How to Build a Business Website

Written by: Nowshade Kabir
http://weblog.rusbiz.com

A recent report done by Yankee Group, a Boston-based market research company, states that at the end of 2004 around 34 percent of small and medium sized businesses in North America are selling goods and services on the Internet and another 25 percent is planning to do so within next 12 months. Online sales in the United States represented 8.4 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product in 2004. This figure is increasingly rising. This means, if your company is not paying serious attention to this vital channel of sales and marketing, you are simply missing the boat.

In its basic form a website is a bundle of pages full of texts, graphics and other electronic files published on the Internet for people to view. How you organize your website depends totally on your online goals. Websites are built for various purposes. You can use a website as a sales point, a marketing channel, a corporate image building tool, a branding channel, an information center, a CRM center, a product launching center, and for number of other reasons. When you plan to build a website, you should base your online strategy keeping in mind two things: your online objectives and your potential audience.

SOME OF THE MOST COMMON TYPES OF CORPORATE WEBSITES ARE:
Information providing sites
Most of today’s sites fall in this category. The simplest of them are actually mere reflection of offline corporate brochures.

Promoting company
The idea behind some of information-driven sites is to give maximum information related to the company. A holding company, for example, may prefer to have a site like this. These sites usually include: company history, company related news, mission statement, profiles of key executives, a good FAQ section, etc. Graphics are used in these sites only to accentuate the text information. However, the sites may include video and FLASH presentation as well.

Promoting products or services
A pharmaceutical company to promote its recently launched medicine may develop a website surrounding the product. The sole purpose of this type of sites is to create awareness of specific products or services.

Creating brand awareness
A manufacturing company that sells its products exclusively through distributing channel may develop a website to provide ultimate information on the products and create brand. These sites complement company’s offline promotional efforts and always built in consistence with other commercials.

E-commerce
Online sales are done through the e-commerce sites. Main characteristics of an e-commerce site include:
1. Detail products or services information with pictures and sometimes with multimedia presentations, drawings, charts, etc. 2. Shopping cart – so that the buyer can select one or several items to purchase.3. Payment gateway – so that the buyer can make payments for the products or services purchased.

Corporate portals
A Website that offers a broad range of resources and services such as email, forums, company pertinent news & articles, membersonly area, etc. is generally called a portal. Portals are intended to be the gateway for their respective audience.

B2B exchange
Business to Business Exchange is an online platform where buyers and sellers come to communicate, collaborate and make business transactions. The main objective of a B2B Exchange is to create a venue, filled with features that allow members to efficiently conduct business processes through the Internet. A private B2B exchange is a corporate portal with a marketplace. It is designedto provide services to the company’s own buyers, sellers and workforce.

WEBSITE PLANNING
Before starting to build your website you should first develop a plan in line with your online objectives, target audience and resources. You can write your plan thoroughly as a storyboard. A storyboard is something similar to a flowchart of all the website components you deem necessary. Once you have a clear picture of what you are going to build, sit with your developers and create a technical scope of the project. This is absolutely necessary! In most of the cases your entrepreneurial vision will differ drastically with the way a programmer look into your requirement.

While working on your scope or even after publishing your websitebear in mind the following crucial aspects of effective websites:

Page loading timeIn the euphoria of having a great slick website, often, we use images that make the pages too heavy. A page which takes just one second to load with T1 speed will need full 55 seconds to load with a 28.8 modem. Web surfers are impatient bunch of click-happy people they don’t like to wait too long! Make sure you optimize each and every page of your website before launchingthe site! Otherwise, you will loose a large portion of your would-be visitors for nothing!
- Look at your pages from a visitor’s prospective.
- Eliminate all images that are not so important to deliveryour messages.- Optimize the remaining images with available tools.
- FLASH images are may be cool, don’t use them just because they are cool. Use them wisely.

Host your website in a server with a good bandwidth.

Navigation
Your website’s links should be well-defined, persistent, and easily visible. If the site is large with many pages, you must have a site map page. Remember that not all visitors will land to your homepage, in order to keep them browsing through your site make navigation from your main landing pages as easy as possible. Try giving them compelling reasons to do so by using catchy links. Also, make sure that all your links work correctly and take a visitor to right place.
Webpage consistencyAll your web pages should have one consistent look. This will give your website a professional appearance, and visitors while browsing through your site will always know that they are still on your website.

Content is the king
If you want your visitors to return back to your site, regularlyadd fresh, relevant and quality content to your website. Internetusers are information hungry people, feed them with fresh information on a regular basis and you will have good number of loyal visitors to your website.
If you already have a website make sure you optimize your websitefrom user’s point of view. According to Gartner, a market research company, even a minor investment in improving the usability of a company website will yield an annual return of 10 to 20 per cent. It increases brand awareness, leads to higher user adoption rates and possibly more transactions per user. Average order size starts to rise and the site generates more return visits from customers.

RESOURCES
Website Performance Tool and Web Page Speed Analysis:http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze
Check your web pages for bad links:http://www.siteowner.com/badlinks.cfm
Webmaster resources: http://bignosebird.com

About the author
Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he has wide experience in Business Consulting, International Trade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace with solutions to start and run online business.You can contact him at mailto:nowshade[at]rusbiz.comhttp://ezine.rusbiz.com

Blogging for Business

Written by: Amitabh Shukla
Amitabh Shukla

Business blogs are primarily used to improve a company's communication both internally and externally. Business blogs are a type of communication channel that could be used effectively in product launches, team interaction internally within the company or interaction between clients and company. With the level of interactivity blogs provide, clients feel more confident in the company. Not to mention the amount of traffic it brings to the main site.

Personal and business blogs: What is difference between two?

There is not much of difference between personal and business blogs visually but there is a fine difference between them in terms of reputation and brand attached.

Business blogs should be well planned before hand. Companies can't afford to just walk away after launching their blog. Business blog has to be successful. Constant and consistent posts are the rule of the game. Blogsphere is full of best writers and faster one learns their rule, better for them. Companies can't just rely on the fact that they are market leaders in their business so they will be successful with their blogs too.

The postings on business blog should be open and should portray personality of the writer and the company. The postings on business blogs should be very informal, and should be written in first person voice. Posts should be informative and relevant with an expert touch to it.

Business Blogs and it content:

According to search engine optimizers, "Content is King". Indeed this is true for websites but not for a blog. Blog is all about writing with a particular voice and personality. A lot of people would like the style and would stick to the blog with regular visits. A lot of them will hate it and would never return.

Content for a business blog should be written in a strong voice with high consistency in quality. It becomes somewhat difficult to maintain quality with regular postings, but no choice. A few bad or substandard posts and regular visitors to the blog will fly off.

Important

Don't hammer your visitors every time with posts like how great is your product and so on. Add some funny incidences or bit of humor to your postings. Talk something about how employees enjoyed drinks in a party organized at particular department. Add some lighter moments in between posts.

Amitabh Shukla(Personal blog for the author is at Seo Expert)

5 Surefire Ways To Ruin Any Website

by Timothy Ward

Owning a website gives you certain rights. For example, you have the right to plaster your URL all over the doors and windows of your SUV in hopes that someone in one of the 7 cars you pass on the way to work will get the urge to visit your website and spend gobs of money. You own the website-this is your right. You also have the right to post pictures of your family, friends, pets, and other totally uninteresting images all over your website after all it's yours. One of the biggest rights you have as a webmaster is the right to make your website successful (and profitable) or to run it into the ground like a 737 missing both engines and landing gear. For those of you who despise online success and frown upon the wealths of cyberspace I have compiled a list of 5 ways to ruin any website.

1. Make Your Website As Cluttered As Possible
Nothing makes visitors leave quicker than a cluttered website that is hard to navigate around. So if you want people to flee from your site like it's a rabid wolf then be sure to put as much junk as you can on the homepage. Then make the links to the rest of the website hard to find. Be sure to have lots and lots of pictures, forms, banners and pop-ups as well. All the relevant information should be well hidden, and the main focus should appear to be the countless programs you want visitors to sign up for. That should keep any pesky visitors from ever coming back.

2. Never Update Your Website
If someone were to visit your website today and then come back 6 months from now they should see the same information. Nothing should be updated. This will let them know that you care nothing about the website and that you have nothing new to offer them. The next time they see a listing for your website they won't even bother to visit. Great!

3. Never Ever Advertise
Advertising cost money and it might draw some good targeted traffic to your website. So be sure to never advertise. You can just keep promoting your website through those same tired free programs that you have been using for years. This should bring you little or no traffic, and the traffic that does come won't be your target audience so they're almost certain to leave without spending a dime. Awesome!

4. Always Sell A Crappy Product
Selling good products online can get you a good reputation. A good reputation can get you repeat sales and new customers. You don't want all this hassle. So find the worst products you can and sell them exclusively. This should damage your reputation to the point where no one wants to bother buying from your site. Be sure to lie about your product too. This will further ruin any kind of credibility you may have.

5. Never Respond To Any Questions
If someone emails you with a question about your website or products on your website, Do Not Reply. Replying could be considered courteous and businesslike. You don't want to come off that way. It's better to just delete any emails from people who were interested enough in your website to take the time to email. Hopefully this will drive them to one of your competitors websites and out of your hair.

There you have it folks. Five great ways to ruin any website. So don't blame me if you don't follow these tips and you become an online success story. I've done all I can to try and help out. And now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to write down the URL that's airbrushed on the hood of this Ford Explorer beside me...
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Tim Ward invites you to visit http://www.timward.1afm.com to sign up for his weekly humor column 'I Never Said I WasNormal'.
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Combine Links with Quality Resources and You’re on a Winner

Written by: Jim Green
WRITING FOR PROFIT

There are 1001 ways to drive traffic to your websites.

I reckon I’ve tried most of them over the years and in the process have become blasé over the whole process of traffic promotion - but here’s one that surprises even a hardened old cynic like me…

Several months ago I designed a single-page website, launched the creature as a sub-domain and promptly forgot about it. In point of fact it was so absentmindedly conceived that the tag still contains the template reference.

So what happened to it?

Here’s what….it has achieved some amazing rankings.

- Yahoo! # 2 (out of 8,270,000 web pages)
- AltaVista #2
- AllTheWeb #2

What’s even better…

I attached my little afterthought single page to two of my prime sites and quality traffic is rocketing to both of them. These sites have always performed well for me but now they’re on fire.

1st CREATIVE WRITING COURSE
#13 on Yahoo! (out of 8,720,000 web pages) for keyword phrase ‘creative writing course’

HOW TO PRODUCTS-XL
# 10 on Yahoo! (Out of 706,000,000 – yes 706 million – web pages)
for keyword phrase ‘how to products’

What is the secret of the single page winner?

It consists entirely of LINKS to QUALITY RESOURCES with reciprocal arrangements for most.

The trick is to narrow the focus on your niche and link to the cream of the marketplace including some of your competition…

If you visit the website in the resource box and click on RESOURCES you can check out my little one-page monster for yourself – and thereafter do a check on the search engines listed.

Jim Green is a bestselling author with an ever-growing string of niche non-fiction titles to his credit. View his output at http://1st-creative-writing-course.com

Are You Choosing Your Website Colors Safely?

Written by: Maricon Almonte Williams
Printing Shoppers

Many designers are overlooking the vitality of colors in creating a web site. Why is it vital? It is because it creates a mood – it can annoy, irritate or interest and uplift the spirit of the visitors. Your site can end up plain and boring or chaotic if you don’t take a look at your colors minutest details.

If you are not an expert in colors, you can consult the color wheel to achieve safe colors. You can opt for complementary colors, those that are found across another color, for safe choices. Orange and blue implies excitement. Green and blue on the other hand, implies unanimity and agreement. You can also opt for monochromatic colors or in the web design parlance – the monolithic approach. It is the approach which uses different shades of the same color. Experts are saying that monoliths is best suited for business sites because of their classy and subtle appearance. Just a word of caution to web designers, this approach can sometimes result to boring colors and may in turn, need an addition of black or other solid colors.

As a general rule, use colors that are pleasing to the eyes and will complement to the subject matter. Thus, it can be concluded that rich, classy and traditional colors like blue, gray, brown and burgundy can be best suited for business websites.

You can also use the conventional black texts with white backgrounds to ensure readability. To grab attention to the subject matter, you can use the bold color red. In order to make your website dynamic yet still readable, you can use contrasting colors. You can have the trial and error method to get best results.

To further guide you with what colors can do. Here are some of their portrayed identities:

Blue means water, peaceful, sad and masculinity.
Red means passion, love, hot and fire.
Yellow conveys happiness, caution, construction, and slowdown.
Green connotes jealousy, envy, beginner, fertility and spring.
Purple may mean royal, grand and comedy.
Orange conveys warmth, Halloween, fall and seasons.
Brown may mean warning, dirty, fall, earthy, environmental and grounded.
Pink entails femininity, cute, softness and weakness.

Your choices of color represent you. It must also represent your products or services. It must be used as a tool to attract visitors and not to irritate them. Another rule of thumb that you must consider is that you MUST use web safe color. What do I mean web safe? It means that the colors must appear sound and clear on the monitor. That way you can be assured that what the visitors are seeing are the exact colors that you want to convey thus, the exact identity.

Indulge in the enthralling world of the powerful colors and you will be delighted with the positive output.

For Comments and Questions about the Article you may Log - on to http://www.printingshoppers.com

3 Simple (and Little-known) Psychological Tricks that Can Increase Your Profits by 100% or More!

by Michael Hopkins

Your sales page is the life-blood of your business. It's the number one difference between a successful product and an unsuccessful product.

Now, a lot has been written about the art of sales copy writing and, if you've been marketing online for any length of time already, you'll be familiar with most of the main points (a strong headline, focus on benefits, a strong call to action and so on).

However, in this article I'm going to introduce you to three very simple, little-known psychological tricks that will instantly increase the readability of your sales page and, thus, greatly increase your chances of closing the sale.

By the way, I learned the first two tricks (and a lot more) from George Katsoudas through the (excellent) free e-course he offers at FrankensteinMarketing.com.

Okay, here goes...

Psychological Sales Page Trick #1: The Big Letter
It's well known that, if you can get your visitors to read the opening paragraph of your sales page, you've hugely increased the chances that they'll read your entire page. And, if they read the entire page, your chances of making a sale have improved big time.

Now, let me ask you a question...
Have you ever wondered why magazines and newspapers use a BIG first letter in the opening paragraph of their articles? (For example, if the article begins with the word 'Why', there will be a great big black W at the beginning).
They do this, because it draws the reader down in to the article.
You can use this very same principle on your website. By using a big letter at the start of your opening paragraph, your visitors eyes will be drawn in and you'll succeed in getting them launched into your sales page.
But don't just make your letter bigger so it sticks up above the others in the paragraph - that simply doesn't work.
Your big letter needs to be aligned so that the top of the letter is in line with the top of the text that follows. (You can see a very good example of this on the 'Website Conversion Secrets' sales page here).
To achieve this effect, create an image file of the letter and then, using your web editing software align it to the left of the text.
It takes just five minutes to do this, but it will be five minutes well spent.

Psychological Sales Page Trick #2: Indented Paragraphs
This is so simple, so effective and yet hardly anyone does it!
Indent your paragraphs!
Just adding a few spaces before the start of each paragraph (just like in this article) makes it easier for the reader to continue reading your text.
And, as I've said, if you can get people reading your sales text, you're well on the way to making a sale.

Psychological Sales Page Trick #3: Add Order to Your Form
Summarize everything in your order form.
Lots of people won't read your entire sales page and will just want to know what you're offering and how much it costs.
For this reason, it's important that, at the point of ordering, you include every bit of essential information related to your offer: the product name with a brief description, the free bonuses, the price, the guarantee, the assurance of a secure ordering procedure and the compelling reason why the visitor should buy now.
The best way to do this is to have all the order links on your sales page point to a separate 'order' page containing everything I mentioned above.
Again, you can see this technique at work on the "Website Conversion Secrets" site.
By the way, do you notice the unchecked check-box, followed by "Yes,..."? You've probably seen them used a lot by now. Why? Well, it's another psychological trick. Mark Joyner - after an extensive series of tests - concluded that the addition of this check-box resulted in a 32% increase in sales! Go figure.
And there you have it. Three simple tricks that will get more people reading your sales letters helping you to make more profits.
Don't put it off. Try it out on your sales page today. You can use the Scientific Internet Marketing Assistant that you got for free in your last issue of Ebook Times to test the results. I'm confident that you'll be pleasantly surprised!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Michael Hopkins is owner of BizzyDays Ebook Publications.Visit now to download original ebooks for free at:http://www.bizzydays.com

Dramatically Increase Your Traffic at Zero Cost!

by Michael Hopkins

Bringing in lots of quality traffic to your website is the key to success for your online business. But it also happens to be the hardest and most expensive part.
Fortunately, there's still ONE easy way to bring in floods of quality traffic without spending a cent...

Just write simple articles and submit them for publication in relevant ezines.
It's not new and it's not revolutionary but it DOES work!

There are several benefits to using articles to promote your product or service:
· You can generate huge amounts of quality targeted traffic by having your articles published in ezines related to your market.
· By having your articles published on other websites (and ezine archives), you'll increase your link popularity as well as directly bring in extra traffic.
· By including the articles on your site, you'll have some good keyword-rich content for the search engines to pick up on.
· Once you've written a few articles centered around the same topic, compile them into a free ebook and, hey presto, you've got yet another traffic-generating tool!
· You can make your articles available to your affiliates as a tool to promote your product.
· You instantly enhance your reputation in the eyes of potential customers.

In short, articles are an EXCELLENT promotion and sales tool.
And, despite what you might think, writing quality articles that Ezine publishers WILL use is much easier than you might think.

Consider these titles and see how many articles related to your product/service you could write...
7 Ways To...
10 Tips For First-Time...
6 Things You Never Knew About...
8 Useful Resources for...
10 Websites That...

These kind of titles ALWAYS work well at attracting the attention of the target audience AND they're quick and easy to write -- all you need is an introduction, the list of points and a concluding paragraph. Heck, just find a few useful websites or free tools related to your subject and you're probably half way there!

Once you've written your article, wait a few days and then read it again. This will give you a fresh perspective to make some improvements and clean up errors. (Don't ignore this step -- it's important).

Now, start submitting your article to article announcement lists and article directories. Here are a few to get you started:

Announcement Lists(Note: Sending an email will subscribe you to the list. It's best to avoid using your main email address if you don't want to have loads of articles arriving to your inbox every day).- article_announce-subscribe@egroups.com- free-content-subscribe@onelist.com- publishinyours-subscribe@onelist.com- articles_archives-subscribe@egroups.com
Article Directories:- GoArticles.com- EzineArticles.com- IdeaMarketers.com- Amazines.com- NetterWeb.com- Article Central

Once you've done submitting your article there, it's time to get specific...

Start submitting to relevant ezines and websites inviting them to publish it. You'll find tons of ezines that are crying out for content in Ezine Directories like Zinos.com or Amazines.com.

Make sure the ezines you're submitting to accept articles and, if so, find out if they have specific guidelines for submission. It's a good idea to find out the name of the publisher so that you can personalize your submission.

This is a copy of the message I use when submitting articles. Feel free to copy it and adapt it to your own needs:

Hi,
My name is [YOUR NAME] and I'm the owner of
[YOUR SITE AND URL].
I've included my latest article for you to consider publishing
in your ezine [EZINE NAME].
The title is "[ARTICLE TITLE]"
I'm certain your readers will find value in it.
Please feel free to publish the article (below) along with the short
bio at the end. I'd greatly appreciate a courtesy copy if you decide
to use it.
Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to your ezine.
Wishing you continued success!
[YOUR NAME]
[YOUR EMAIL]
[YOUR URL]
Article: "[ARTICLE TITLE]"
Article size: xxx words (body)
=======================================================
Article Begins Here...
=======================================================
[ARTICLE TEXT]
=======================================================
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
[YOUR BIO]
=======================================================

And there you have it, a quick and easy (yes, easy!) approach to generating quality targeted traffic in the short and long term.

Believe me, if you want to do just one thing this week towards developing your online business, then don't put it off...

Write that article today!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Michael Hopkins is owner of BizzyDays Ebook Publications.Visit now to download original ebooks for free at:http://www.bizzydays.com/