Tag Archives: Avoid

How to Avoid Getting Ripped Off by Your Web Designer

Posted on August 26, 2010 by arra| Leave a comment

OK, you’ve heard, read, and been told by folks that having a website is a great way to reach a global audience. You even know some folks who do a substantial business entirely on the internet. You don’t want to be left behind, so you decide to have your own website. But let me warn you – there are several things that you need to do, learn, understand and research before you jump in, unless you have money to burn. If not, let’s get started right away.

First of all, you need to decide what you really want and expect from your website. When I say want, I mean everything – A to Z. How do you want your website to look aesthetically? How do you want your navigation? Do you want a static site or a dynamic one? How frequently do you want it updated? Will you write the content yourself or will you seek the services of a copy writer? (warning: if you copy content off some other website you are doing copyright infringement and may receive a DCMA complaint and even get sued). Always plan your website content keeping the focus on your customer. What does your customer seek before arriving at your website? It is advisable to visit a few websites, especially your competitors and see how they have their websites done. This will give you pointers and help you take directions.

Once you know what you expect from your website, start inviting web design and development quotes from multiple sources, like recommendations from friends and associates, online sources like elance, yellow pages, etc. Also ask them what type of hosting plans will be required. Once you’ve taken sufficient quotes, do some research for hosting providers on Google; you will get several choices. I’ve found that AwareINDIA.net is one of the good ones who give excellent support. Their rates are also very economical (just a few cents to a few dollars a month depending on the plan you choose). You will also need to have some idea of search engine marketing (SEM) costs before you form a budget for web design. SEM is a great way to ensure free long term visitor traffic to your website. While SEM will not be required immediately, it makes sense to know if all expenses meet your budget, else you will require making some compromises. It is also advisable to let your SEM company work hand in hand with your designer, as your website also needs to be search engine optimized (SEO) so that SE robots can index your pages properly and rank them higher for your desired keywords and phrases.

It may interest you to know that there are several open source software available which can take care of your website needs. For example, OS commerce and Zen Cart are some great options if you plan to have a shopping cart system and ecommerce enable your website. If you want a discussion forum, PHPbb is one of the best used extensively. If you’re looking out for a Portal or CMS software, there are Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, Post Nuke, PHP Nuke, and many more. Some folks even use blog software to power their website which gives it an interactive edge. Popular blog software are wordpress, b2evolution and nucleus. The good news is, most of these software can be installed for free at the click of a button without requiring any technical skills, if your hosting provider supports fantastico (AwareINDIA.net does support it). In fact, you can even buy ready made templates specially designed for and compatible with these software. Some companies even make customized templates. It’s a good idea to research on these software and also discuss this with your programmer and weigh the options if it is viable or not. Building a system from scratch would be quite expensive, especially if you’re on a tight budget. In fact, just mentioning about fantastico and these open source software with your designer will immediately cause him to feel as if you’re very much aware of the market and he will certainly think twice before giving you an exorbitant quote!

Some hosting providers also provide a Do-It-Yourself website builder which is quite easy to use, eliminating the need for a web designer altogether. However, there are some limitations with such options. AwareINDIA.net does offer this option; in fact, you can even get a free trial and see if it suits your requirements. If you’re comfortable using Microsoft Word, you should be able to design your own website without much hassle.

If you do plan to use the services of a designer, make sure you have everything in black and white. Keep the terms and conditions of the contract crystal clear. This is good for both of you as it is binding. Use an escrow service if required – most online portals like elance have this option. If you wish to read more of my work, you can visit http://www.bharatbhasha.com/author.php/Nirjara%20Rustom – I’ve written several articles related to SEO, online success, marketing tips, email marketing, etc.

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5 Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing a Web Designer

Posted on August 19, 2010 by arra| Leave a comment

Choosing a web designer has grown to be very difficult. You can find all kind of types, prices, skills, and abilities. Everyone who can’t design their own website should seek professional help, but here are 5 mistakes to avoid when choosing your designer.

1.    Choosing a designer who suggest flash intro pages or a ton of flash
I like flash websites. They are pretty, do cool things, and usually are very visually-stimulating, but this doesn’t work for anyone unless you are as big as, Coca-Cola, or you have $1 Million budget just for website promotion. Since most  businesses don’t have budgets that big over even a 10-year span, you need a site that helps drive traffic for free.
A flash site can’t be read by search engine robots (the things that crawl your site and return what is on your site). These robots can only read html text in the form of titles, alternative text, body copy, and other elements that are not part of flash. In the end, flash is like one big picture on your site. It may look good, but that is all the search engines see it as.

2.    Choose a designer that suggests you use frames
Once again, this is a search engine issue. Frames can hamper the search engine’s ability to follow your site, its navigation, and ultimately what you are all about. This is a good place to explain why search engines need to be able to figure out your site.
When a search engine crawls your site, it gets indexed along with all of your content. Then the search engine plugs your site into its extensive database, and when people conduct searches, your site gets inserted. Now there is a lot more to this topic, in fact an entire industry has spawned from this, but in a nut shell, you want it to be as easy as possible for search engines to find out what your site is about, and find your keywords as often as possible. If your designer wants to use frames, it is usually safe to bet that they will not be very good at setting your site up for good search engine optimization!

3.    Use a template for your site
There are many great template sites available. Usually, you can purchase a template for under a $100. The biggest problem with using templates is the lack of consistency and branding. I worked with a fairly large company that should have employed a professional designer to build a site that carried their brand, but instead they used a template that was a far cry from anything consistent. You may save money by buying a template, but the money you will have to spend to compensate for lack of consistency will far outweigh the savings.
Another reason for avoiding templates is bulky images and flash. For one, you usually get a flash header or intro that is resource-heavy, and then you get stuck with a bunch of images for navigation, headers, and other important areas. As stated earlier, this will hinder your search engine rankings. You don’t want to have to pay for every visitor, so avoid simple mistakes on the front end.

4.    Use a part-time designer
I have nothing against people that have two jobs or trying to make ends meet doing design part time. The problem with this situation as a client is time. When you deal with a part-time designer, they usually have an issue with finding the time. They have a main job that takes up their time 40+ hours a week, so they have to find time around that for your site. This usually means they will work on it on the weekends, at night for an hour or two, or some other random time. This drags out the time to complete your site. Instead of completing your project in 2 weeks, it takes 2 months or longer! When you work with someone that designs and develops full time, you get more time commitment, which means quicker completion.

5.    Use your friend’s cousin’s friend from the gym to design your site
I have encountered many clients that started out working with someone they knew, but really didn’t know. Usually it is a friend of a friend or some other distant relationship that says they save them the client money. If the job gets done, because many times it never gets done, it takes a long time and the quality is sub-par. I am not shooting down the referral system, because I do very well with referrals, but you should do some homework on the referral before you jump into it. When someone says they can design a site for 1/6 of the cost you can get it anywhere, usually it is 1/6 of the quality and takes 6 times as long to complete. Get your referrals, but ask for more information. Don’t take everyone else’ word for it!

There are more mistakes that you should avoid when choosing a web designer, but these 5 are major issues to avoid. In today’s market, your website must be professional and useful. It needs to contain the proper SEO elements, and should be consistent with the rest of your marketing activities. In fact, in many instances, the web site should be the center of your marketing plans, so don’t try to go too cheap or too quick for the sake of getting a website up. Talk to a professional that can assist you through the process!

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Avoid These Web Design Features That Annoy Website Visitors!

Posted on August 11, 2010 by arra| Leave a comment

If you do your own web design, the best thing to offer your potential customers in order to get a good first impression is a website that provides a pleasant experience with an easy and intuitive user interface. You may be selling the world’s hottest product but if your website is amateur-looking, your visitors will get turned off and look for the product elsewhere because of your shoddy design.

When you think of a good web design, you shouldn’t think solely in terms of just the graphical aspect. As a professional web designer, you should be able to distinguish the various factors which make up a good website such as quick accessibility, easy layout or interface, pleasant user experience and, of course, great graphics.

Based on numerous user feedbacks, the items below are reported to be some of the worst web design features they’ve seen in a long while. Know what makes them annoying and compare them to your own website as a precautionary step. If you’ve got anything like these on your website, then it’s about time to give it a good facelift.

Font size that are too large or too small

As written earlier, great graphics are merely a part of web design and easy user accessibility plays a big part in it. See to it that the text on your website is clearly legible and comfortably sized to provide your visitors an easy read without causing them a lot of eyestrain. You may be an ace copywriter and have written an amazing unique sales proposal for your product but if potential clients can’t read a word of your great copy, then you’re not making a single sale at all.

Irritating background music

Short intro bits can be tolerable but not the whole sound clip. What if you’ve got a sizeable website with lots of pages and each time a visitor clicks to another page, that infernal music starts to blast all over again? You probably had this unpleasant experience before and just clicked off the player button.

But if your website doesn’t have that blessed option, visitors would just be too relieved to exit your site. Furthermore, background music gobbles up a lot of bandwidth and if your visitors are using slower Internet connections, they’ll just have to endure the long wait before they can finally view your site – and still get irritated by your background music.

Annoying pop-up screens

Almost all web surfers consider pop-up screens as a brazen form of displaying supplemental advertisements that nobody really cares reading about. They instinctively close them whenever they manage to filter through their pop-up blockers without even a look at their content. Now, if you have a great product to promote, will you just place it in a pop-up screen that people immediately shoot down every time it shows up? Your website loses its credibility – and sales – for using such a sneaky advertising technique.

Remember that not all aspects of web design are pleasing to the eyes and ears. Removing these troublesome web design features from your website will make it easier to read, load faster and provide a more welcoming experience for your prospective customers.

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Basic Web Design: Why You Should Avoid WYSIWYG Website Builders

Posted on August 5, 2010 by arra| Leave a comment

Basic Web design is easy to learn and you will always get the best results using real code. WYSIWYG “wizard” software that promises to do all the work for you typically causes more problems than it solves.

There are numerous software applications that allow you to drag, drop, point, and click your way to a Web template without ever typing the first line of code. These tools are often called WYSIWYG, meaning What You See Is What You Get. Most such devices are junk and should be avoided at all cost.

Due to the heavily promoted simplicity of WYSIWYG tools, many people use them for their basic Web design needs. But the bottom line is these tools limit your flexibility, create sloppy code, and in many cases simply do not work the way you want them to.

Learning the basics of Web design is easier than you might think. And in the long run you’ll save time and money, plus end up with a much better site, when you create your own code in lieu of using a WYSIWYG.

Let’s look more closely at the primary drawbacks of this type of software.

Limited Flexibility

No matter how slick, expensive, and high-tech a WYSIWYG editor, it’s not as robust and expansive as the human mind. There’s simply no way one of these utilities can be programmed for every possible parameter.

And frankly in most cases point and click Website builders are seriously flawed in terms of what they allow you to do.

As long as you stick with the basics of putting a table here, dropping an image there, and so forth you’ll be fine. But when you decide you want to align a block of text outside and to the right of an existing table, suddenly the software stops responding and you are unable to make the seemingly simple change you want.

WYSIWYG software is not intuitive in many scenarios. And there are a variety of design tactics and format changes you simply cannot do without going directly into the raw code.

Sloppy Code

Neat, properly formatted HTML (and other code) is critical for the success of your site. And it’s totally impossible to duplicate this level of quality when using a WYSIWYG.

When your HTML code is entered incorrectly your site obviously will not display properly. WYSIWYG software generally enters the basic structure correctly, but numerous small errors appear throughout a document created with these tools, and this will cause your pages to look different from one browser to another.

Also, the structure of your code is an important part of onsite search engine optimization. The kind of jumbled slop produced by a WYSIWYG tool can actually harm your search engine rankings, whereas proper hand coding can greatly enhance your position within the results listings.

Just Won’t do What You Want

Even at the level of basic Web design there are times when the developer wants to do something a little outside of the ordinary. And few things are more frustrating in a Website development scenario than wanting to create a specific effect and not being able to do so.

When using WYSIWYG technology you will often discover there is simply no way to create the format or effect you’d like to see on the screen in front of you. The “wizard” must adhere strictly to the rules it was programmed with, and even if the change you want to make is very minor, it just isn’t possible if the WYSIWYG doesn’t understand how to do it.

On the other hand, once you have even a preliminary grasp of basic Web design code, you’ll be able to make any changes you like in a matter of seconds. There are very few limitations when handling raw code, whereas a WYSIWYG will allow you to perform only a pre-determined range of commands.

With the right educational material, the average Internet user can become proficient in the art of basic Web design in 30 days or less. With only a small amount of practice you’ll be cranking out Web pages that are ten times better than those produced by the most expensive WYSIWYG on the market.

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Hosting Problems, And How To Avoid Them

Posted on August 1, 2010 by arra| Leave a comment

What problems do people have with their web hosting companies? Knowing what the problems are, is there anything you can do to avoid hosting problems and issues yourself?

To answer these questions, consider this – hosting problems really fall into two categories.

One set of issues are to do with the host itself – how it runs its business and its servers. If a host is having issues with server downtime, they may be having problems with cheap hardware failing, or a lack of competent technical staff to address failures quickly. If host serves pages very slowly or not at all, then they may be overselling, and putting too many sites on one server. If they don’t answer support requests, they may simply not have enough staff, or worse, they may have so many customers that they don’t care.

This sort of host is easy to avoid, if you do some work first. When you are thinking of signing up with a host, check their own forums, or independent hosting forums to see what their customers are saying. One common warning sign would be posts like ‘You used to be great, but now you are not replying to my emails.’ You want to get a sense of how a host is performing from people actually using the service: just checking hosting review sites is not a good idea, as they are usually full of affiliate links and have no value as real independent reviews.

Another way to avoid bad hosts or hosts with problems is to find out how long they have been in business. Really bad hosts tend not to last long, as word soon gets around and people take their business elsewhere. Hosts that offer space or bandwidth which seems excessive or is meant to be ‘unlimited’ are not using a viable business model, and you should be cautious before signing up.

The other category of problems which users have with hosting services is to do with the users own requirements and expectations. If you need to do more with your host than simply upload basic files and images – if you need to set up a MySQL database, or a special script for example – you will inevitable end up looking for help from the host. A good host will reply promptly, have staff who are polite and experienced enough to see what you need to do, and sort it out.

Some users though have unreasonable expectations of what they should be allowed to do with their site, both technically and in terms of content. Hosting companies have no choice when one users sets up scripts which take all the server’s resources, or place material which is objectionable or legally actionable, and have to take the site down to protect their other users. While the user sees this as a problematic host, the host sees the user as the problem.

If you really need full control of your site, think about signing up for a dedicated server. Some dedicated server plans are now as cheap as shared hosting used to be. Many problems of both categories considered above can be avoided this way.

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Avoid Using Free Hosting! It May Actually Cost You More Money

Posted on June 1, 2010 by arra| Leave a comment

Are great, now you the owner of an online business. You just your niche, your product or project found and must decide now what will be the next step to build your website to promote it. They have also taken steps to plan in advance. Set your goal, their interests, and how and where to find them. And in the process of all this, you have a valuable relationship of trust between them and you inspired. They decided to do business with you is simply smart. You also have the definition of the main objectives and the nature of the chosen location would best promote your product (sales special page optin single membership site, websites or brochures, newspaper websites or blogs, Internet portals – all together a different article). And besides all this, you have chosen your domain name. Great, sounds like you on the way to build a big business! One last thing to happen anyway. You need to choose a hosting company for your site and host. The question is really low for this, I use a hosting company’s free or paid one? My answer may surprise you. Avoid using free hosting at any price. Below I will explain you some reasons why. First, determine what is not what tools and services the hosting company and supported. Some of the best I have met www. Super hosting. com, www. Domains. com, and my favorite, www. CoolNetHosting. com, formerly known as WebHotMonkey. com. You can much more for your money, as they say, with one of these to some others out there compared. Whatever your choice, make sure that you are looking for measurement tools included in the package. Offered in their standard hosting packages include these high-tech web analytics tools. If you are not sure what it is and then search online for sites that explain it. There are also courses of this kind of thing. Your hosting company should be able to monitor and analyze traffic and conversions on your site as well. The key is to get the software set up soon after and then wait. Remember, you’re paying for it, so you should get what they think your product is the best promotion. Second, the hosting half of highly effective control of the spammer. This should be the top priority for the Internet environment in which we live today. But with free hosting, spammers are not always treated as a priority. Since you are sending and receiving emails on the server from your host, make sure they have made provision, the spammers, who use them for the Quick-start their campaigns to discourage. The good thing is that Internet Service Provider or the police of the Internet, as I call them, these spammers block listing (also called “black list to fight”) and / or sanctions against the hosting company, not related to these guarantees. Unfortunately, some of the freebie hosting company slipped under the radar. So if you’re not a spammer, why? Here, too, unfortunately, most if not all e-mails from the server hosting, this can also include from you, are blocked (or spammers) and you never know. Read at www. Spamhaus. Org Here you can find out which hosting company, you should stay away from the pursuit of its IP address. Finally, a careful look at the reliability of the hosting company you will be considered. All disturbances experience cyberspace, but does something “Research on your side, you can determine which companies are less likely, these defects are seen in the sites of their customers. These defects may relate to slowing or even worse, stop, your site. This anomalies can occur frequently and can last for hours or even days. We recommend Google-hosting companies that experienced this type of thing. Some of these sites search engine to record past and present host data reliably. These are a great source of information which will help you to decide on a host society. As you can see, can cause the decision on a hosting company pain. weighing the pros and cons of hosting company you are considering can eliminate this pain . Remember sure that the hosting company provides measurement tools to work the best. You must not use, it allows spammers to your host server, and last but not least, hard, hosting companies to search through search engines, to see the fewer errors in cyberspace have. In addition to these things, do not forget to avoid the society of free hosting. Sorry if you can. You certainly have a harder time finding people who are willing to link to your website and receive this are, set the host banner ads on your page will probably turn away visitors. Unhappy visitors like no sale! Hello, my name Dancy peace, the author. If you want to use a hosting company for your business, I urge you look for my business opportunity, visit my website at http://www. BetterLifeToCome.

Dancy Pace was born in Bossier City, Louisiana in 1973 along with two other brothers. Yes, he is one of the three, an identical triplet. Dancy is a Christian who is dedicated to his family, and spends much time with them each get a chance. He also enjoys time with his brothers in all, as no competition concerns, including sports. Their competitiveness in the sport are close to success in business such as sales and marketing expert in context. After working as a Lead District Sales Manager with the Shreveport Times for more than two years, a thorough knowledge of what it takes, playing to sell products in online business. Soon after, began a new adventure Dancy busy shopping area with Enterprise Rent a Car, where he made fast the title of the Branch Corporate Account Manager. From Dancy and determination to be completed successfully target, Branch Manager of the Office within the first year. With these years of experience behind him, of course, everyone in the online business, Dancy is now planning to invest their knowledge, time, and fighting spirit in the world of online business.

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