Over the years, the internet has grown into a marvelous avenue to promote your business.

In my last article, “Why Your Business Needs to Have an Internet Presence” (http://www.jvmediadesign.com/info37.html), I discussed 5 valid reasons why your business needs a website. In this article, I discuss some things to avoid and how a custom, professional website can help your business succeed.

Professional is the key. Remember, the internet has a global reach. Some of your new potential clientele may be learning of your business for the first time by visiting your website and the old cliché, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression”, still rings true.

When a business makes the decision to gain an internet presence, whether they are the largest corporation or the smallest home business, they may be tempted to take what appears to be the “easy way” to get the company website up and running fast. The three major potential pitfalls here are:

1) Some hosting comes with “do it yourself” capabilities and pre-made templates. Although this is a great way to upload photos of your summer vacation for your family and friends to see, this is not a good way to make that great first impression for your business. In short, these “solutions” really do not present a professional image, and often use very minimal templates and overall poor layout and design.

2) Many companies now sell website “templates” for low cost, making it easy for you to get up and running quickly. While this is true (you can get up and running quickly and many of these companies do sell more professional designs), you run the risk of other businesses using that SAME design. And to buy a “unique” copy of the template the cost is often just as, or more expensive, than if you were to hire a professional company to create a custom design for you.

3) Complete websites for $100! This may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I have actually seen advertisements for complete websites for very low prices. You must remember that you are investing in your business when you decide to have a custom website developed, and you really do get what you pay for. A professional design firm creates original designs, from scratch, tailor-made for each individual client – and the prices for that work can vary a lot, but do expect to pay a reasonable amount for the services.

These three potential pitfalls aside, the process of getting your business onto the World Wide Web does not have to be a confusing, time-consuming, and costly affair. Below is a succinct outline of the process.

1) First, you need to design on your domain name for your website. Avoid names with “-” in them and very long names. Try to be as succinct

as possible. It is easiest for your visitors to remember a URL that is your company name, or at the very least, keywords that describe your company. For instance, if your business is ABC Accounting, you could consider abcaccounting.com or something such as accountingservice.com. You may find that your first (and second!) choice for a domain name may already be taken, so you may have to get creative. Just remember that a domain name that reflects your business is key.

2) Shop around for the right design firm. There is no shortage of companies who can handle the design and development of your website. Do not be afraid to shop around. Prepare a detailed RFP (Request For Proposal) that outlines things such as the goals of your website, your target market, the information you would like to have on your website, and advanced features such as ecommerce. Review the portfolios of companies and send out your RFP to the ones you feel have the skills to do your job. When you’ve narrowed down the prospects, do not be afraid to ask for personal or telephone interviews. Find out what their design process and work flow is like. Ask for recommendations about what type of web hosting your site will need. Also, make sure to review the design agreement or contract with the company you choose (a professional company will ALWAYS require a contract before work begins).

3) Have a basic idea of what you would like your finished site to look like. It’s a good idea to do some “surfing” of the web to see what your competition and similar companies are doing, but look outside your industry as well for designs that catch your eye. This will give your design team a place to start and an idea of the style of design you expect for your own website.

4) Work on your “content”. The content of your site includes all the text you wish to display. This is a very important aspect to your site. Although you do not want to overwhelm your visitors with nothing but pages and pages of text, you do want to offer clear, concise, professionally composed and edited information. Proof read, proof read, proof read! If you are in doubt, it is best to consider hiring a professional copy writer. Remember that grammatical errors shout “unprofessional!” to the viewer.

5) Once your site is up and running, don’t be afraid to add or edit your content periodically. This keeps your pages “fresh” and shows repeat visitors that your business is active and “takes an interest” in staying up to date.

Sherry Holub received her degree in design from UCLA in 1995. She is now the Lead Designer and Creative Director at Southern California Studio, JV Media Design. http://www.jvmediadesign.com

Many websites have an “About Us” page. However, when you click on the “about us” button and reach some of these pages, often you do not learn much about who is behind the website. This is a pity, for you, but it is also a loss for the person who owns the website, for she has missed a chance to convince you why you should do business with her.

If you have a website which is trying to convince your viewers to buy goods or services from you, here are some ways to use the “about us” section to back up and support your sales message.

1. Put your photo on the page. No one likes to deal with a faceless person. How would you feel if you went into a store and the sales people were hidden in shadows or had masks over their faces? You most certainly would find it odd. Similarly, when someone comes to your website and clicks on the “about us” button she wants to find out who she is dealing with. One of the best things you can do to answer this desire is to put your photograph or some of your staff photographs on this page. This immediately let’s your potential customer know that she is dealing with “real” people.

2. Explain your special features and why your visitor should do business with you. The Internet is crammed with websites selling almost the same goods and services, and in the case of affiliate sites, exactly the same products. Why should someone do business with you and not your competitor?

Suppose you have a site selling DVD rental plans. On your “About Us” page you could explain your passion, interest and knowledge of films and show how

you have used this zeal to build a unique website. This information could make you stand out from the many other sites offering the same rental plans.

3. Don’t try to be what you are not. Anyone can build a slickly-designed corporate looking website and pretend that they have a huge organization, when in reality they are a home-based business working from one computer in their living room.

If you are a small business, don’t hide it. Often it works to your advantage because many people prefer to deal with one person or a few persons with whom they feel they will be able to communicate easily.

On the other hand, if you have a well-organized corporate structure, use the about us page to give some background on your set-up and to show how this organization serves the needs of its clients.

5. Give as much information as you can. Trust is one of the most important factors in successful selling on the Internet. You are asking your customers to take a leap of faith and send money to you, a complete stranger. Make it easier for them to do so by providing accurate information, contact details and anything else that will give people confidence in you.

So, take a look at your website’s About Us section, and see if you can provide the kind of information that will improve your website’s ability to build trust and convert your visitors into buyers.

Copyright 2004

Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor, and social worker. He has beenworking on the Internet since 1995 and is the proprietor of A1-Optimization,http://www.a1-optimization.com, a firm providing search engine optimization,copywriting, reciprocal linking, and other web promotion services. Hepublishes a monthly ezine, A1-Web Promotion Tips, available athttp://www.a1-optimization.com/newsletter.html

Cascading Stylesheets become more and more important in today’s webdesign.

But before you decide to get started using CSS you should know why CSS is so important and what its advantages are.

1. The content is separated from the design

Because you are able to create a separate Stylesheet and link it to all your webdocuments, you have great control over how your website looks. So if you want to change a certain aspect of your page, you only need to alter one file: your Stylesheet!

This Of course, generates some great flexibility. This flexibility is not available when your website is using tables for layout, inline font tags or inline defined colors.

A single CSS file can contain positioning, layout, font, colors and style information for an entire web site.

2. You site uses less bandwidth and loads faster

Because stylesheets are so lightweight, your website will load much faster. The main reason is because you do not need table layouts anymore for the positioning of elements. Since text loads really really fast your website will be visible in a flash.

This means that visitors will be happier when surfing your website. They only have to download the Stylesheet once, and it’s automatically reused for every page. So the only thing that needs to be loaded is the actual content.

On average a website will load five to ten times faster if it makes use of cascading style sheets.

3. Your website will automatically gain better search engine results

With CSS, you can position any element, anywhere you want. So if your menu is at the bottom of your HTML document, you can bring it up using absolute positioning. The reason this is useful is to make sure the search engine spiders pick up the main content first.

Another advantage you automatically gain is that your HTML code is much cleaner. So the search engine spider will not have to separate the junk code from the real content.

So make sure you put your logo text and your menu at the bottom

of your HTML document at put it at the top using CSS!

4. CSS is compatible with newer browsers

Because more and more browsers are used other than Internet Explorer on a Windows machine, you need to be sure that your website is accessible by all major and newer browsers.

By using webstandards, defined by the w3c, you are making sure your content is viewable in the future.

Because there are so many browsers these days, it is impossible to test your website in all these browsers on different configurations. Coding to standards is then the only practical solution.

5. CSS can be used to display the same content on different media.

Because you are able to define different stylesheets for different media you have great flexibility in presenting your content.

The printer for example, is a medium on itself. If someone prints out your website, you will be able to modify the look of it. Add an extra black and white logo, remove the advertisements and change the colors to black and white values. It’s all done easily by using cascading stylesheets. And the best thing is, visitors do not even have to know you created a new Stylesheet especially for the printer.

Stylesheets can also be created specifically for PDA’s and such. As you will understand, this adds some great flexibility to the presentation of your web document.

Conclusion

Cascading Style Sheets are created to make things easier. It gives you great control of your website and makes your visitors happy when they are surfing your website.

You are prepared for the future and will gain better search engine results automatically. Start using CSS to its full potential today! It will suit you well.

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Hilco van der Meer is an expert on Cascading Style Sheets.

He is known as the creator of the “How To Master CSS” course.

This course discusses CSS in a fun and easy way.

Apart from the book, he also created CSS training videos for the course.

The course can be found at: http://www.HowToMasterCSS.com

This is my second article on maximising web site viewability. Analysing screen resolution data.

With so many different configurations internet users have their computers set up with, it can be difficult to decide how web sites

should be configured so that it is viewable in as many configurations as possible.

So in the last 6 months i have been logging the statistics from my web design site to achieve as accurate a result as possible to answer this question.

The results are interesting reading and in my next few articles i will be analysing this data.

resolution statistics :

1024 x 768 Screen Resolution – 52%

1280 x 1024 Screen Resolution – 24%

1600 x 1200 Screen Resolution – 11%

800 x 600 Screen Resolution – 12%

1152x 864 Screen Resolution – 7%

These statistics basically show that internet users are moving towards their highest resoultion, with the largest resoultion of 800 by 600 going by the wayside. But there is still 12% using this resolution.

I see many web designers who seem to think nobody is using 800 by 600. Ive done several polls and gathered statistics on resolution and it has hovered around

10% for quite some time. I suspect this is people who have old computers, as the most popular operating system is XP and its resolution default is near 1024 by 768. All they accomplish is lost visitors and possible sales. For a visitor there is nothing worse than viewing a website that looks awful in their particular resolution.

You can check your website in the different resolutions by right clicking your desktop and selecting Properties, then go into the settings tab to change your resolution.

I would suggest making sure your website is viewable equally in 800 by 600 and 1024 by 768. This basically covers all screen resoultions.

http://www.onestop-webdesign.com One Stop Web Site Design specialises in creating the complete web site without the buyer having to understand all the jargon. Simply sign up to our low cost monthly plan, and give us an outline of what your website should be about and what products to sell. You can then sit back as we organise everything from hosting, web site development to setting up your shop and web site ready for going live.

If you’ve been on the Internet for a while, you’ve probably seen numerous examples of JavaScript use. JavaScript is a powerful scripting language used to create special effects on your website, but did you know it can also be used as a very powerful web design tool?

Have you ever joined a new affiliate program or created a new publication that you wanted to add to your existing navigational set up, but dreaded having to manually add the links to every page on your site?

You can use JavaScript to enable you to dynamically update every page on your website with just one file. This technique is the same technology used by numerous syndication services on the Internet. It enables them to deliver dynamically updated content to every website in their program.

Before we begin, if you’d like to see an example of a navigational system that is dynamically displayed, visit http://www.web-source.net. This website has over one thousand pages and each and every one of them displays its navigational system using JavaScript. If I want to add an additional link, I simply update one file and every page on the site is automatically updated.

The first step in setting up your JavaScript feed is to create the file that will contain your content. To do this, open a text editor such as NotePad and simply copy and paste your existing navigational setup into a new page. There is no need to begin the page with , etc. as you are only creating the feed for one section of your existing web page which already has those tags.

Once you’ve created your new page containing your navigational HTML, you’ll now need to add some additional JavaScript coding to each line of your HTML.

The first line of your new file will look like this: