The reality is the Telecom Carriers are practically not part of the Cloud. You can read more in my interview for the the TMForum.

http://www.ctel3.com

Kudos to Search Engine Land!

Below you will find important tips about designing the Best Website for your Small Business.

Designing the best website for your Small Business – Tip #1:
Is it clear to your visitors what’s your business?

A visitor will only spend few seconds on your site (normally 3 to 5 seconds), it’s important that your value proposition and intent be clear the minute customers hit your homepage if you wish to engage your visitors and keep them on your site. How do you do that? Great visual design always helps, but you must express your business’s message on the front page using clear and simple language. A good example is Twitter, Twitter allows their users to follow others and keep up to date about what it happening around the world. Twitter front page is very simple and their message in Big letters is” Follow your interests”. It will take new only one second to realize Twitter are not selling cars but if he is curious about how he can follow what interests him he will stay longer to explore.

Don’t underestimate the power of your mission statement. Make sure it is short and clear!

Designing the best website for your Small Business – Tip #2:
Can search engines find your website (SEO)?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads. If you’re site is not search-engine optimized, you’re basically cutting off almost all possibility for anyone to find you organically. There are many ways to tackle SEO and like everything else it depends on your budget, however a good website should be built with the basic SEO principles in mind.

If your budget permits, get an SEO company or a consultant to promote your site. If you are a new company, you should consider buying sponsored link placements through popular search engines. If you can’t afford it ,make sure that for the very least your website has:

• A site map page
• SEO-friendly URLs
• Relevant keywords in your content
• Unique and relevant title and meta description on every page
• Great, unique content
• Blog
• Social Media links and buttons
• Link to other sites

Designing the best website for your Small Business – Tip #3:
Is your website interesting?

Your website should offer value to the visitor, visitors first engage with the message and the looks but stay and return if you offer valuable and interesting content. Many “experts’ will tell you that you’ll need to have a lot of content mainly for the search engines but keep in mind that the powerful bots that crawling the web have never bought anything online, signed up for a newsletter, or picked up the phone to call about your services. Only people do those things, so write your content with humans in mind and offer them something interesting.

A good content will help you: Keep visitors engaged, establish credibility, build confidence in your brand and attract more business.

Designing the best website for your Small Business – Tip #4:
Is your website easy to use?

Make sure to present users with an experience that is efficient and pleasant from a user flow, navigation, and technical perspective. The Internet is cluttered with bad websites that are very difficult to use, make yours usableand you’ll attract visitors and form lasting relationships with your customers. Your website should have easy-to-use site navigation and pages that achieve quick download times.

Designing the best website for your Small Business – Tip #5:
Is your website mobile ready?

With the growing popularity of Smart Phones, Tablets and other mobile devices, As of August 2011, about 7% of the total web browsing is done through Mobile devices. Mobile devices represents the fastest growing trend in internet usage and researchers expect that most web traffic will flow through mobile devices by 2015. Make sure that your website can be accessed an viewed on a mobile device.

There are many Professional Photographers who chose to go with a flash based animated website and to top it all they add a loud background music to go with it.

OK, so what’s wrong with that?

1. Flash based websites take sometime to load. Many users don’t like to wait while watching a spinning clock that shows the loaded percentage and simply leave the site. Those customers usually don’t return.
2. The music becomes really annoying after 10 – 20 seconds. Indeed many sites has a Pause button that allow you to silence the music but it is usually very small and difficult to find.
3. Flash websites are NOT SEO friendly! They may be visually attractive but for the search engines they almost invisible.
4. Apple devices (Mac OS, iPod, iPad, iPhone) do not support flash, so customers who are using these popular devices can’t see the site.
5. Flash websites are not easy to maintain and normally require a Flash designer in order to make changes, so may sites are animated but the content never change.

A better approach for Professional Photographers websites

At the eLevitator we created a website system that include all the tools that are needed by Professional Photographers and are easy to manage and use by anyone. The system is based on WordPress content management system and includes features like:

• Interactive Photo Gallery.
• Easy photo and content management.
• Search Engine Optimized.
• Protected area for customers’ albums.
• Integration with Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, YouTube etc.)

We create unique designs with state of the art features like:

• Interactive Photo Gallery.
• Easy photo and content management.
• Search Engine Optimized.
• Protected area for customers’ albums

http://photo.elevitator.com

These post describes most everything you’ll need to know before making this important decision and will help you to get familiar with the lingo when working with your service provider.

Getting Started

Keep in mind that your website is first and foremost need to serve some kind of a business purpose, so before you start think about what business goal you want to accomplish. Don’t worry if you are not to sure a good web design company will help you get there. There are many routes you can take for building your website from DIY to hiring your genius next door neighbor’s kid or you can use some cheap solutions by directory advertising companies but if you are serious about standing out and present your business in the best possible way, we highly recommend hiring a professional web design firm.

What type of website people are out there?

These are the people you will most likely come across when working on your site:

• Web Designer – The Web Designer is the project manager of your website design work and  helps you to design the pages layout, graphic theme, site modules (for example: blog, forum, shopping car, etc.) and text layout as well as the navigation and how pages will link to one another. He may also do the actual programming and graphic art work for the site or outsource that work to another programmer.
• Web Programmer - The Web Programmer responsible for all the technical aspects of your website that happens behind-the-scenes. Normally he will convert the design that as created by the Web Designer and will create the actual website using programming languages like: HTML, XML, Java, Java Script, PHP, ASP and more.
• Webmaster -  The Webmaster is a person responsible for maintaining the websites. The duties of the webmaster may include ensuring that the web servers, hardware and software are operating accurately, designing the website, generating and revising web pages, replying to user comments, and examining traffic through the site. Webmasters “must also be well-versed in Web transaction software, payment-processing software, and security software.
• Graphic Designer - The Graphic Designer is responsible for all the website’s graphics, including page layout, colors, etc.
• Online Marketing and SEO specialist - The Online Marketing and SEO specialist is the person responsible for promoting your site online in order to get more traffic and sales from your site. Often times there are more than one person fulfilling this role and they will leverage different tools like: social media, social networking and Search Engine Optimization to attract more visitors to the site.

 Choosing a good web designer

There several things you may need to think about / consider when choosing a web designer:

• Do you prefer to work with someone locally or are you OK working via the phone and e-mail with someone remote? With today’s technologies working with someone remotely is fairly easy but often times it is a matter of personal preference.
• A good web designer, first and foremost will work to intimately understand YOUR BUSINESS and your BUSINESS goals from your online presence.  Pay attention to how much they ask you about it!  This is crucial for designing a site that reflects you and your business.
• Check other sites they’ve designed. Do you like their style?
• Check if they have a structured planning process that leads you through the design phase! They should document all the discussions and decisions?
• Ask them for a Website Planning Guide that you’ll work through together, that’s really helpful.
• Ask them what they know about internet marketing and search engine optimization.
• Ask the designer for their fees and what is the estimated cost for the site you want however they may not be able to give you a good estimate until you discuss content and features of the site.
• Ask them how they bill you. Will they invoice you monthly, or when certain milestones are reached? Do you have to make deposits?
• Pay attention to whether they’ll try to stick within your budget, or whether they keep suggesting new add-ons that increase to the cost of your site. Remember, designers aren’t responsible for your budget — you are.
• Ask for references from their current and recent clients to check how smooth was the process. You want to work with someone someone who has excellent customer focus, good project management skills and good communication skills.
• Ask them whether they will maintain and host your site after the initial deployment, and how much they’ll charge for that. Some designers want to create new sites but don’t want to maintain them.
• Ask them what technologies will they use to build your site. Good designers seeks to work with common and well known technologies (preferably open source) rather than reinvent the wheel.
• If you’re going to maintain the site yourself, ask them if they’ll design your site so that it is easily maintained by a business owner.
• Make sure that your contract states that you own the copyright to the entire website (except, of course, for stock photos and graphic…the original photographer/artist owns the copyright to stock images). All content, including graphics that you hired someone to custom-create for you, should be owned by you.
• Make sure you own your domain name, even if the website designer registered it for you.
• Ask your designer for original, editable source files. You need to be assured that you will be able to edit your website (or have another designer edit your website) with ease.
• You have got to enjoy talking and working with them. Do you LIKE the designer? Do you believe they’ll act ethically? Do you enjoy speaking with them? Do they stay focused to the task at hand, or do they ramble and waste your time? Do you feel you “click” with their personality and values? Do they offer you invaluable insight and advice about your site design?
• Tell your prospective website designer what your deadline is and ask if they can meet it. Many good website designers are already booked for the next 4-6 weeks, so you may have to wait for the designer of your choice.

How much should a good website cost?

There are many factors that influence the cost of  a website. Like any other custom work there is no “one size fit all” solution. A quality website with good graphic design and layout will cost around $1,000 – $3,500 for a 10-20 page site. If you need some extra functionality like blog, newsletter, shopping cart, recruiting model, email address setup, SEO, membership site, or logo design the price may be higher.

I want to be #1 on Google = Everyone wants to go to heaven but no one wants to die – A word about SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines. It is very important to understand that no one can be #1 on Google all the time but you be there for specific keywords and search terms.

You can create ranking factor quickly for keywords that are less competitive and easy to rank for but typically have less search volume. However, knocking out the more competitive broad level key phrases (which have millions of websites competing for them) takes time. How much time it will take to reach page one depends on two things (1) your competition and (2) your own website’s authority (meaning how authoritative or useful it is) which is decided by (a) the quality and volume of content on the subject present in the site and (b) how many other websites link to or cite your website.  In some cases it may take 6 to 12 months to see meaningful results.

Popular keywords are more expensive and more competitive than any other keywords.

There is no SEO magic bullet, just (1) selective keyword and market research (2) intelligent application of that research (3) authoritative contextual relevance created by supporting pages or emotionally charged landing pages and (4) enough links/citation from other websites to cross the tipping point in search engines to award page or domain authority.

In either case, SEO is an investment and nothing converts like search engine traffic, so it’s a matter of which keywords you can afford to target, the time you have and how you intend to monetize that traffic once you get it.

We will love to hear your feedback so please feel free to contact us at anytime at (913) 735 3844

http://www.healthysolutionsinc.com

http://www.quasarsystemsinc.com