Setting Yourself Up for Success on the Web

So, you have decided to put your business to work for you on the web. Your next decisions could make or break the productivity of your new web site. There are many points to consider when setting up a web site. The following is a discussion of what to consider.

Professional Web Developers:

The single most important decision to get your business on the web is to hire a professional web developer. Professional web developers can be a great source of information. They are experienced with internet technologies and can produce professional looking web sites with high visual impact which can help build your web presence. Stay away from amateur web designers. The price may be cheaper and more attractive, but you will get an inferior site in the end and they may not be there when you need help with your site. You can count on a professional developer for support if you have problems with your site. Your website needs to be easy to use and enjoyable for your customer to ensure return visits. A professional web developer has the experience and knowledge to build a great looking and user friendly web site.

Domain Names:

Choosing a domain name is another important part of your web site development. Try to use a domain name that will be easy to remember and spell or find the closest version to your company’s name. You want your domain name to be short, catchy, and memorable. Have a few backups in mind in case the domain name you want is already registered. Buy the “.com” version of the name if it is available. People will remember “.com” with your domain even if it is a “.net” or “.org”. Avoid names that sound or look like other companies. A customer may land on another site by mistake and never come back to yours. A good domain name can make the difference in the productivity of your site.

Web Hosting Services:

Web hosting companies vary in services and reliability. One thing to consider is uptime, or if you’re a pessimist, downtime. You want to choose a host whose servers are up and running as close to 100% of the time as possible. An hour or two for routine maintenance is no big deal, but watch out for hosts who have a history of downtime and problems. Talk to your web developer, they usually have a few hosting companies they rely on for hosting.

Web Space:

Another point to consider is web space, which is the amount of memory provided to store your web site information. If you are planning a large e-commerce site, you will want more space than if you are trying to provide information about your company to prospective clients. Your web developer can help you decide on the amount of web space you will need.

Bandwidth:

Bandwidth is another important issue. This is the amount of information your site can send to users within a given timeframe, including downloading files and visiting your site. Bandwidth is usually tracked in monthly increments. Once your site has reached its bandwidth limit, you will either have to pay for more, or your users won’t be able view your site. The size of your website affects the bandwidth, so keeping files such as graphics or video to a minimal size will help control this. Professional web developers employ many techniques to optimize graphics and other information to keep bandwidth usage to a minimum. You also need to consider the amount of traffic you may generate to your site. More page hits means more bandwidth.

Access to Your Site Files:

Access to your site through ftp (file transfer protocol) is another important item to consider. You will want to be able to update or edit your site when needed. Some hosting companies will control the access and perform updates for you and may not do it in a timely manner. You don’t want to be waiting days or even weeks for your updates especially if you are trying to generate income from your site. Also make sure that you own the domain name and site files they generate for you. This will make transferring domains easier if the need arises. Some hosts provide Content Management Systems (CMS) that make editing easier for the client. Most professional web developers will work with you and perform updates for a minimal cost.

Hosting Plans:

Once you have chosen a hosting provider, you will want to choose a hosting plan. The cost of the hosting plan will be dictated by the points mentioned above. Most hosts offer a variety of plans at different levels of services and costs. Various options can include the number of email accounts, amount of bandwidth, level of customer support and availability of applications such as databases, forums, guestbook services and shopping carts. Web developers have experience in determining what best suits your type of web site and your personal needs.

A variety of factors influence your success on the web. Considering the topics discussed here can help you avoid mistakes and set you on the right path for an effective web site that meets your needs. A professional web site developer, such as isiteweb, can discuss these points with you and help make your venture into the World Wide Web an enjoyable experience.

About the Author: Matt Claypool is a web designer/developer at isiteweb.

Mihaela Lica on SEO

Web design focuses on appearance and aesthetics. SEO focuses on text quality and quantity. Web designers don't really like to clutter their designs with text. They prefer to see the images stand out on their own. SEOs on the other hand do not like images that much. Sure, an image can be optimized for the search engines by adding relevant alt attributes and titles, but this is not enough for a site to be properly optimized. Page copy still plays the most important role in website optimization for SEO.

As a business owner you are caught in the middle of this conflict. For your website to convert you need both design and optimization. There is no middle way. You cannot have a little bit of this and a little bit of that and still be competitive. You cannot have just one of the two either. Without optimization your site is invisible to the search engines, hence to your potential customers. On the other hand, without a good design, your site, although not invisible, will get nothing but hits. Web users are picky and if they find nothing of interest on your site they will just surf to the next site.

Having a beautiful website no one can find is like having a store and keeping the doors locked. You know it is there, you've done a great job decorating it, the products are waiting for the customers, yet no one comes in.

When you pay for web design, don't automatically assume that by paying thousands of dollars on a layout you'll be a hit on the Web. The Web is a highly competitive place. There are already thousands entrepreneurs who, just like you, invest in design and hope to become the new "it." Without online marketing (SEO being an important part of the discipline) all these entrepreneurs will remain in the shadow, with their beautiful websites closed to the world.
SEO is the key to that virtual door you need to open for your customers. It is important that you consider this tool when you first conceive your site. Web design and SEO don't need to be enemies. There are enough professional agencies that employ both web designers and SEOs who work together to develop a good business website, a site that is SEO ready, accessible and readable with any browser. You just need to take your time, research and send a few inquiries. Then choose the company that answers your questions in a timely manner, basically choose the company that proves a clear ability of designing with W3C standards and a clear understanding of the online trends and realities.

Then balancing content with visual appearance shouldn't be such a difficult task. Aside graphics and artwork you have to choose proper font types, in a readable size, with colors that harmonize with the layout of the site and so on. If your site is not SEO ready from the first stage of the project you'll face additional costs after you launch. SEO ready means a site that is properly coded (errors in the HTML code might stop some search bots from crawling and indexing your site correctly), with good navigability and good internal linking structure.

On the other hand, SEO and appearance are not the only traits of a good site. Brand conscious companies should look at the broader picture: instead of debating what is better online, entrepreneurs should ask themselves what works best to convert visitors into clients.
Studies show that an over optimized page might hurt the user-experience of people with disabilities. For example, many SEOs stuff the image alt attributes and their alternative titles with keywords. Blind and other visually impaired people who use screen readers to access the Web and read the pages cannot see the images and, instead of listening to a relevant image description, they'll hear... nonsense.

Usability and accessibility are equally important as design and optimization. Strangely enough images are better for usability. They give focus to the design and when properly optimized they provide for less cluttered website content. The problems appear when the images slow down the loading times, but with the use of CSS loading times should not be a big concern.

As search engines prefer fast loading sites it is easy to understand why good coding and optimization are so important. Poor coding raises many other problems aside loading times and might increase costs when you need website updates, especially when your website administrator is not the one who created your site.

About the Author: Mihaela Lica used to be a military journalist, worked six years as a freelance reporter for the Romanian National Radio Station (ROR) and four years in the Public Relations Directorate of the Romanian Ministry of Defense. Since 2002 she is a PR consultant in Germany. For more SEO articles visit ewritings.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a subset of search engine marketing, and deals with improving the number and/or quality of visitors to a web site from "natural" (aka "organic" or "algorithmic" search engine) listings. In effect, SEO is marketing by appealing to machine algorithms to increase search engine relevance and ultimately web traffic. This is analogous to foot traffic in retail advertising. The term SEO can also refer to "search engine optimizers", an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients.
SEO strategies vary widely, in accordance with the specific site. Broadly speaking, SEO may be geared towards increasing either, or both, the total number and quality of visitors from Search Engines. The quality of a visitor can be measured by how often a visitor using a specific keyword leads to a desired conversion action, such as making a purchase or requesting further information.

Search engine optimization is available as a stand-alone service or as a part of a larger marketing campaign. Because SEO often requires making changes to the source code of a site, it is often most effective when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site, leading to the use of the term "Search Engine Friendly" to describe designs, menus, Content management systems and shopping carts that can be optimized easily and effectively.
A range of strategies and techniques are employed in SEO, including changes to a site's code (referred to as "on page factors") and getting links from other sites (referred to as "off page factors")

Some SEO History

The first mentions of Search Engine Optimization do not appear on Usenet until 1997, a few years after the launch of the first Internet search engines. The operators of search engines recognized quickly that some people from the webmaster community were making efforts to rank well in their search engines, and even manipulating the page rankings in search results. In some early search engines, such as Infoseek, ranking first was as easy as grabbing the source code of the top-ranked page, placing it on your website, and submitting a URL to instantly index and rank that page.

Due to the high value and targeting of search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs. In 2005, an annual conference named AirWeb was created to discuss bridging the gap and minimizing the sometimes damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.
Some more aggressive site owners and SEOs generate automated sites or employ techniques that eventually get domains banned from the search engines. Many search engine optimization companies, which sell services, employ long-term, low-risk strategies, and most SEO firms that do employ high-risk strategies do so on their own affiliate, lead-generation, or content sites, instead of risking client websites.

Some SEO companies employ aggressive techniques that get their client websites banned from the search results. The Wall Street Journal profiled a company that allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients. Wired reported the same company sued a blogger for mentioning that they were banned. Google's Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.

Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences and seminars. In fact, with the advent of paid inclusion, some search engines now have a vested interest in the health of the optimization community. All of the main search engines provide information/guidelines to help with site optimization: Google's, Yahoo!'s, MSN's and Ask.com's. Google has a Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Yahoo! has Site Explorer that provides a way to submit your URLs for free (like MSN/Google), determine how many pages are in the Yahoo! index and drill down on inlinks to deep pages. Yahoo! has an Ambassador Program and Google has a program for qualifying Google Advertising Professionals.

CMS

CMS, What is it and why do I need it? CMS, content management systems are relatively new in the market, and while many are still not familiar with them, they have the potential to dramatically simplify the maintenance of both websites and intranets.

What is a CMS?

A content management system is a software package specifically designed to manage a website. It is installed by the web designers, but intended to be used by you.

• First off, it provides you with a simple, non-technical way of updating your content. This is typically (but not always) done via a web-based interface that works much like Word does.
• Just point-and-click, type in the new words, and hit save. Your site is instantly updated.
• Equally easy is adding new pages, deleting old ones, or restructuring the site to match your new business model.
• The CMS also automates menial tasks, such as applying the same page layout and appearance across the site. Menus and other navigation are also automatically produced.
• Along with the many other administrative tools, this leaves you to concentrate on the words, and not on the technology.

What are the benefits?

A content management system makes life much easier in many ways:

• You are no longer dependent on the web designers making changes for you.
• Changes can be made any time they are needed, day or night. This is increasingly important as your business comes to rely on the website as a communications channel.
• All the technical details are simply handled by the CMS, allowing anyone to manage and update the site.
• Multiple staff can keep the site up to date, instead of being restricted to just one person. The CMS will track who is doing what, avoiding potential confusion.
• The CMS ensures that all the pages are consistent in design, and will build all the menus and other navigation for you.
• The many other powerful features of the CMS allows the site to grow in sync with your business.