Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

How To Prepare An Effective Design Brief For Graphic Design Projects

Monday, December 7th, 2009

A thoroughly prepared client brief is half the success of a rebranding or design project. Attaining all the necessary and relevant information from the client and a comprehensive insight into the client’s brand provides you with a great foundation for the right brand identity and design solution.

As a designer or brand consultant, a properly prepared client brief gives multiple sources of ideas to work with. Unless you have a clear understanding of what the client wants and needs, you waste your time trying to design something out of nothing and the client ends up spending more money than budgeted for as a result of the required modifications – which naturally makes both parties very happy?.

Depending on the particular project you will need a specific design brief. That means if you are developing a website or creating a business card, the client design brief will be different. However, there is some general information about your company and what you want to achieve, which should give a good idea in any design situation. Here are some general questions that will help me and fellow designers and consultants:

1. Title

2. What is the nature of your business? What does your business do?

3. What is your target market? a. Age b. Sex c. Income d. Occupation e. Location

4. What is unique about your business or product?

5. Who is your competition?

6. What is your aim? What are your goals?

7. How do you want your clients to feel about the brand? What is the message you want to communicate?

8. What is your budget? Range?  – Providing a rough guide enables the consultant/designer with an idea of the type of marketing and design solution that can be provided to you.

9. What is your deadline?

10. Provide the designer with current and past design and marketing materials.

To see how you can improve the image of your brand click here: Graphic Design Melbourne

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Building Affiliate Marketing Websites The Easy Way

Friday, December 4th, 2009

There are some myths in affiliate marketing, which attract a lot of people to it believing they are true. First is they think managing an online business is easy and second, they think that one can make a fortune through online marketing in an instant. Probably not even 10% of those who are into affiliate marketing became rich overnight. There may be some who fortunately achieved overwhelming success in just a short span of time after setting up an affiliate program, but not a majority of them can confidently say they only had luck. Anyone who is successful in this kind of business would say he worked hard to get to where he is right now. Success in affiliate marketing takes time and hard work, but it’s worth it.

If you are planning to start an affiliate program, one of the things you have to consider is having your own website, not just an ordinary website but a professional looking one. How do you build an affiliate marketing website? What are the easy steps to build one? First, you must have already decided on the theme or niche of your website. It would be better if you already have an idea what products or services to promote as this would help you plan the design and lay-out of your web pages. The next thing to do is to choose a domain name and get it hosted. The domain name is a unique name used to label the actual address of your website on the Internet.  In deciding what domain name to register, look into the type of products you are endorsing and the theme of your site. Having the right keywords in your domain name would give you better chances of drawing more visitors to your website. Also, choose a top level domain or extension, such as .com because it is more popular. In selecting your web host, consider the security of servers and up time guarantees.

Now, you can start creating your web-pages. Don’t be disheartened when you know a little in this field. There are page generation tools and fast launch sites available online; you just have to search for them. Countless online sources could help you build an affiliate marketing website, though you might need time to study and learn the whole process. This is one of the reasons why your site or the products you are going to promote must match your interest. Building your marketing website for the first time would be a lot more fun if you know very well the theme of your site. If you don’t have time to make your own website, you can use templates or purchase readily available websites. The latter, however, is a more expensive option.

Creating an affiliate website on your own would be cheaper and more interesting. In the process of building your website, you may also increase your knowledge in Information Technology and the use of computers, softwares and the Internet. As you educate yourself in these fields, you are increasing your advantage against other affiliate marketers. It helps a lot, though, if you already know the basics in web page development like programming languages and graphics softwares because you can make your site extra corporate-looking, more convenient to use or easier to navigate. Furthermore, if you are knowledgeable and skillful in this area, you can already concentrate more on the content of the page rather than the design.

The key to draw visitors to your website is to have high quality content; thus, the next thing you must pay attention to in building your marketing website is this. There may be several other factors that contribute to the success of your affiliate marketing site, but a good content tops the list. This is precisely the reason why users choose to enter your site. They want to get information and so when they don’t find it, they would definitely go elsewhere. Write interesting articles related to your theme as this would make them frequent your site. If you have already looked for affiliate programs that complement your site, add links to the business sites and other very good informative sites. Links contribute to how well you will be listed in major search engines as well. Also, create pages for the products you are endorsing, but don’t just promote the products by putting hyped-up ads. Keep your readers interested by injecting lots of relevant and useful information. This would make them click the link to the business site and buy the product. Remember that no good content means no frequent visitors, no sales and ultimately, no commission.

Make your site simple yet not without a touch of class in order to make it appear more of a business website rather than a personal website. This would be pleasing to the eyes and more interesting to browse. To help you with the design, you can check some successful online stores to get an idea on how you can make your site look better. Make sure you don’t place too many banner ads since these could distract some site users; and thus, instead of clicking your ad, they might just leave your site and look for other interesting websites. After all, banner ads are not the only means of advertising your products. Now your website is complete, submit its URL to major search engines to increase your traffic.

Grow from where you started. Learn about use of keywords for search engine optimization and apply them in your content. Update your site regularly or add new webpages. Make sure to inform your prospects about the latest updates in your site. You can use newsletters to accomplish this. The Internet offers a huge source of information about just anything, make use of it. Continue to educate yourself on how to improve your website and soon you’ll find yourself successful in affiliate marketing.

How About Your Own Affiliate Program?

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The importance of keyword density.

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears  on a web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site. Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

here are some simple steps to check the density:

- Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.

- Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.

- Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.

- When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.

- Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

To achieve the best results it is important to have the first 250 words of your copy be  keyword rich.

A good tip is to write your content first, then choose your keywords and/or keyword phrases from the content. Rewrite your content as needed, adding keywords and/or keyword phrases that pertain to the theme of the content. This way, you’ve chosen keywords and/or keyword phrases that are relevant to your content, instead of trying to write content to fit your keywords and/or keyword phrases.

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The importance of search engines to your business.

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

The search engines can play a very important role in the success of your business. They can also provide you with unlimited amounts of free traffic and visitors. Recent studies have shown that the average shopper will go to the search engine and do a search before deciding whether or not they want to make a purchase.

When they perform that search the search engine will sift through the millions of pages it has indexed about and present them with ones that match their requests. The matches are ranked so that the most relevant ones come first.

It is also good to keep in mind that your prospective customer will probably only look at the first page of listings in the search results. So it does matter where your website appears in the search engine ranking. Statistics show that most people use one of the top 6-7 search engines and these search engines attract more visitors to websites than anything else.

When your businesses competing with hundreds if not thousands of other businesses for the top spot it makes it easy to understand why search engines are so important to the success of  your business. It all depends on which search engines the customers use and how they rank your site.

It is the keywords and phrases that you choose that play the most important role when it comes to SEO for the online or offline advertising of your website via the search engines.

As I mentioned earlier, when customers want to find a website for information or to buy a product or service, they find what they are looking for in one of the following ways:

- The first option is they find a site through a search engine.

- Secondly they find a site by clicking on a link from another website or page that relates to the topic in which they are interested.

- Or they find a site by hearing about it from a friend or reading in an article.

Thus it’s obvious the most popular way to find a site, by search engine, represents more than 90% of online users. In other words, only 10% of the people looking for a website will use methods other than search engines.

Now, I hope you understand how important the search engines can be to the success of your business and why you should learn and use a variety of SEO techniques to get your business website to rank well in the popular search engines.

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The LadyWeb family of Educational & Informational websites are brought to you by Spun Silk Web Design a name you can trust to take care of you, because I have been doing business affordably online since December 1995 and I am not going anywhere.

If you want to know more about me and who I am, just visit my blog at MyLadyWeb

Take care until next time,
Smiles and good fortune,
Teresa
teresa@spunsilk.com

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An overview of search engine optimization (SEO).

Monday, August 24th, 2009

Basically SEO is a process of choosing the most appropriate and targeted keyword phrases related to your website and working to get them to rank your site in the search engines so that when someone searches for the keywords or phrases it returns your site on the top of the search engine results page.  Basic SEO involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags. It also involves a good link building process.

The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL and Ask Jeeves.

Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to prevent spam pages from clogging the results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually.

Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in one search engine could rank #200 in another. New sites don’t necessarily have to be “submitted” to search engines to be listed. A simple link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. It can take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to
visit and index the new site.

Now let’s talk about how the search engines actually work. They use spiders to crawled your website pages and index them. A ’spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. The spider visits a web site, reads the content on the actual site, the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects to. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well.

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book that contains a huge table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all  the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a  million pages a day.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different results and rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to get the job done.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

I know this may sound a bit confusing if you’re new to SEO but don’t worry once you take the time to learn the basics you find that it’s not as complicated as you may think.

Now, if you don’t want to research and choose keywords and work on your own search engine ranking, you may want to hire someone to  do the work for you.

There are many marketing and promotion companies available that will to all of the work for you or simply look at your site and make recommendations to increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. They will also provide ongoing consultation and reporting to monitor your website and make recommendations for editing and improvements to keep your site traffic flow and your search engine ranking high.

Normally your SEO experts work with your web designer to build an integrated plan right away so that all aspects of design are considered at the same time.

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The LadyWeb family of Educational & Informational websites are  brought to you by Spun Silk Web Design a name you can trust to take care of you, because I have been doing  business affordably online since December 1995 and I am not going anywhere.

If you want to know more about me and who I am, just visit my blog at MyLadyWeb

Take care until next time,
Smiles and good fortune,
Teresa
teresa@spunsilk.com

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