Monday, 29 June 2009

User Friendly Website Designs

User Friendly Website Designs

We design websites to be functional, easy to navigate, and fast to load.

Web design is a science that is constantly evolving, but one thing remains true to good website design – there has to be a clear purpose to the website. Our websites communicate a clear purpose to the user through a variety of design functions that make your site functional and simple to use. After all, that’s crucial to getting people to return. And we can adapt that functionality to your existing site, or create an entirely new site based on the exact needs of your business. With our designs, you have complete input on every component.

Reviewing your website’s design

If you’re not getting all you can from your website, try building some tracking data through Google Analytics, a free tool that can enlighten you on which pages work and which don’t. And when you find pages that aren’t working, it will be wise to review its design and consider these ideas:

Navigation: How easy is it for a complete novice to navigate your site? If you designed it yourself or if you’ve lived with your site’s design for a long enough period of time, it’s a good idea to step back and watch someone unfamiliar with your site as they attempt to navigate. What may seem like obvious function or process to you may in fact be completely invisible or incomprehensible to a new visitor. And if a site is difficult to navigate once they get in, chances are they aren’t going to stay long.

Site map: This is one tool that can aid site navigation and help increase search engine rankings. Use visual aids to help walk visitors through the process of getting from point A to point B on your site. This complements navigation and can be beneficial in getting customers right to the page where merchandise is selected then the next page to close out their purchase.

Banner ads: These annoying ads take up a lot of site space and generate very little return. Visitors tend to shy away from them and look for a cleaner, more functional presentation. Handy links that get them what they came to your site for will do more to lead them to more time spent on your site and greater potential for purchases.

Browser compatibility: Remember that your site’s design needs to accommodate the major browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. And new browsers are being introduced, like Google Chrome and Opera – so once you’ve designed your site, try navigating it and going through all the functions your customers would on each browser type. See if there are any issues with pages loading or operating correctly and that visuals, graphics, animations, and links all perform as they should. If your site isn’t functional on the major browsers, you’ll lose customers before they even get in the door – and worst of all, you may never know it unless you test different browsers on your site.

Website designers who listen to you

Since we don’t use preformed templates in designing your website, you get the unique opportunity to work with our designers and build a winning relationship with them. You have total input into the design, and our team approaches the task at hand as one of proactive problem solving. Whatever the unique challenges of your business, our designers are prepared to find a creative solution. We’ve done it for years, and our designers are among the best and most-respected in the industry. We offer custom design that meets the needs of your business and is easy for your customers to use. Even if your old site just needs a makeover, our designers can deliver the results you want.

Thursday, 25 June 2009

User Friendly Website Designs

User Friendly Website Designs

We design websites to be functional, easy to navigate, and fast to load.

Web design is a science that is constantly evolving, but one thing remains true to good website design – there has to be a clear purpose to the website. Our websites communicate a clear purpose to the user through a variety of design functions that make your site functional and simple to use. After all, that’s crucial to getting people to return. And we can adapt that functionality to your existing site, or create an entirely new site based on the exact needs of your business. With our designs, you have complete input on every component.

Reviewing your website’s design

If you’re not getting all you can from your website, try building some tracking data through Google Analytics, a free tool that can enlighten you on which pages work and which don’t. And when you find pages that aren’t working, it will be wise to review its design and consider these ideas:

Navigation: How easy is it for a complete novice to navigate your site? If you designed it yourself or if you’ve lived with your site’s design for a long enough period of time, it’s a good idea to step back and watch someone unfamiliar with your site as they attempt to navigate. What may seem like obvious function or process to you may in fact be completely invisible or incomprehensible to a new visitor. And if a site is difficult to navigate once they get in, chances are they aren’t going to stay long.

Site map: This is one tool that can aid site navigation and help increase search engine rankings. Use visual aids to help walk visitors through the process of getting from point A to point B on your site. This complements navigation and can be beneficial in getting customers right to the page where merchandise is selected then the next page to close out their purchase.

Banner ads: These annoying ads take up a lot of site space and generate very little return. Visitors tend to shy away from them and look for a cleaner, more functional presentation. Handy links that get them what they came to your site for will do more to lead them to more time spent on your site and greater potential for purchases.

Browser compatibility: Remember that your site’s design needs to accommodate the major browsers, including Internet Explorere, Firefox, and Safari. And new browsers are being introduced, like Google Chrome and Opera – so once you’ve designed your site, try navigating it and going through all the functions your customers would on each browser type. See if there are any issues with pages loading or operating correctly and that visuals, graphics, animations, and links all perform as they should. If your site isn’t functional on the major browsers, you’ll lose customers before they even get in the door – and worst of all, you may never know it unless you test different browsers on your site.

Website designers who listen to you

Since we don’t use preformed templates in designing your website, you get the unique opportunity to work with our designers and build a winning relationship with them. You have total input into the design, and our team approaches the task at hand as one of proactive problem solving. Whatever the unique challenges of your business, our designers are prepared to find a creative solution. We’ve done it for years, and our designers are among the best and most-respected in the industry. We offer custom design that meets the needs of your business and is easy for your customers to use. Even if your old site just needs a makeover, our designers can deliver the results you want.

Effective, powerful marketing that gets your site in front of your customers consistently.

Marketing Through Search Engine Optimization

Effective, powerful marketing that gets your site in front of your customers consistently.

There are many ways to market your website, but the most powerful way is through search engine optimization. Your customers are looking for you right now. They’re Googling and Yahooing their way across the Internet, but if your site isn’t optimized so the search engines can find you and rank you high enough to be seen, your customers will end up on another site. Even websites with far less compelling content can get ranked higher through the hottest marketing strategy on the internet – search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization tips

Your website can be optimized in a number of ways. Here are some tips for reviewing your site for search engine optimization.

• Site development. Develop your site with DIV tags rather than tables. Table-based sites tend to load more slowly than sites that aren’t developed with tables.
• Write your own unique content for your home page. Search engines can spot plagiarized content and ignore it.
• Develop a realistic set of keywords and use them on your home page. Keywords are words or phrases people would use to find your site or product, and giving them presence on your home page will improve your site’s rankings.
• Keyword placement. The closer you can place your keywords to your site’s < body > tag, the better.
• Less Flash is more. Flash content slows down page loading, and takes more code to write than text.
• Make your meta mean something. Writing a meaningful meta description instead of just randomly dropping keywords into it will improve your page’s search engine rankings.
• The meta keywords you use can have minimum repetition, but your title and meta descriptions should be unique.
• Review your links. Make sure your site doesn’t contain any broken links.
• Create an xml site map. Link it from your homepage, unless you have a large number of links. If you have more than 100 links, keep your site map on your second page. Also, use the webmaster console to send your site map to Google.
• When you’re looking for a host, be sure to choose one that allows you to be on your own individual IP address.
• Keep your page weight trim (less than 40K) so it will load faster and be discovered quicker by the search engines.
• Title brevity. Keep your page titles short and match it to your content heading. Avoid repeating titles.
• Use UL and LI to build a search engine friendly menu instead of using Javascript.
• Never use underscores in URLs – hyphens work better.
• Use 301 redirections for any URLs that aren’t www. URLs. This will keep your site from being split into two different sites to search engines.
• Call background images with CSS and use repetitive images for your backgrounds.
• Once your site is live, begin building relationships with other compatible sites to begin link exchanges. The more sites your link can be linked to, the greater your exposure and more sources of traffic you can generate.

Sign up for a free site test

Is your site search engine optimized? From time to time, search engine companies will tweak their search formulas to improve the quality of returned sites, and we are constantly reviewing search engine strategies to keep your marketing fresh and focused. Search engine optimization will dramatically increase the traffic you’ll see on your site. You’ve put all this time and money into developing a great product and a compelling website – why not make sure it’s going to get the traffic you want? Contact us today for a free, comprehensive report!

Wednesday, 17 June 2009

Getting The Most Out Of Google Analytics

Getting The Most Out Of Google Analytics

You’ll be surprised at what you can learn about how your customers are finding you.

Sometimes it’s all too easy to get so close to your product that you lose the ability to be objective. You may find yourself in a similar situation with your website. What may seem like a finely honed marketing tool may be in need of a tune-up. Google Analytics is a free tool designed to analyze up to fifty web pages and generate detailed reports on each page’s performance. It can show you how visitors found your site, how they explored it, and advise you on what to do to enhance their visit. Signing up for Google Analytics is as easy as signing up for an email account, and even though the service is free, it’s remarkably thorough in the information it can provide on your website’s performance.

Top benefits

• If you have a Google Adwords account, you can see your Analytics reports on a separate tab. It’s easy to link the two accounts together, and it allows advertisers to compare their ads’ performance so they can utilize the best-performing ads. Analytics will also track other Google products, including AdSense.
• The Top Contest report lets you know which of your pages are driving the most views. If a page is showing a high bounce rate from viewers abandoning the page, this could be an indication that there are design issues with the page.
• In Google Analytics, “Goals” are website pages that become conversions for your site such as a purchase confirmation page or a thank you page that is seen in response to usage of a form on your site. By setting up Goals, you can gain insight as to which visitors are being converted to customers.
• Google Analytics can be shared within your organization so other key members of your staff can benefit from the myriad reports available, and you can act as the account administrator to determine exactly what access permissions each staff member is allowed.
• There are over 80 reports with drag and drop features available to give you insight to how your web pages are performing. You can also set up custom reports that will allow you to filter your information in whatever configuration makes the most sense for your business.

Navigating the Analytics interface

In the upper left corner of the orange page bar is a link (“Analytics settings”) that takes you back to your settings page for an overview of your accounts and profiles. There, you’ll be able to edit all your accounts and profiles. And from that page, you will be able to view your Google Analytics tracking code. Goals are also easily created there.

Also on the Analytics interface page, there is a drop down menu in the top orange page bar that lets you navigate quickly to any of your accounts. In the upper right corner of the Analytics interface is a “Settings” link that differs from the “Analytics settings” link. This “Settings” link allows you to determine which email addresses are associated with your account, and lets you determine which email notifications you want sent and to whom they should go.

To the right of the “Settings” link is a “My Account” link that will show you all of your Google accounts on one page. To the right of “My Account” you will find a “Help” link that offers support content from Google’s Help Center, Analytics Help Group, and others culled from over 30,000 pages of help-related content. Finally, at the right of the “Help” link is the “Sign Out” link.

Contact us for more assistance

Once you’ve set your site up for Google Analytics, contact us and let us show you how we can improve your site through our exclusive bespoke web design and search engine optimization. We’ll even throw in a free, comprehensive report to show you just how well your site performs for Google and all the other search engines.

Saturday, 13 June 2009

Are you ready to go global?

Internet Marketing – a brave new world

Are you ready to go global?

The Internet has revolutionized the way we communicate. Now, instead of real-time conversations between two people that spread information one person at a time, we all have the ability to communicate on a global scale. One voice can be heard by millions. It’s the same with your company. The Internet gives you access to a customer base that is on the biggest of stages – quite literally, the world.

Internet marketing strategies are different. That’s why we have developed Internet marketing tools that allow you to reach the world while building an intimate bond with each individual customer. In fact, we can show you how to refine the way your business communicates on every level, whether it’s with your vendors, your existing customers, or the new ones you want to reach via the world-wide web.

How to optimize your site for search engines

• Choose the right keywords that will get your site noticed. You should choose the same keywords your customers are most likely to use – words they’ll be using on the search engines to find you. Use them consistently throughout your website.
• Create a title tag relevant to your site containing the keywords. And it’s a good idea to add h1, h2, and h3 tags – typically small title tags with your keywords – and they will help further optimize your site.
• Perform a 301 redirect on any non-www. URLs to a www. URL to prevent search engines from classifying your site as two different websites. This will help keep your searches focused and prevent your rankings from being diluted.
• Make sure your link anchor text is built around your keywords. Google in particular takes a strong look at anchor text in its site cataloging. Be careful to use slight variations in your anchor text to prevent search engines from treating your site like it is spam

Other search engine optimization strategies

• Make sure all text on your site is written with the search engines in mind. Keyword usage within your site’s text will improve its ranking during searches.
• Be proactive and submit your site to search engines and other directories, rather than assume they are going to find you. This ensures your site is being cataloged and will alert your to any issues that might hurt your rankings.
• Review your site’s content on a regular basis. Content must be fresh and relevant in order to keep visitors returning to your site. And you will want to keep your keyword presence up throughout the site as you update it.
• Use a data analysis tool (such as Google Analytics) to review your site’s traffic and track how well your changes are impacting your site. You’ll gain valuable insight into your site’s traffic – what search engines are sending visitors to you, what countries and states they reside in, how well you’re converting visitors to sales, etc. You will also get a clearer picture of what keywords they’re using to look for you. Modify your keywords if you determine a trending phrase that will improve website traffic.

Free search engine optimization report

Take the first step toward maximizing your business’ potential. Contact us for a free, comprehensive report on how well your website performs with search engines – the first step in being found on the Internet. We’ll analyze your site for key word content, and show you how your site performs based on search engine optimization strategies. And we can show you how to improve that performance dramatically. So contact us for your free report right now, while you’re here. It’ll be the smartest move you’ll make.

Web Design Liverpool

Thursday, 11 June 2009

Sign up for a free site test

Is your site search engine optimized? We can show you just how well it performs in a free, comprehensive test. We’ll examine your existing content and look at the relevant key words, then show you what the search engines see. We guarantee you will view your site in a whole new way. Contact us today for your free report!

Marketing Through Search Engine Optimization

Effective, powerful marketing that gets your site in front of your customers consistently.

There are many ways to market your website, but the most powerful way is through search engine optimization. Your customers are looking for you right now. They’re Googling and Yahooing their way across the Internet, but if your site isn’t optimized so the search engines can find you and rank you high enough to be seen, your customers will end up on another site. Even websites with far less compelling content can get ranked higher through the hottest marketing strategy on the internet – search engine optimization.

Proven search engine expertise to optimize your site

We know what makes search engines work. We know what they look for and how they rank sites. When a customer uses a search engine to look for a website, they will enter a word or phrase to pull up a list of sites that contain the word or phrase. These key words are used by search engines to catalog and rank sites. And the more a key word is used in the site, the higher it’s going to be ranked by the search engine. Also, your site’s size – how many pages and how much content it has – determines its presence and also is a consideration reviewed by search engines. Key words give your site relevance, and search engines determine how high to rank your site based on its presence and relevance.

Why search engine optimization works

Now that you know about how search engines see key words and use them to rank your site, you’re probably thinking why not just use a page of nothing but key words repeated a bunch of times in order to skew the search in your favor – well, search engines are one step ahead of the game. Search engines will block sites that over-use key words. Our expertise comes in knowing just how and where to strategically place key words in order to really optimize your site for the search engines. And we work with you to determine exactly what key words a customer might use to look for your web site, so not only are you using enough key words in the appropriate context and placement, you’re also using the right key words – smart ones that will set your site apart from your competitor’s.

Search engine optimization is smart marketing

There isn’t a more cost-effective way to market your website than search engine optimization. We can help laser focus your marketing so it cuts through the clutter and targets the people you want to reach. We can tailor your search engine optimization to synchronize perfectly with your long range business plan. And our tried and tested methods of search engine optimization will have your site standing head and shoulders above your competition.

From time to time, search engine companies will tweak their search formulas to improve the quality of returned sites, and we are constantly reviewing search engine strategies to keep your marketing fresh and focused. Search engine optimization will dramatically increase the traffic you’ll see on your site. You’ve put all this time and money into developing a great product and a compelling website – why not make sure it’s going to get the traffic you want?

Wednesday, 10 June 2009

FREE SEO REPORTS FOR ALL!

Marketing Through Search Engine Optimization

Effective, powerful marketing that gets your site in front of your customers consistently.

There are many ways to market your website, but the most powerful way is through search engine optimization. Your customers are looking for you right now. They’re Googling and Yahooing their way across the Internet, but if your site isn’t optimized so the search engines can find you and rank you high enough to be seen, your customers will end up on another site. Even websites with far less compelling content can get ranked higher through the hottest marketing strategy on the internet – search engine optimization.

Proven search engine expertise to optimize your site

We know what makes search engines work. We know what they look for and how they rank sites. When a customer uses a search engine to look for a website, they will enter a word or phrase to pull up a list of sites that contain the word or phrase. These key words are used by search engines to catalog and rank sites. And the more a key word is used in the site, the higher it’s going to be ranked by the search engine. Also, your site’s size – how many pages and how much content it has – determines its presence and also is a consideration reviewed by search engines. Key words give your site relevance, and search engines determine how high to rank your site based on its presence and relevance.

Why search engine optimization works

Now that you know about how search engines see key words and use them to rank your site, you’re probably thinking why not just use a page of nothing but key words repeated a bunch of times in order to skew the search in your favor – well, search engines are one step ahead of the game. Search engines will block sites that over-use key words. Our expertise comes in knowing just how and where to strategically place key words in order to really optimize your site for the search engines. And we work with you to determine exactly what key words a customer might use to look for your web site, so not only are you using enough key words in the appropriate context and placement, you’re also using the right key words – smart ones that will set your site apart from your competitor’s.

Search engine optimization is smart marketing

There isn’t a more cost-effective way to market your website than search engine optimization. We can help laser focus your marketing so it cuts through the clutter and targets the people you want to reach. We can tailor your search engine optimization to synchronize perfectly with your long range business plan. And our tried and tested methods of search engine optimization will have your site standing head and shoulders above your competition.

From time to time, search engine companies will tweak their search formulas to improve the quality of returned sites, and we are constantly reviewing search engine strategies to keep your marketing fresh and focused. Search engine optimization will dramatically increase the traffic you’ll see on your site. You’ve put all this time and money into developing a great product and a compelling website – why not make sure it’s going to get the traffic you want?

Sign up for a free site test

Is your site search engine optimized? We can show you just how well it performs in a free, comprehensive test. We’ll examine your existing content and look at the relevant key words, then show you what the search engines see. We guarantee you will view your site in a whole new way. Contact us today for your free report!

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