Friday, March 16, 2007

Planning A Web Site Design

Seventy-five percent of a successful website design project is planning. That means beginning with measurable goals and objectives. Your goals and objectives should always tie back into your company's mission. So, if your company's mission is to be the market leader in widgets, your site's purpose should be to do that. It's also important to set measurable goals. This will prove that investing in your web site, pays off. Plus, it'll make you look good to your boss.

Once the goals are set, your planning is still far from done. You'll want to examine your target audience or audiences and get in their heads. This means finding out who they are and why they are on your site. Then, you'll need to make sure you are fulfilling their needs. Identify what actions each target audience will take on the site. If it's someone purchasing a widget, make widgets easily available from the homepage. Research show that people who buy on the web want to see products right away and they want to see images and prices. Put your widgets on your homepage with a small image, title, description, price (users hate to drill down to get pricing), and a "Buy Now" link.

The next step is to determine the specifications of your functionality. It sounds scary, but it's not. Most developers can work with a list of statements like, "I want a user to be able to rate products on a scale of one through five." Write down everything you want the site to do and even include what you might want it to do. For example, "An administrator should be able to log into a content management area and add a press release." You get the idea. Along with your specs, you'll need to include a database discovery. This means determining all the possible fields for everything that might be stored and served in a database. For example, a product might have an image, a title, a description, a price, a product number, etc

After you have determined your information architecture, it's time to create wireframes. Wireframes are like a blueprint of your web site. You'll want to identify all of the content that will be represented on each page including navigation, logos, images, and content. This is a very important step because it takes all the guess work out for the designer, and you can do a usability gut check on your key user paths and the flow of the site itself. You can even build a test site based on the wireframes and run a usability test.

The next step is to get your content together. Start with a content strategy. What are you trying to accomplish with your content? Don't forget to include a search engine strategy that defines what your key words are and how you will leverage them in your content. Is all of your content working toward your goals and objectives? Too often I see meaningless stock images like the ubiquitous handshake. Web users are jaded and images like these just distract the user from their mission. Do yourself and your users a favor and leave it out. Instead, use images that are meaningful and I'm not talking about the butterfly that signifies growth.

Only once all of the above steps are taken should you even start to think about design. So many web design companies lead with design. Then the client ends up with a site that may be gorgeous, but doesn't support goals and objectives. It is also of the utmost importance to design around content rather than creating a design and then stuffing the content into it. Your design should support your brand and serve as the wrapping paper to the gift. And again, make sure the design supports those key user paths; the first question your web designer should ask you is, "What's the first thing you want users to do when they come to your site. Don't forget to integrate the look and feel of your site with your offline materials-- if you don't, you'll just end up diluting your brand and your marketing efforts.

Your planning is still not done. The last bit is to plan the actual work--who is going to do what when. Who needs to give approval for what when. Throw in some milestones, stakeholders, and deliverables and you're done. In other words create a project plan. And by all means, plan the launch of the site. Make it deliberate, not an incomplete, rushed event because someone has it in their head that this just must be done before the end of the year, or else Create some buzz and PR for the launch of your new gorgeous and effective web site. Remember, you only have one chance to gain or lose users; if a new user comes to the site and does not see what their looking for, they're gone, forever, and you've just lost a possible new lifetime customer.

By planning, and doing it right instead of quickly, you'll have an end result that is not only effective but also matches everyone's expectations-- your boss, your sales team, your marketing people, and most importantly your users and your bottom line.

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Monday, February 26, 2007

Website Designing: Grow Your Business

In this ever-evolving online market, website is one of the most important thing through which you can grow business. In fact website is your window to the world. Technology has changed the face of communication and effective communication has transformed this world into a global village. A global village which is using the facilities provided by e-commerce. Online marketing has increased the demand for a strong web presence so that companies can add more clients to their existing list of clients and in the process generate more business. In order to take advantage from this trend, all companies should have a powerful website.

At Vsworx, we offer a full range of web design solutions for businesses as well as individuals. We cater to the needs of the clients based across the globe. Our team of thorough professionals with proven expertise in the field of web design & development are capable of providing high quality and cost-effective solutions including complex-database integrated websites, e-commerce websites, website redesign and maintenance solutions.

You must know that website designing is an art and it needs lot of creativity. You should be very careful while designing templates. You should have color sense and the most important thing, you should have visualization power. If your website is attractive, then visitors will enter your website. The second most important thing is that your content has to be search-engine friendly. It should have keyword-rich content. You should always remember search engine loves keyword-rich content. At Vsworx, you can be sure of receiving a website that not only attracts traffic but also generates more sales. We specialize in web development. We at Vsworx have the requisite expertise to translate your ideas into results.

Our designers have years of experience in creating a website that sells. Our team of creative web designers will work with you to establish a specification of your website’s look and feel, functionally and navigational framework. We will provide at least 3 mock-up designs based on your specification for you to choose from before we proceed with the development of the website. Every company is unique and therefore each design we create reflects your ideas and needs. While constructing web pages, we keep search engine in mind. Our search engine friendly web pages ensure top rankings. Our content writers are experts in writing excellent content enriched with unique keywords that will help your website gain maximum mileage in the long run.

To end with, it can be said that an effective website design is one which has an elegant, creative look representing company’s vision, needs, products and services to its targeted audience.

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Friday, February 16, 2007

Show Your Corporate Identity Through Web Design

A web site is a very commanding and an inexpensive marketing and advertising gizmo and a great way to develop your business into the online market world. Web Designing is an innovative work. For the millions and millions of web surfers, your web site is only the first impression of your business and your trustworthiness. The key concern in web design is how to add value to the user's experience and how to make them feel that they are truly got something by visiting your web site.

Now-a-days in this www world, all industries are in a need of good looking and attractive website, but few are eager to pay for an expertly designed site. Business owners on the other hand want their site that attracts visitors and wants to bring them back again and again, and hopefully buying their services or products. But, it can be rather baffling to choose the right web site designer/ website designing company. Only a specialized well designed website will bring the visitors in, and even then it may not due to the amount of competition on the web.

Web design industry is one of the most hastily developing areas in the world of commerce. The sizzling growth of WWW has created a demand for web sites. As this is the known fact that Web Design is the never-ending topic but, most of the companies are in very good position to deliver wow-inducing services apart from the other competitors in the given market.

Web design is a composite discipline that rivets an extensive range of skills. In fact, I would go as far as to say that, web design is “information design”. So, before you really go for the website designing, make it sure that it answers the following queries:

- Is the site intelligent and organized?
- Does it load quickly?
- Is it user-friendly?
- Are the designs exclusive, unique and creative?
- Whether they have used latest technology while designing the site?

Designing web site which loads quickly doesn’t signify that you have to compromise on the design. A diminutive effort on CSS and paying little bit more attention to the file sizes means that your site looks professional and loads quickly at the same time.

Only professional and extraordinary Web Design Company has positive answers to above questions and this result to a Successful Business.

There are many companies in India offering professional web design services and graphic design services with affordable rates. And also feel free to circulate and share out this as you wish - if you can post it on your own site or email it to your friends, then please do. It’s real time to reproduce the word far and wide amongst the all community across the world.

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Monday, January 15, 2007

Do You Know How To Create A Successful Web Site?

Most people do not realize that the key to making money on the Internet depends on your website. Your site does not have to be perfect to be successful. If your website is making you money, would you consider it successful? I would.

What is important is that a website should bring in money each and every day!

What makes a website successful?

A website that brings in targeted traffic and visitors who buy services or products is what actually makes a site valuable. A successful site should deliver leads, customers or sales. It sells and has value.

The success of your website will depend on one thing, your targeted keywords or keyphrases. Once your keywords or phrases rank high in the search engines then your site will get targeted traffic. If you take the time and effort to develop targeted keywords that relate to your websites content then your site will earn you money. If you do this one thing right, get high rankings for your websites keywords, then you will have a successful site, no matter how well your website is designed!

This certainly does not mean that your websites design does not play an important part in the success of your site.

Tips For Creating A Successful WebSite

1. Use professional graphics, headings and logos.

2. Your website should be easy to navigate with no dead links.

3. All links should be clearly visible and should make sense as far as where they will take your visitors.

4. Your fonts and colors should be easy to view and consistent throughout your entire site.

5. Set up your sites content in as simple a manner as possible, focusing on what your visitors are looking for, information.

6. Try to have only one topic per page with an appropriate title at the top. Include your main keyword or phrases in your title and within your pages content.

7. Make sure that your website loads quickly. Most visitors will not wait long for your site to load.

8. Once you finish developing your website make sure you check it for compatibility with different browsers such as Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, etc.

9. Keep your websites content informative but short. Provide valuable, useful information that will appeal to the search engines as well as your visitors.

10. Your meta tags are very important. Make sure you include your keywords or phrases in your meta tag title and description for each page of your site.

11. Provide fresh content on your website weekly, if not daily.

12. Do not user frames.

13. Optimize your website for search engines. Do this for every page you create.

If you can give your visitors what they are looking for, then your site will be successful.

How do you know what your visitors are looking for? Well, chances are that your visitors are looking for specific information, information that they will fine useful and that will also encourage them to visit your website often. Quality is more important then quantity. Interesting content can attract more visitors to your site then by copying as much text as possible onto your website and making it available.

How would you define good content? Your websites content should encourage your visitors to think, laugh, get upset, motivated or informed. But most importantly should bring them back for more.

Before you create your website you may want to think about these three things.

1. Determine the purpose of your website. Why do you want a website? What do you expect to gain from having a presence on the internet? Once you know what the purpose of your website is then you can easily determine your target audience.

2. Identify any short and long term goals. Put together a few short-term goals for your website that will be fairly easy to achieve over the next year. Long term goals can be realized by first identifying a number of short term goals that together could help you accomplish a long-term goal.

3. Figure out the image that you would like your website to portray. A good first impression is critical to your visitors, since they probably do not know you. If your website is not informative and organized you may appear unprofessional.

Creating a successful website will take time and persistence. Your site will continually grow and change. Just remember to provide informative content that is easy to read and your visitors will come back for more, the search engines will love you.

When your site starts getting tons of targeted traffic for a specific topic then that is when you know that you have created a successful website.

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