as they should be considered most important. If you get to #1 on Google, but your visitors are immediately turned away by poor content, site design, and layout, how many sales can you expect to get?

**While reviewing your content, keep an eye on your site’s ‘keyword weight’ and ‘keyword density’. If the ratios are too low you will not rank very well for your targeted keywords. However, if the ratios are too high, some search engines may view this as keyword stuffing and penalize your site for this.

An excellent way to monitor your site is with a program called WebCEO. There is a great free trial version with no time limit. Just search for WebCEO in any search engine for the free download. Using this program, you can do a full review of your site. I would recommend following the advice very closely, as I have used the trial version to get my site to top rankings on all major search engines.

4. Meta Tags. Your site’s meta tags are still an important part of your content. Although some search engines are placing less weight on these, I would still recommend optimizing your tags as they still hold some weight. You will want your keywords to appear at least once in your ‘title’ and ‘description’ tags, preferably at the beginning. I have found it to be just fine to make your title and description tags identical.

Same as with your content, with your meta tags you will want to cater to your customers first. Be sure your title is easy to read and demands action. Usually, your title tag will be what is displayed in the search engine result pages. Be sure your title attracts a click once a person reads it.

The description of your website, especially the description tag, is also important, as several search engines will refer to it. If you decide to make each unique, be sure to carefully maintain the balance between catering to the customers and catering to the search engines.

5. Be careful when you decide to use certain technologies on your website. You may not want to sacrifice your sites rankings to make your site prettier. Many technologies such as flash, allow a page to be clearly seen by a human eye while presenting a blank page to the search engine if it is not optimized properly. Be sure that the technology you decide to use does not harm your rankings in an indirect manner.

6. Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. You will want to conduct a search on the keywords you are targeting, and attempt to mimic the strategies used by the top ranking sites. You can view the source of many sites, allowing you a sneak peek at their title, description, and keyword meta tags. You can also use the WebCEO program to view other sites’ keyword weights and densities. There is no need to try to reinvent the wheel. Find what works, and copy it.

Here are more tips to tap into your sites’ potential:

7. Keep an eye on your customer feedback. When a customer makes a purchase on your site, ask them for their opinion or feedback. They may give you insight on another advertising angle you can use, or which advertising program is providing the best results and why. You will not believe the effectiveness of several ideas suggested by customers until you see it. This tip could improve your profit by as much as 50%.

8. Constantly review the stats of your website. Use a tracker to keep a detailed summary log of your customers. Some hosting companies include this along with their hosting package. You can also use a third party tracker such as Statcounter.com or Thecounter.com. Using a good tracker, you will be able to view how your customers find your site, what pages they visited, how long they stayed, the operating system they used, the time of day, and much, much more. Be sure to review the keywords they used, and your top referring sites, as this is very important information you need to know about your customers.

9. Review your advertising stats. Whenever you run an advertising campaign, it would make good sense to keep a detailed log of your results. You could create a spreadsheet to track information such as how much the campaign cost, start date, completion date, profit or loss, advertisement used, among other details.

10. Lastly, do not be satisfied after reaching a good position in the market. With some of the highest levels of competition in the history of the search engine optimization, and search engine’s constantly changing algorithms, you cannot afford to become complacent. The only way to stay ahead is to keep running harder than you ever have before.

A recent study has shown that approximately 95% of all web visitors determine within one second or less if any given website is worthy of their business. 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? In most cases, it’s a matter of aesthetics. 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. Take a moment to think of some of the sites you have bookmarked in your browser. 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. It’s a fact that cannot be ignored.

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). You can expect to pay upwards of $1500 for even the most basic of sites consisting entirely of HTML. That is a pretty hefty chunk of change that can easily triple or quadruple before your website is complete! Not everyone has the financial means (or willingness) to drop that kind of money into a website, especially when just starting out. 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. If you plan on doing it yourself you’ll need to be an expert in HTML and have some sort of degree in design or the IT industry. That’s the myth… now here is the reality. You can put out a professionally designed website without ever needing to enlist the services of a web design company! The best part of all, you don’t need to be an expert in HTML or web design and you can do it for less than $60! All you need is this guide, some basic HTML skills, and a few hours of time and you’ll be on your way to owning a truly professional quality site that your competition will envy!

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. Ask yourself the following two questions: “Who is my target audience?” and “What service or product am I providing?” Once you have it figured out, try to categorize your website. 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. Now that you have your category, I’m going to share one of the best kept secrets that web design professionals don’t want you to know about!

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. Template Monster is the secret that will give you the edge over your competition! 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? Now’s the time to apply it. 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. Hovering your mouse over the image will display a larger preview of the template. When choosing a template, try to find one that appeals the most to you. 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! Best of all it cost less than $60.00 and required no effort on your part what-so-ever. 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). Great domain names are becoming very difficult to come by. There is a lot of competition and once a domain name is purchased, it’s gone (with some exceptions which we won’t cover here). The simple rule to follow when choosing a domain name is to try to keep it short and keep it relevant to your website content. Alternatively, if you can come up with something that is catchy and people will remember, it can be just as effective. Before you go out and purchase your domain, take a moment to read the next section. 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. In fact, they are amongst the most competitive in the industry and offer outstanding customer support and tools.

Our highest recommendation is Yahoo Small Business hosting. Remember your domain name? Typically you’d spend $8.95 or more to register it for a year. 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! When you break down the overall cost against the credits and service you receive, this is an outstanding value! 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.

For those of you on a tighter budget that are looking to host a multitude of websites, a very viable and more affordable alternative to Yahoo Small Business is Host Gator. With Host Gator you pay $10.00 per month for UNLIMITED website hosting! That’s right, you can host any number of websites you want and only pay $10.00 per month for the whole lot of them. It’s a bargain that can’t be beat and is just one more way you can design on a dime!

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. After all, what good is having the greatest site in the world if no one knows about it? 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. They have an excellent tech-support team that is always open to fielding questions and helping new webmasters optimize their site.

With a little effort and knowing where to look, you too can have your very own professionally designed website on a stellar hosting environment at a fraction of the cost of outsourcing it. Using this guide as your resource, you are already well on your way to success in your online business!

Building a website for a small and medium enterprise can be a stress free experience If handled efficiently. Follow these 10 basic web site design tips and they will make your task much easier.

1. Own Your Project: It’s your site, your investment on the line. Be prepared to lead and keep the momentum heading towards a realistic launch date. Be patient but firm and keep directing the flow towards your end goal. If you don’t have the time to manage the construction of the site, hire someone who does.

2. Choose Your Color Scheme and Layout: Search the web and choose a few sites featuring the colors and layouts you like and a few sites with colors and layouts you don’t like. Otherwise, you might be presented with a design or color scheme that is not what you had in mind and that will be force a major delay in your site launch date while you start from scratch again.

3. Decide on Theme and Images: Choose your images with a common theme in mind and make sure your concept is easy to understand. Run it by your friends and family, if they don’t get the idea immediately, you need to go back to the drawing board. There are lots of great images you can purchase on the web, however, make sure that the theme and the backgrounds of the images are consistent. Merging light and dark backgrounds can make the best images look out of place. You can find a great variety of royalty free images on Fotosearch.com.

4. Plan Your Site Structure: Write your site structure down on paper or use an excel spreadsheet; otherwise, it might get out of control. Keep it simple but scalable so you can continue to add pages as the need or demand arises.

5. Hire a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Firm: Your developer should have SEO experience or be working with an SEO firm. You want your links and content developed around keywords and phrases that customers are actually using to search for your products not industry insider terms that your customers are not familiar with. An SEO firm will guide you through the process. You can find top SEO firms advertising on Searchenginewatch.com or go to Google and type in search engine optimization and visit some SEO sites.

6. Meet Suggested Deadlines: A good web design firm will give you target dates for images, content, keyword development and site structure. Be prepared to meet the proposed deadlines at the agreed time or you will be put on the sidelines while the developer works with a client that has their act together.

You know what you want; you have assembled a team of experts and You understand the perils of keeping your teammates waiting……

You are good to go!

7. Begin With Keyword Research: Participate in the keyword research but trust your SEO partner. Start with Google Suggest, a free keyword tool. Start typing your keyword phrase. Google Suggest will show you a drop down list with numerous alternative keyword phrases that might be valuable to your business. Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool provides free results as well

Once you have exhausted these tools, Wordtracker.com is a terrific paid subscription software that can lead you into profitable directions you may never have imagined.

8. Start Writing Your Content Now! Did I say now, I meant right now! Now that you have your keyword phrase list, you will soon discover what an onerous task it can be to write the content for an entire site. A better idea might be to outsource the content to a good writer. You can edit their work before you site goes live and your SEO firm should have a hand in the final product. You can find a list of award winning content writers at TopSEOS .com. should you decide to outsource your content development.

9. Don’t Assume Anything: Just because you have given instructions to one of your teammates don’t assume that they are being executed. Keep a list of items that you have delegated and check to see if they have been completed.

10. Edit The Site Yourself: Once the site is complete, review every page for spelling mistakes, graphic mishaps, incorrect internal linking and unnecessary links to the SEO or developer sites. Review your site in Internet Explorer and Firefox to make sure it is consistent both web browsers.

Anticipate delays in your project but keep the pedal to the metal until the site is operational. Don’t compromise on your vision of the site but be flexible enough not causing major delays in the construction. Finally, track everything. Your new site will be drawing web traffic to your business; you need to know where your visitors are coming from.