By: Stephanie Diamond

Redesigning your website to take advantage of new opportunities and solve problems can be challenging. Different political groups jockey for position and new ideas get shouted down or lost due to employee popularity or ranking. A technique that can strip away these “human” factors can make a big difference when planning and strategizing.

In the late 60’s Tony Buzan developed a technique he called “Mind Mapping” to make use of the latest in brain research. His goal was to help people use all their cortical skills, i.e. word, image, number, etc. to learn and problem solve. This technique has grown and developed over the years as brain research becomes more sophisticated.

This method works very well in corporate setting where the audience has diverse skills. Rather than focus on skills, you focus on ideas. People feel they are on firm ground and are more likely to share ideas and look for solutions. This is exactly the kind of atmosphere you want to create when groups congregate to solve business problems.

In my work with Internet clients, I have adapted this method to take advantage of different creative skill sets among staff members. The marketing group has their way of looking at things, the developers theirs, and management, still another. When mind maps are applied to internet planning (or any business plan) it removes the barriers and helps each group apply its best creative knowledge.

There are four main advantages to using a mind map in an internet setting. The first is that it’s non-linear. This makes all ideas important and eliminates ideas chosen by employee rankings. When there are open spaces on the map branches, the brain wants closure. Everyone wants them to be filled in. This promotes teamwork.

The second is it provides a look at the “big picture” and the details at the same time. This helps managers focus on their concerns while those tasked with the details can focus on their part of the puzzle and everyone can see the whole.

The third is it highlights omissions. When you follow the same process and look at the same lists you forget or “don’t see” what’s missing. Looking at the material in a new way helps you analyze it.

The fourth is it stimulates everyone’s creativity by using pictures and colors, lines of different widths and spaces. Programmers use their special skills and designers and managers use their unique skills.

When you redesign your website, your main goal should be to make it easier for your customers to find information and buy products. This tools makes it easier to achieve success.

Author Bio
About Digital Media Works Digital Media Works, Inc. (www.freespiritmedia.com) is an Internet marketing and design firm that specializes in solutions for e-commerce companies. A seasoned 25+ year management/marketing professional, founder Stephanie Diamond is experienced in building profits in a broad range of product and services businesses. She created a highly successful line of multimedia software products that sold millions of copies for America Online.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com

By: Stephanie Diamond

Small business owners need to monitor whether their investment in a website is providing a good return. Are your products and services easy to buy? If they aren’t, you are wasting time and money and probably doing more harm than good.

Ask yourself the following five questions to see whether it’s time for a redesign:

1. Has the size of the site grown substantially?
   If your site continues to grow and change like most business sites, you need to evaluate whether it’s still meeting your objectives. As you add new products and services you need to re-organize your information. In addition, you should consider adding multimedia information (audio, video) to sharpen your message.
2. Is some of the content outdated or unnecessary?
   Does your website have up-to-date content? Someone should be revising spec sheets, changing promotion dates and adding new material weekly. If your website appears static, it looks like you’re not a serious business.
3. Is the most important content buried below?
   Here’s where you need to do an “easy to buy” audit. By that I mean you need to evaluate how easy it is to find information and actually buy your products. This sounds like common sense, but we’ve all purchased online and know that it can sometimes be frustrating.
4. Are you using the latest technology, instead of hard-coding?
   If you created your website more than 18 months ago, you are probably due for a technology update. This is also true if you started with a very basic site and “hard-coded” everything. Ask your webmaster whether he has some suggestions. You can be sure he will.
5. Does the home page design suit your current business objectives?
   Does your website communicate the depth and breadth of your current business? If you have changed the focus of your services, added new products or want to communicate a different face to your visitors, consider a redesign for your overall website.

Author Bio
About Digital Media Works
Digital Media Works, Inc. (www.DigMediaWorks.com) is an Internet marketing and design firm that specializes in solutions for high tech and e-commerce companies. A seasoned 25+ year management/marketing professional, founder Stephanie Diamond is experienced in building profits in a broad range of product and services businesses. She created a highly successful line of multimedia software products that sold millions of copies for America Online, and has developed unique business strategies and products for a variety of companies, including AOL Time Warner, Redgate New Media and Newsweek, Inc. Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

By: Bonnie Beck

Many companies throughout the world today are operating their business with no website. When the internet keeps moving forward and advancing, your business needs to advance as well. If companies do not own or operate an online business as well as a physical business, they will lose out on sales and additional profits.

There are so many valid reasons why owning and operating a website is important. Reaching your target market in your own area is one thing, but having a website allows you to reach your target market world wide. Many more individuals and companies are becoming computer and internet savvy, this means to stay atop of the competition, you need to have a website that is not only informative but functional and professional. If marketed properly you should have sales or contacts via your website that are valid and valuable.

Every business needs to have an advertising campaign, and including your current website in that is vital to success on the internet. It’s not good enough to just have a website; you need to invest time and money into your online business. Between pay per click advertising and the search engine marketing, it is more important than ever to keep the online public aware of the services and goods you provide. Whether you decide to hire out these tasks to a web design or marketing company or do the job yourself, it is the most important factor to getting your website awareness out there to the public.

If you own a business and it is not online, this is really a huge factor that needs to be considered. Not only will owning a website help your current clients, with items such as your office hours, prices or services available, it will allow your online audience to see what great products and services you offer, and possibly inspire them into action!
Author Bio
www.aarcmedia.com
sales@aarcmedia.com
ph. 607-330-2844

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By: Tyson Fenech

Naturally there are many aspects to succeeding online but the nature of business hasn’t swayed. You must have a professional image and you must provide a great service for your clients. This is what makes a business grow. This is not another article telling you to be sure you have Meta tags, linking and all the other wonderful Search Engine friendly includes. This is a bare bones old school reflection on how companies are losing sight of the bigger picture.

Put some heart into it

Most entrepreneurs have that essential vivacious approach to starting up a business and the truly successful ones will maintain that level of excitement to help cultivate a healthy and steady growth. A web site can help establish your business as a serious contender or just another hole in the wall. Which one are you? Some businesses place more emphasis on what they’re going to have for lunch rather than the image they portray to their clients. Your excitement about your business shows in everything you do.

When getting a web site for your company be certain you place your trust and hard earned dollars with a design firm that is passionate about their work and has a proven record of accomplishment, understand why one charges $500 and another $3000. You will have a much better project if the designer has foresight and desire to see their work succeed and not just become another bank deposit.

If you surf online and scope out the millions of companies, it is amazing to see how many tired looking sites you’ll come across. I can’t imagine a company that sells from a brick and mortar store, allowing the front of their building to become decrepit with their sign barely hanging on by a couple of bolts. Not a good way of attracting customers off the street and into your establishment.

The heart of your business

Do what you do best. Sell the products and services that define you and earn the capital. Promote your business in the best way possible, keeping honesty and integrity at the forefront. Do not sell yourself short. Invest into your growth and future developments.

There are countless articles on Search Engine Optimization and how to make money quickly. Have we forgotten the core of doing business and how the market is stimulated? There are plenty of ways to promote your business online and expand your demographic just be sure to focus on the important facets that make a company great. Provide and honest service and quality product. More than just attracting customers to your web site you want to retain long lasting relationships which will only draw more clients as time goes on.

Search Engine Friendly

No doubt search engine optimization is an extremely important aspect for the success of your business but can’t stress enough that the importance of having a solid image must tie in. What many articles fail to point out is that SEO isn’t the only thing to achieving online success. The focus tends to be on one aspect and never the whole picture. Business like everything involving human interaction revolves around the senses.

Okay so your site gets to the top of the search results and gets a click thru. Upon arriving to your site, which lacks any sense of presentation is quickly scanned, forgotten and on to the next site they go. The attention span of surfer’s is on the decline. Yes you must have relevant content but it better be presented in the best possible way so when your competitors are visited by the same potential customer you stand out. It’s all about standing out and making your presence known. When you first write your business plan (you do have a goal right?), one of the main things is to define your sole purpose and what the business hopes to achieve and how you stand out from everyone else.

Building that niche

It is ideal to focus your efforts and find that little pocket where you can shine and grow. This is very helpful when creating your online image. Custom designed graphics, tailored to your business will help secure your position within your chosen niche market. A beautiful looking web site will not help your ranking but it will help secure client interest and entice sales. Many SEO specialists overlook the importance of branding, which is number one in order for a company to separate themselves from the pack. Don’t allow customers the chance to forget your name. Be remembered and maintain your presence.

Author Bio
Tyson Fenech is the Creative Director for Core Creative Concepts. Designing web sites and print materials for the past 7 years helping both small startups and Fortune 500 companies. www.coregraphicdesign.com

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

By: Pegasus

Internet technology has progressed by leaps and bounds resulting in number of websites being launched on the internet. When the website gets firmly established on the net your success is determined. Irrespective of the objectives of your website, it has to be maintained.

There are myriad reasons why the websites need to be maintained. Your website is your company’s profile on the net which helps in converting your site visitor into your customer. It is essential to maintain this profile on the net.

The websites are subjected to cyber crimes like phishing, spamming, spreading viruses, fooling around with people’s personal accounts etc. which are instigated by destructive hackers. In order to deal with these anti social elements maintaining the websites have become imperative. Company websites are generally maintained by their own IT department or EDP division. Some times the work is outsourced to companies who specialize in the domain of maintaining websites.

There are several factors that are considered while maintaining the website.

Website traffic:
To understand the popularity of your site it is necessary to analyze the site traffic. Site traffic relates to the hits received daily by your website from different sources. This report gives an in depth analyses of pages on your site that are more popular and also tells you about the sources from where it is being visited. Based on these reports the website can be refurbished ensuring apt site promotion.

Link Validation:
Link validation is the most common part of web maintenance regimen. This includes checking all the links on your website ensuring that they all are in working condition. Having dead links gives a bad impression to your site.

Revising Content:
Content on any website is updated on regular basis depending on the type of industry and variety of visitors. Details like new address, phone number etc are regularly updated irrespective of the industry type. A company needs to make these minor but important additions to their existing content. Generally article publishing sites add graphics to their websites.

Optimizing the Images:
Images make websites more attractive. However these images take up lot of space on the website. To ensure the image downloads faster on the visitors page maintenance is essential. Optimizing the images is highly necessary as it affects the loading speed and the performance of the website.

Link Popularity:
This is done by search engine optimization or SEO. SEO relates to exchanging links with other websites of related domain. Link popularity is measured on the basis of the incoming and outgoing links on your website. Greater the number of links on your website, higher is the page rank. Maintenance helps in make the website more search engine friendly.

Content Archival:
Article or newsletter websites are rich in content. These sites should a mechanism by which old content gets archived and is available on request. These websites have huge database of content which has to be managed accordingly. This is done through web site maintenance. However in this case people specializing in maintaining databases are required. This is highly significant and time consuming job profile of website maintenance.

Web Server Maintenance:
Server is the home of your website. Most of the companies have third party hosting their websites. The hosting company handles the technical maintenance of your company. The routine maintenance of your server includes monitoring disk space, data transfer and efficient performance. This type of maintenance is a regular affair and quite easy to undertake.

Changing Layouts:
Layout changing is not a normal routine of website maintenance. Layout changing includes changing the entire design and the structure of the website of either the homepage or any particular pages. They may include additional graphics, flash, images, content etc.

The objective of any company web site maintenance program is to keep the web site appealing, up-to-date and to attract and retain visitors. Company web site maintenance is a full-time and highly responsible job, especially for web sites that have constantly changing content. Also, being a very highly technical job, a lot of software tools have come up to automate the process, but the uniqueness of each web site does not aid the automation fully.

The focus of maintaining a website is to keep it looking fresh, up dated and appealing to its visitors. Maintaining a website is a highly serious business as you deal with a company’s entire persona on the net.

Author Bio
Pegasus InfoCorp (P) Limited (www.pegasusinfocorp.com) was formed with a single powerful belief among its two founders that the Internet could enhance and transform businesses in an amazing way. This belief continues to drive us towards our mission of helping discover and implement the best online strategy for businesses, institutions and professionals.

By: Tyson Fenech

Naturally there are many aspects to succeeding online but the nature of business hasn’t swayed. You must have a professional image and you must provide a great service for your clients. This is what makes a business grow. This is not another article telling you to be sure you have Meta tags, linking and all the other wonderful Search Engine friendly includes. This is a bare bones old school reflection on how companies are losing sight of the bigger picture.

Put some heart into it

Most entrepreneurs have that essential vivacious approach to starting up a business and the truly successful ones will maintain that level of excitement to help cultivate a healthy and steady growth. A web site can help establish your business as a serious contender or just another hole in the wall. Which one are you? Some businesses place more emphasis on what they’re going to have for lunch rather than the image they portray to their clients. Your excitement about your business shows in everything you do.

When getting a web site for your company be certain you place your trust and hard earned dollars with a design firm that is passionate about their work and has a proven record of accomplishment, understand why one charges $500 and another $3000. You will have a much better project if the designer has foresight and desire to see their work succeed and not just become another bank deposit.

If you surf online and scope out the millions of companies, it is amazing to see how many tired looking sites you’ll come across. I can’t imagine a company that sells from a brick and mortar store, allowing the front of their building to become decrepit with their sign barely hanging on by a couple of bolts. Not a good way of attracting customers off the street and into your establishment.

The heart of your business

Do what you do best. Sell the products and services that define you and earn the capital. Promote your business in the best way possible, keeping honesty and integrity at the forefront. Do not sell yourself short. Invest into your growth and future developments.

There are countless articles on Search Engine Optimization and how to make money quickly. Have we forgotten the core of doing business and how the market is stimulated? There are plenty of ways to promote your business online and expand your demographic just be sure to focus on the important facets that make a company great. Provide and honest service and quality product. More than just attracting customers to your web site you want to retain long lasting relationships which will only draw more clients as time goes on.

Search Engine Friendly

No doubt search engine optimization is an extremely important aspect for the success of your business but can’t stress enough that the importance of having a solid image must tie in. What many articles fail to point out is that SEO isn’t the only thing to achieving online success. The focus tends to be on one aspect and never the whole picture. Business like everything involving human interaction revolves around the senses.

Okay so your site gets to the top of the search results and gets a click thru. Upon arriving to your site, which lacks any sense of presentation is quickly scanned, forgotten and on to the next site they go. The attention span of surfer’s is on the decline. Yes you must have relevant content but it better be presented in the best possible way so when your competitors are visited by the same potential customer you stand out. It’s all about standing out and making your presence known. When you first write your business plan (you do have a goal right?), one of the main things is to define your sole purpose and what the business hopes to achieve and how you stand out from everyone else.

Building that niche

It is ideal to focus your efforts and find that little pocket where you can shine and grow. This is very helpful when creating your online image. Custom designed graphics, tailored to your business will help secure your position within your chosen niche market. A beautiful looking web site will not help your ranking but it will help secure client interest and entice sales. Many SEO specialists overlook the importance of branding, which is number one in order for a company to separate themselves from the pack. Don’t allow customers the chance to forget your name. Be remembered and maintain your presence.

Author Bio
Tyson Fenech is the Creative Director for Core Creative Concepts. Designing web sites and print materials for the past 7 years helping both small startups and Fortune 500 companies. www.coregraphicdesign.com

By: Craig Bucknall

As hard as it may be, but letting go of your website designing ideas and listening to the customer may actually be of benefit in the long run.

I know what you are saying, you’ve been in the web designing business long enough to know what works and wont doesn’t, what would my customer know? Well after approaching web design in the same manner, I’ve unfortunately had no other choice but to give in to my best laid plans and comply with the wishes of my customers.

Construction of good websites usually means that it has to be appealing to the eye, as well as being fully functioning for Search Engine benefits, but ultimately it must display professionalism for the business represented.

Complying with W3C Standards (W3C Markup Validation Service) for both HTML and CSS validation is paramount to good design and programming (but not necessary for good Google PR, I will discuss in later posts), so when designing we like to use base HTML formatting and CSS text font like Tahoma 11pt, to make neat easy to read text and nice page image layouts.

I will list some cases of where letting go has benefits for both parties involved and how in some circumstances actually resulted in little or no web traffic for the website.

Case Study 1. Architectural Firm flash and font matters

Our customer wanted the use of Flash elements to display several architecture images with a nice fade between images and changes to original CSS Font used Tahoma 11pt font and replaced with Century Gothic 11pt, which is used in all their logos and architecture design work.

As most would know embedding Flash files into your website results in W3C Validation undefined source failure, thus rendering the site Invalid Markup. After explaining this, the customer felt the need to have a nice graphical flash style image far outweighed the importance of quality valid HTML Transitional Markup. To them the appearance and perception of their website to their customers was far more advantageous than complying with the W3C.

In addition they wanted the use of the Century Gothic font rather than Tahoma. By design Century Gothic has a much larger font height than Tahoma and when used increased the page height larger than when using Tahoma thus resulting in the site displaying with scroll bars when view under 1024 x 768 resolution, where previously it fitted in the whole page perfectly.

In the end the customer achieved the desired affects they wanted and ultimately it is the customer who ‘always’ knows best.

Case Study 2. Box supplier becomes boxed in

Our customer had started a new business supplying cardboard boxes for moving and packing. They wanted a simple site with heavy graphical image elements and little or no text on the home page.

Explaining to the customer the role of text based search engines results and that having no ‘readable text’ on the home page would limit their visibility, they choose design over results.
Why you may ask would a company limit their possibilities of being found on search engines? Well the question still burns with us too, but as mentioned earlier the ‘customer always knows best’ and the decision was solely theirs to make.

Their philosophy was simple, their website was purely to be used as a reference guide and not the source of extra business, as their marketing strategies would be enough to garner constant business.

To this day I still wonder why they limited their marketability and in particular their website which is always online and can be searched at all times of the day.

So in summary the best laid plans of mice and men (well in this case web designers) can be a utter waste of good management as what I have stated all along that the ‘customer always knows best’ and ultimately they are the ones paying for your service so sometimes its best to lay down your guns and concede defeat.

Author Bio
Craig Bucknall is the owner and Managing Director of the Sydney based Website Design studio Bullie Graphics. They have been producing quality website design for Australian businesses since 1999.
You can view his website at www.bulliegraphics.com.au