11 Reasons Why You Need to Create a Website For Your Business

Building a website for your business is a very crucial step to a successful online future. Here are 11 benefits of having a website for your business if you are a beginner.

1. You website is available 24 7 365 - no need to open or close your store, your website is like another office that opens 24 hours. With a website, you can literally make money while you sleep.

2. Convenient for your customer - people shop online more and more everyday since technology allows us to become lazier. Who want to get up, drive your car through traffics, walk around the mall, drive yourself back through traffics...that is a lot of time to waste.

3. Credibility and professional image - if you don't have a website, people will think your business is not 'real' and decide not to buy your products. Building a website will help you enhance the trusts in your potential customers.

4. The future is automation - a website is a self-service medium where people can do all the shopping, check out by themselves. You can save lots money by not hiring employees for your store.

5. Cheaper than print advertising - your website costs are not that much compare to other means of business promotion. You website also have a longer existent time thus more exposure to potential clients.

6. Easily changed or modified - you can change details on your website anytime you like. It is much easier to change the price of the products, special offers, remove less profitable products, update contact information... You can't do that with flyers or brochures.

7. Can be found by search engine - when customers look for products they want, your website can reach your clients through search engine by using keyword optimization.

8. Target wider audience around the world - you can have a more diverse customer base because anybody can access your information anywhere and anytime.

9. Growth opportunity - you can attract future investors to your website when your business grow.

10. Easy customer feedback - customers can leave comments and feedbacks about your product, you can communicate with them easier and free through emails

11. No need to buy upfront stock - save lots of money by not buying lots of stock for your store. You can send your customer directly to the specific product they want to buy. For a small business opportunity, building a website is what you must do.

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3 Website Pitfalls Most Dental Practices Overlook

Marketing your dental practice online is a measurable, cost-effective strategy for reaching customers on their terms. The people who need your help are looking for you online. With the right approach, you can encourage them to visit your website, contact your office and set up appointments. In order to accomplish that goal, you must have a website that meets several design and marketing parameters. Most dentists don't, and their websites languish in obscurity.

A well-designed dental website should practically eliminate the labor-intensive marketing efforts most dentists focus upon. Below, we'll share three common website pitfalls that ensnare many dental practices.

#1 - Trying To Impress Visitors With Your Dental Website

Few factors can sabotage your site's ability to increase your case acceptance as quickly as unnecessary flash and glitz. Prospective patients will often turn away from dental websites that are stylish to the point of being intimidating. Your site should coax potential patients to explore your services, rather than seem daunting to them.

That's not to suggest that style is unimportant. On the contrary, a professional design is critical. It helps your dental practice exude confidence, talent and proficiency. The key is to find the perfect balance between "too much style" and "just enough to coax them into contacting you."

#2 - Failing To Make Your Dental Website Search Engine Friendly

Google, Yahoo!, and Bing! continue to attract millions of people each day. Many of these people are in your community, looking for a dental practice they can trust. In fact, the trend to find local dentists online has grown dramatically over the last several years. This gives you an enormous opportunity to leverage the search engines in order to reach new patients who live near your office.

The problem is, most dental websites are designed in a way that makes it difficult for search engines to index and rank them properly. Sometimes, the issue is structural; the architecture of the site may prevent "spidering" by the search engines. Other times, the problem is a lack of relevance; the search engines are unable to determine the site's topic.

If Google, Yahoo!, and MSN cannot find, index and rank your site properly, many of your potential patients will be unable to find you. An effective dental website must be search engine friendly.

#3 - Neglecting To Educate Patients

Many people are tentative about visiting dentists because they're uncertain about what to expect. That uncertainty breeds procrastination. For example, a person might be experiencing a dull, throbbing pain in his tooth, yet be nervous about potential treatment strategies. Or, a person might be interested in enjoying a more attractive smile, yet remain unaware about her options. The less informed people are, the less likely they are to set an appointment with your office.

Your dental website is an ideal platform from which to educate those who need your services. Regardless of when someone visits your site, that person can explore a library of useful information that carefully describes the procedures you offer. By educating your patients, you'll give them a level of comfort. And that encourages them to make an appointment.

Bonus Pitfall: Not Allowing Patients To Make An Appointment Online

Most dental websites do not allow patients to set appointments online. Instead, they force people to call. Not only is this inconvenient for the patient, but it's also inefficient for the dental practice. Your site should give patients the flexibility to request appointments online. Once a request is submitted to your office, your staff can call the patient to confirm the date and time.

Designing and maintaining a website that effectively promotes your dental practice requires that you deftly sidestep a number of pitfalls. The effort is worthwhile. A well-designed dental website will attract more people and coax them to contact your office.

Chris Harmen writes for Officite, a medical website design firm that creates medical and dental web sites that are user-friendly and search engine optimized.

Web Design - 10 Tips to Make Your Website User-Friendly

Other than a nice design and excellent content, a good website must also be user-friendly. When you make life easier for people who visit your website, they will stay on your site longer and more likely to take action. Therefore, usability of a website is extremely important.

When someone visits your website, he or she will want to easily find what they are looking for. If your website makes it difficult for them to find what they are looking for, they will leave your site and go to your competitors. Now, let me share with you 10 tips to make your website user friendly.

1. Make sure your images don't take away all the focus. If you want your website visitors to take action, you need to make sure that they are presented with the right information. Don't make them think.

2. Use powerful headlines. Great headlines capture the attention of people. So ensure your headlines are interesting to get people to read the rest of the content on the page.

3. Choose the right font size and color. The text on your website should be easy to read. Try to use a white background for your website.

4. Make sure that your navigation bar is prominent and easy to use. First-time visitors to your website must be able to navigate to key pages within 1 to 2 clicks.

5. For text, don't use images. Search engines cannot read the words in an image and this will affect your search engine rankings. So always use text for your content.

6. Use captions on images in case they don't show up on browser.

7. Always provide contact information on your website so that your prospect can contact you easily.

8. Include a sitemap. Sitemap makes it easy for Google and website visitors to find other pages of your site.

9. Proof read the content on your website. Before you publish your website online, you should get someone else to proof read the content for you. Frequent spelling and grammar mistakes turn people off.

10. Keep multimedia and image file size to the minimal. Large file sizes make your site loads slower and this can be a great turn off to people who have slower internet connection.

Website usability is something you cannot compromise when it comes to web design and development. So make sure that your web designers know about the points mentioned above.

Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency providing web design singapore service.

Check out more web design portfolio here.

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Making the Best Landing Page

A landing page is basically the page that a potential customer arrives to after clicking an advertisement or a search engine result link. This specific page contains additional information regarding the product or service being advertised. It shows the visitor the benefits and advantages he can get once he decides to follow through and avail of the product or service being advertised.

Usually, when potential customers are redirected to the homepage of an advertisement, they spend a few seconds reading whatever they first set their eyes on and eventually if they don't see what they need to do immediately they hit the back button to move on to find other competitors. What a landing page aims to do is to capture the attention of the visitor and guide them on what to do next. This is done by pointing out what benefits he can get presented in short phrases but strong enough to make the visitor click through and come nearer to closing the deal with the advertiser. Landing pages can contain a list of specific links that is related to the advertising that the visitor clicked on. For example, the visitor clicked an ad regarding loans, the landing page that he gets redirected to may contain links to various loan applications online. The visitor then has the option of choosing a link that is best suited to the type of loan that he needs. Another strategy that landing pages provide is that it makes signing up for the said product or service easier.

A landing page may contain a sign-up form requesting important information regarding the customer. This part of the landing page states what happens next after the customer gives the information. Some landing pages automatically redirect the customer to the sales page and asks for more information and at the final click of a button a sale has been made. While some landing pages offer to add the customer to their mailing list in order to receive a daily newsletter or other e-mailing campaigns that the advertiser uses.

Bruce Tucker has been in the field of internet marketing,SEO and landing pages for a long time with a web site about Landing Pages and with a blog that is all about Landing Pages that you would find interesting.

3 Secrets to Designing Your Website

When designing your primary objective is to have the visitors to your site enjoy their visit enough to want to stay. You want them to have a great experience. In order for that to happen, there are three things you must do: make your website easy to navigate, have a great design, and make the loading time fast. No one will stay on a site that takes forever to load.

First, you must make your website easy to navigate. Keep in mind who your audience is and put yourself in their place. They shouldn't have to hunt for your toolbar. Keep it in this same place on each page. Never make them search for the information they're after. Make it easy to find. Keep hyperlinks to a minimum. No more than three. Your hyperlinks should open in a new page, so that they can easily go back to the previous page.

Second is your website design. Again, put yourself in your visitor's place and keep it simple. You want your audience to enjoy their experience. Keep loading time short. Some say that each web page should be different, but I don't agree. You don't want them wondering if they've somehow been sent to a different site. Keep the same look and feel to each page. Have your navigation bar in the same place, and use the same header on each page. Keep balance between text and images on the page. Play with the site while you're building it to make sure images are well placed and fit the text. Your text size and the type of fonts (Tahoma, Verdana and Georgia test well) you use should be relevant to the importance of the subject. Look at your page. Have others look at it and give you feedback.

Third, page loading time is important. You don't want your visitors leaving, because it takes too long for the page to load. Although many people are now using broadband, there are still those who use dial-up internet connections. We have to keep them in mind as well. We want to make everyone's experience a good one. Text loads quickly, but where you can make a difference is in the images that you use. Use an editing software (IrfanView is free and easy to use.) to reduce the image size without losing quality. Because we want to have enough images to attract our visitors and we don't want to slow down the loading time, using image editing software is going to be one of your favorite tools.

In designing your site, keep these three things in mind and you'll be on your way to a great site. For more frugal and free ways to build your business and your website go to: http://www.frugalebizproducts.com

Marilyn Parmelee is a published author, pastor and internet marketer. She helps author's, nonprofits, and small businesses develop a web presence. To find out more go to http://www.frugalebizproducts.com

Create Your First Web Page Today

There are two ways to a new web site project. You can either jump right in and get your hands dirty, or you can do some planning first.

You can start by creating a "test" web page, but not worrying too much on how it looks. Of course if you have marketed your name and a lot of people are going to be visiting your homepage, you want to first plan ahead.

The overall impression of your first website depends on many variables, like the text, font, graphic placement, headlines, colors, and other eye-catching elements. Everything needs to work together.

Most of the time it takes a professional to make a web site look really good. But a professional web developer is not needed to make your site look pretty good.

One of the key aspects to web design is simplicity. The human eye is trained to see and appreciate simple, unornamented designs. You should start by using the simplest design, that will accomplish your task, and then try to make it even simpler.

If you think about it simplicity has very specific advantages in the web design world. You should take in factors like download time constraints, compatibility issues of different browsers and screen resolutions. A simple design will take in all these factors.

Another factor is the ever-growing popular mobile devices. Everybody is using mobile device now a days so you need to make sure that your website is compatible with mobile. A simple website almost always displays perfect on most mobile devices.

Lionel has been writing articles online for nearly 3 years, not only does this author specialize in web development and design, you can also check out his latest website on his new Bisquick Cookbook which has some great recipes for your next meal using Bisquick.

What is the Definitive Custom Web Design?

You'll see this phrase all over the Internet when searching for Web site development, whether in Calgary or around the world, the term "custom" web design has itself become incredibly diluted in its meaning. While I don't like to be pedantic with words, advertising can quickly gloss over a true meaning of a word by hoping that its target audience doesn't fully understand the term's definition, or the context of the term. If you go to a popular search engine and type in "Custom Web Design" you will see paid ads on the side that say things like:

Free Web Design & Hosting

30 Day Free Trial! Custom Website

Design & Hosting For $6.99 a Month.

This sounds like a good deal, right? "Free Web Design & Hosting" - Of course, they actually contradict themselves on the third line when the "Design & Hosting" now suddenly cost $6.99 a month! Hmmm...Can a trial actually be seen as free if there is a cost associated with the actual product? So "Free" actually means "on loan" or perhaps they mean that you don't get charged extra for their website templates that you build your site with because they are included in the package price?

But I digress, my main point with this ad is the use of "Custom Website Design" in the ad copy and the question is, is this actually true? I would have to say no, that this is not a proper use of the term "Custom Web Design." Why? Because they are using design templates that you can "customize" - which is different than an actual custom design that is started from scratch. Sure, you can change pictures in pre-coded spots, maybe change colours and positions, but in the end the design is a prefab template - this is NOT custom design, it is customized design.

Now, customization in Web development is extremely useful, it allows for fast, semi-automatic development where the majority of code is reused across a wide platform of applications. It streamlines the process and also makes security updates and coding/database upgrades a lot easier since the sites share the same code and database structure. This is the major advantage and reason for the large variance in Web site prices online since, for those willing to use template designs, they can make the process user friendly and basically automatic for ANYONE to use...and provide this service at an extremely low price. However, be aware that there could be dozens or hundreds of other companies using the SAME template that you're using, which in the end, could well damage your image and not promote it.

For those who create a definitive custom design, their Web design process start with a blank page and a strong connection with their client's vision and needs. Sure there is overlap with how these needs are satisfied, as there is also need to keep to certain, proven conventions in design that ensure proper navigation, logo presentation and content layout and promotion. But the goal of the custom Web designer is to create a unique, one-off design that will stand out from template designs and designs that do not satisfy or adhere to the needs of design conventions, nor capture the client's perspective.

The best Web designer/developer will be able to balance between the customized world of coding and the custom world of design. This ensures a fast, manageable turnaround time in the development of the code and database (if necessary) and the integration of a design that is compliant with Web standards, is built for Search Engine Optimization and is unique in its graphic layout.

If you are looking for a custom Web site design in Calgary, Cochrane or anywhere else in the world, make sure you are getting a unique design by asking your Web designer if the design is based on a template or if they build from scratch. Take a look through their portfolio and see if their work shows variety, improvisation and innovation while simultaneously providing consideration for proper navigation, content flow and effective use of branding.

If you are looking for a proactive and multi-faceted design team in Calgary Alberta, please visit Calgary Web Design to see BlindDrop Design's full list of services to the Cochrane & Calgary Area. Lucas Arnatt has been a Calgary Web Designer producing custom Web designs since 1997.