Web Design - How to Get What You Want

Communicating with your web designer is no different to communicating with your accountant, your training provider and even your internet service providers. Each of these relationships is only successful when the service that is provided to you matches your expectations and requirements. The best way to communicate your expectations and requirements to your web designer is through a web design brief.
A well written web design brief summarises exactly what you want from your website, helping your designer to clarify what they need to do in order to meet your requirements. Writing a good brief can be tricky, and web design is often a peculiar subject, however focusing on these 6 simple things will ensure a hassle free brief-writing process.

Budget

The most crucial part of your brief, if you don't know how much you are prepared to spend for your website how can a designer know what to build for you?! If you aren't able to set an exact budget amount, try to provide your designer with a budget based on amounts that you are comfortable spending. Setting your budget at the start of the process eliminates those nasty extra costs at the end of the process!

Your Business

What is your business all about? Although your designer may know what it is your business does, they won't automatically understand its inner mechanisms. Provide your designer with a good description of your business, its target markets and what differentiates you from your competitors. Only by understanding these minutiae will they be able to create a site which fits and improves your business.

Timescales

Building a website is a detailed and often lengthy process, to ensure timely delivery strict timescales need to be agreed from the start of the process. Timescales aren't just indications for your designer however; you also need to make your internal team aware of the timescales to ensure that they meet content creation and delivery deadlines.

Users

Your customers, both future and current, are the ultimate users of your website. Rather than focusing on how your site is presented to your customers, think instead of how you can help your customers and improve your working relationships with them through functionality and usability. Try to define your typical customers in your brief, what do they expect out of your website and how can you go beyond their expectations?

Updating your Site

How do you plan to keep your website updated? In order to succeed, you need to ensure that your site is regularly updated with fresh and engaging content to promote your brand and your business. Clarify the nature of the content that you will be producing, will you focus on written or visual content or a mixture of both? Who will be responsible for updating the site? Such clarification is necessary to find the best content management system for your website.

Websites that you like

Last but not least, what kind of websites do you like and why do you like them? Take some time to carry out focused and structured site research, think of the functionality and design criteria which you have set for your site and find the sites which best meet this criteria.

Web Design For the Small Business

Website for the small business has same importance as the corporate website. Today when we see there are lots of small businesses, local businesses and Moms & Pop stores, the website is required for them for getting a good way of marketing. This is necessary because often they feel difficulty for accomplishing their goals. Since internet has changed the way of business today and customers are also moving to a market place where buying and selling could be easier. So website on the internet is one of the best methods for them.

Internet has lots of wonderful opportunities for the small businesses. The small businesses can reach a much wider customer base by using internet and expand beyond their expectations. So website can be a good way to make the business online, either it is on big or small scale. The online businesses get the information quickly and easily. This also empowers the customers to know about your business.

Various companies are offering the website design facilities especially for the small businesses to promote their business to the world. So if you want to get benefits of the internet through your own website, you can go for it. If you are going to create your website for the small business then you should consider two things before taking any decision. This is necessary because there are two ways to develop a website. You may create either "static" or "dynamic" website for your small business. This depends on your choice and requirements.

Static sites publish your information and do not change frequently. This kind of the websites comprise of a few pages and these web pages give you detail of the company, contact information and what the company offers you. Quality web design companies offer you these types of sites for your business. As content of these sites change rarely, so these are called as static sites. But if you want a site that could change and update regularly, then you can choose a dynamic website for your small business. These sites can help you by publishing the current price of the product and getting the orders for the customer online form all over the world.

There is also a downside of the competition in web development, so you can also choose a cheap web developing company easily. But you must make sure for the quality of the website developed by these companies. Never compromise with the quality since this is a crucial element in your small business to get maximum customers.

So you should find a web design company that can give you a good web service package. Quality of these companies can be checked through their portfolios. After viewing the look and design you should also check some other things like you read the package details and make sure that there is no hidden cost. Then finally decide to create a site for your small business and choose the web designer accordingly.

SEO For Business why its importent

The business world is firmly embracing the art of SEO like a long lost, much loved relative. Of course SEO is another way of marketing a business. It is like traditional advertising but at the same time its totally different.
In the past

In the past,seo was all about being number one. The top spot was the prised position as there could only be one top spot. Competition was fierce and in the early days a lot of the returned results were pages designed to gain rankings not to entice visitors. Spamming was rife. Meta tags held a large sway with the then search engine algorithms, they would be stuffed with words in the hope of getting traffic. I must even admit to using some of these tactics in the early days. Using software such as web position gold in the hope of it telling me the magic numbers to make me an SEO God
Business SEO has Matured

Like all things, SEO has aged, looking back on it’s past and reminiscing how silly it used to be. The modern online marketing consultant is no longer just interested in rankings , now he or she is interested in helping you the business owner.
SEO has gone all holistic

As I said previously SEO used to be all about the position. Now from my point of view I want to get your website and online marketing working seamlessly together. Using the term SEO is a little misleading as search engine optimisation is only a part of what a good internet marketing company does.
So what does a “good” internet marketing company do

SEO is still a major part of the mix but for it to be done properly you need your SEO involved from the conception stage of the web design process. By having them involved they can advise the web designer on how to structure the site so it is search engine friendly. The other option would be to hire an SEO web designer with the skills in place to build a search engine friendly website.
Keyword Research

One of the most important parts of an SEO’s job finding good high traffic keywords and phrases relevant to your business.
Ditching Keywords

Once your SEO has built his list of key phrases he or she will “ditch” the ones with to much competition (new sites) or not enough searches to be profitable.
Copy writing

Your website copy could mean the difference between making a sale or not, your SEO will help you with your copy giving you pointers to improve the wording or take on the project themselves using a good SEO copywriter .
Calls to action

Call to action is a common phrase in the world of online marketing simply put it is asking the customer to perform a single or set of actions these may be as simple as using the phrase “buy now” or using your phone number as a focus point with “call us now”
Converting visitors to buyer, website conversion rates

The ability of a website to make sales or enquiries is measured in its conversion rate. A conversion rate of a page or a site is calculated in the number of sales divided by the number of visitors. An example would be a websites gets a thousand visitors a month and from that thousand 35 people go on to buy the product or service we would have a conversion rate of 35/1000 = 0. 035 or 3.5 %.

things that can decrease or increase conversion rates are headlines, copy, site design, colour and calls to action. For the bigger budget projects your SEO would undertake some split testing of different layouts, wording, headlines,colours and images. A quick way to get some results for the conversion rates would be to use PPC (pay per click) sending half the clicks to one page and the other half to the other modified page and compare conversion rates.
Off Page Optimisation

Off page SEO is a whole subject in it’s own right. To give you an idea it mainly involves link building and the way link building is done is dependent on the SEO. It could be blog commenting, article marketing or the creation of micro-sites to feed traffic back to your main site the list goes on.

The meta tags and SEO

Posted by SEO South Yorkshire

Here’s short post on SEO meta tags. For the majority of search engines the meta tags have zero relevance to ranking a page in the search engine algorithm. It hasn’t always been like that in the past the main ranking factor was the meta tags, like any thing that can be humanly changed we had the years of the meta tag stuffing where keywords would be placed in the description and keyword tag area often not relevant to what’s on the page. This would lead to higher ranking but made for a crap user experience with pages returned that were not relevant to what the person was searching for. Today it’s all about relevancy and user intention.

So should you use the SEO Meta Tags

Yes you should, let me explain why. The keyword meta tag is all obsolete for the search engines. There is a but, Some social bookmarking sites read the keyword tag and use it to auto generate tags for bookmarking and sharing. This will save any user bookmarking the page time and effort. Thus making the process of bookmarking more striate forward.
The description tag , although this tag is not used for the ranking of pages this text is displayed under the page title in the search engine results page. This gives you opportunity to write attractive and enticing copy to increase your click through rates


Remember to choose the keywords as if your were tagging the document .

Note from Google on the Keywords meta tag

Recently we received some questions about how Google uses (or more accurately, doesn’t use) the “keywords” meta tag in ranking web search results. Suppose you have two website owners, Alice and Bob. Alice runs a company called AliceCo and Bob runs BobCo. One day while looking at Bob’s site, Alice notices that Bob has copied some of the words that she uses in her “keywords” meta tag. Even more interesting, Bob has added the words “AliceCo” to his “keywords” meta tag. Should Alice be concerned?
At least for Google’s web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking. This video explains more, or see the questions below.

Complete article  http://webmojo.co.uk/blog/seo-meta-tags/

How to Price for SEO

SEO is very important to the online business with on average the number of leads the search engines produce being anything from 60% – 100% of the visitors to a website. So as an SEO how do you work out your SEO pricing. I find this part of the job one of the hardest. Search engine optimisation and pricing, it is a minefield. Price too low and the client thinks your unskilled at your art, price too high and your run the risk of pricing yourself out of the job. So where’s the middle ground.
SEO is a two stage process the first being the on page optimisation where the structure and content is optimised to take full advantage of how the search engines rank a page / site. The second stage is off site optimisation this involves building links to the site from relevant sources across the internet. Pricing should always reflect the amount of time that is going to be spent on the optimisation process. A rule of thumb is an newly trained SEO’s time is worth £25 per hour and an SEO at the top of their game can be worth up to £175 an hour. So you should be pricing for your SEO service accordingly.
Word of warning, if you are a new to the world of SEO, know your own level. You don’t have to tell your customer, but if you price according to the the results you expect, then you shouldn’t go far wrong. There is nothing more irritating then an SEO who is over confident and under skilled, they give the whole industry a bad name.

Method one: Price on performance SEO

This sounds simple, you get the customer on first page and they pay you. This method is problematic especially with the introduction of personalised search. You may find yourself educating your clients on the search engines so they can validate the data you send over in your monthly report. I’ve talked to business owners who have used this type of service and it seems to turn into a pay us if you want to relationship. With the client only paying when they think the seo company has done enough. This may seem the fairest but its often the SEO company that is left out of pocket.
This opens the system up to abuse by not having a set metric. I normally see this sort of SEO pricing at the lower end of the market with uncompetitive phrases and localised search. Price wise you are looking at £50 – £150 a month on phrases with moderately low level of competing sites.

Full article on SEO pricing

simple layouts for web designers just starting out

There are many good web designers out there and some who are just starting out. If your one of those beginners, you can have some problems coming up with web design ideas. having a basic design formulated in your head is half the battle and actually building it is the other half.

There are several simple models that you can use to base your site on. Here are a couple of different models to help you with your ideas.

The first type of configuration is a three column with header and footer. It comprises of a header section three columns and a footer with the main page content taking up the centre column.

The second type of configuration is the header menu content footer layout set out top to bottom header at the top with the menu directly below set out horizontally then content and finally the footer section.

latest projects moneymakingmummy and more

Here is a list of our latest projects
Moneymakingmummy.co.uk we are working closely with getting paid to work at home expert Syreeta Dent on this project providing SEO support

Babykingdom.co.uk 
We are working on this project selling baby equipment  

and lastly we are working on payasyougogo.co.uk a site about everthing pay as you go from mobile phone to credit cards