Website Hosting and the Starting Point for Customers

Website hosting packages often include a Web Content Management System , so the end-user doesn’t have to worry about the more technical aspects. These Web Content Management systems are great for the average user, but for those who want more control over their website design, this feature may not be adequate. Web Hosting by Emerald is devoted to providing essential information on the best web hosting services they provide. Our main purpose has always been to help our readers to find affordable website hosting plans. Website Hosting is open to new clients who purchase Web Hosting, which is offered for one, three, and twelve-month terms. At sign-up, customers choosing the three-month term will be billed for three months’ service, with the first three months charged at the discounted rate.

Internet web hosting is an internet storage service that gives individuals, organizations, and businesses the ability to publish web sites on the web. Web Hosting services provide space on their web servers that clients can “rent” and store personal web sites. Website hosting isn’t something you tend to think about every day. It’s something you purchase when you first get an idea for a site, you setup and then hopefully forget.

Shared hosting is a way for a hosting company to offer low cost internet web hosting to their clients while having more users on one server and thus less overhead costs. Shared SSL should almost never be used, if you value the security of your server and that of your online clients. Your web host should also allow you to use SSL at no additional purchase. Shared hosting means that on a server are hosted many web sites that all have a distinct quota of hard drive space and bandwidth. They all run at the same time and there can be from hundreds to thousands of web sites on the same server.

Internet web hosting can be low cost, but also reliable and fast. Our low cost web hosting plans come with full email pop3,smtp and imap support with email aliases and responders. Web hosting is the service that allows your website to be viewed on the Internet. Such services will usually cost a low monthly fee, and may be included in the services provided by the web designer you’ve hired to build your website.

How You Can Get a Web Designer To Build Your Site

Have you received quotes from various ecommerce website designers for your dream website? Examine the quality. First of all, try to find out the number of pages and the scripting languages offered by a quote are according to your requirements or not. These factors allow you to generate an estimate cost of the ecommerce website of your own which considerably reduces the chances of getting scammed.

Whatever your customer pays to you online is directly submitted in your bank account by the means of this payment gateway. Database: In an ecommerce website, each and everything depends on the database as all your products and their details are kept under it. It is so because you are going to trade online which means you have to add, delete or update the details of your products. This is why you need a good ecommerce web design. Also you can get a website quote.

What about the updates. You need to be very conscious about the updates of your ecommerce website. Designing a website doesn’t mean to publish it over the Internet. In case your customers don’t like the interface of your website, then it becomes essential to change it instantly.

So You Want To Build A Website?

Introduction

When I decided I needed a website for my business I had no idea of the very many processes involved. Like most people, I thought web design meant deciding on the graphics and the look of the pages and then by some magic it would all happen.I simply hadn’t had any exposure to the planning and build process which I now know to be extensive!

I have a friend who is in the business of SEO web design and web content management systems so I approached him for a quote. As a complete novice who is computer literate up to a point, I was amazed at the depth of initial questioning required to find out exactly what I wanted to achieve.

I had no idea about the various elements and the structure of the site and I found it mind blowing when I learnt about the amount of work involved. So I thought other people would be interested to know more about this complicated process particularly if you consider yourself a non computer person and have to get a website built. I have asked my SEO friend to supply the technical information for this article.In case you are wondering ‘SEO’ stands for search engine optimisation, and refers to the practise of getting your website ranked as close to the top of the results for a particular search term in a search engine. You see you’re learning already!

Stages in the Process

Target Audience

Before building a website there are important questions to consider. I was asked who would be my potential audience. Who are my customers likely to be? Would they be children, businesses, home owners, sales people, parents or teenagers and so on?

The Objective of the Website

Then I was asked, what was the purpose of my website? Did I want to sell products on line or use it to market my business and get more leads for potential customers? Maybe I would want to use the site as an online brochure to showcase my services. Another possibility was to use the website to foster a community so that I was in contact with other like-minded people, with chat rooms, online discussions and being supported by advertising on the site. This didn’t really apply to my business, although I did think about offering to advertise allied services!

I hadn’t quite realised the scope of a website but as I was asked these questions it became clear that a lot of careful planning went into the preparation before building a website. I realised it is like any project, the majority of the work is in the preparation, a bit like decorating really!

Creating a Site Map

The importance of creating a site map is to get it clear in your mind of all the pages you will have on your website so you can prepare the content for each page and begin to design the flow through the website, such as when a user adds a product to their basket, then enters their delivery and billing address and makes the credit card payment in the correct order.

A sitemap is basically the blueprint for your website and is an essential part of the plan if you want the design, copy writing, search engine optimization and monitoring of your website to be successful.

The aim is to make the site as user friendly as possible so that there are no barriers to getting into the website or making a purchase. For that reason often user name and passwords are set for the customer so that they are not put off making a purchase by having to register. How many times have you gone to buy something online and then been faced with having to choose a user name and password to create an account, and fill out all of your address details and decided not to bother in the end? Well they just lost a sale!

For a non e-commerce site things are simpler with a contact form which allows you to receive enquiries by email without publishing your email address on the website, thus avoiding junk email.Web forms can also validate the information before you receive it, so ensuring that the phone number provided does not contain words, and that the email address is in the correct format, for example. These things may sound very technical to us lay-folk but I assure you everything has to be decided in advance before starting on the construction of the site.

Your Domain Name

Choosing a domain name is often quite a problem because every name you initially come up with will almost certainly have been taken. Domain names ending in .com are by far the most popular and internationally recognised; the snag is that it’s very popularity means that the majority of the shorter names have probably already been registered. However, you can usually think of some domain name that is available, which is much less time consuming than trying to purchase a previously registered domain name from its existing owner, most of the time just contacting them, and getting a reply is a challenge.

So looking at names with endings such as .net; .org .co.uk or .info may be able to provide you with the domain name you want. When choosing your domain name it is very important to include one or more of your keywords if possible as this can apparently help with search engine rankings. So although the name of your business is the obvious choice for a domain name, it is not necessarily the only option.

Copy

The next stage is preparing the content. This is not the design of your website – just the words and visuals you want to have one each of the pages.

Having gathered all the above information you will need to decide what imagery you want to use within the website content. As we all know, a picture speaks a thousand words and remains in people’s memory far longer than just words. It is a popular concept that people don’t read, and is even more true on the web today, so use as many images, diagrams, cartoons and illustrations as possible.

For each image you could also have a caption, as the caption of an image is the next ‘most read’ words on the page after the page title. Images and their captions need to be clickable. When you click on a picture it should take you to the next stage of the process such as the sale page or placing an enquiry if your website is for lead generation. All images should also have alternative text or alt tags. Alt tags will display the hover text when you position your mouse over the picture, but also they are used by screen readers to assist visually impaired users know what the image is about.

Website Design

Finally we come to the design of your website.

Sometimes one of the most difficult parts in website design can be the creation of the designs, whilst there are clear technical aspects to be worked in there is no clear right and wrong with regards the style and your work is almost entirely dependent upon the impression of the client contact that has to review the work.

There are a number of ways to approach website design but ultimately you need to create a design brief for the designer(s) to work from. Look at other websites and your competitor’s websites to find out what you like or dislike. The design brief should give reference to the logo, any existing brand guidelines or schemes and fonts and colour schemes, and should also detail which pages of the website that the designer is being tasked with creating visuals for.

The very best results will be achieved by using a graphic designer, and beware – not all graphic designers are the same. A graphic designer who designs specifically for print is working in a different discipline than a graphic designer who designs for screen and specifically the web. So choose your designer carefully, look at other work that person has done and determine whether or not you like their style.

If you are working in the big time and budget allows, use multiple graphic designers who have all been given the same design brief and request three concept designs from each designer. If the client themselves also do a graphic design, even if it’s a back of the envelope scribble, you will then have 10 concept designs. The next step is to get them all together and select the preferred elements from each design. Then give the work to the selected graphic designer to work up as the final artwork.

The artwork should be finalised and agreed on by everybody before development of the site begins.

Navigation

Another important consideration when building a website is how you want your navigation to work. You can have links within the content of your website, in the text, so there are not just links from the menu. You will need to decide whether the links will open into a new window, retaining your original page open or just change the page to the one clicked on. Next time you go online, you will realise how much thought has gone into the way in which a website works. You will may also have some ideas for improving how some of them work after reading all of this!

Production

Finally the preparation has been done and the site is ready to be constructed. Now for the more technical stuff! You will need to have decided which programming language to use to build the website. There are two main types for developing a website, one is Unix based, and the other is Windows based. Each one has pros and cons. If you are starting from scratch then it probably won’t matter, so you can go with the preference of your professional doing the work. My website is built on the Unix platform (apparently!) which is the same as many of the more well known websites such as Ebay, Facebook, Google and Amazon. Also your website hosting must be compatible with the development language with which your website is built.

Work In Progress

The best way to build a website and be able to monitor work in progress is on the web server where the site is ultimately going to live. This way, those involved in reviewing the work can see work in progress and provide comments throughout the development process.

Launching Your New Website

The moment of excitement comes when your site finally gets launched and you see the results of all the thought that has gone into the whole process.

I spent many hours working with the web agency to get the Xbox 360 steering wheel review site just right for our company before taking it live, and when the day came to publish it I was really pleased at all our hard work.

As soon as the site has gone live there is no substitute for real world testing though, so ask as many of your friends and colleagues to view the website from their own offices and give feedback..

Accessibility and Compliance

The website has to meet the current standards for website coding and doing so insures that disabled users, such as the visually impaired, can still access the entire website if they are using a Braille web browser. To date there has only be one case of an organisation being charged for having an in-accessible website which was the site for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, make sure you are not the second case and get it clear in your mind what this entails and be sure you and your web designer agree the same thing. Accessibility and Compliance are confusingly similar and have different levels, each having potential implications on designs and technology components, and build costs. It is also a good idea to also discuss conformance moving forward, particularly if you have a web content management system, because and accessible of compliant site may become un-accessible after six months of being edited by you if you do not add or edit the website content in an accessible manner.

Unforeseen Items

There are always things that arise in any project which you suddenly realise you have forgotten, so no matter how well the web developer prepares and asks the right questions, there is bound to be a last minute change of mind or addition to the site. The main aim is to minimise the number of glitches that might arise because they aren’t calculated in at the start and they could cause extra costs and delays on the date of the website going live.As a general rule it is always a good idea to get he site live to the original plans and then look at an update after it has gone live, unless it is a very small deviation from the initial plans.

Reporting and Monitoring

Once your website is up and running, you might like to know how many people visit your website and from that number how many actually buy the products or place an enquiry. From these statistics you can work out the ratio of hits to sales and gradually make changes to improve the ratios. There are some reliable statistics packages such as Google Analytics or Web-Stat.com which allow you to collect and review website visitor data in near real time. All you need to do this is to have a small block of code inserted into each web page on your site.Using web stats programs is also invaluable for SEO keyword reviews after your site has been live for a while because it tells you what phrases have been typed into the search engines by users before they visited your website.

Another useful service that Web-stat.com provides is to monitor the website and warn you by email or text message if the site is offline.

Marketing

Once the website is live there are lots of things you can do to market your product or service. The first step is to submit it to the search engines and at the same time write articles, and press releases. Getting links to the site from forums, blogs and other social networking spaces are other options. For more on this subject ask your designer about SEO, remember that’s search engine optimisation.

How to be Found on the Web

One of the first questions I was asked was, ‘Do you want it to be found by Google the main search engine?’ If I did then there was a whole process of establishing Keywords. So finding the best keywords are vital if you want to be found in Google. He says there are two main types of keywords. The first is the trophy, or generic, keyword for the industry which in my industry is simply ‘demolition’. The second kind of keyword is the long tail keyword. These are not searched for as frequently but if you can get a match then they are much more likely to convert into customers. A good example of this in my industry is ‘factory demolition company Derby’. So it is very important to do a lot of research on keywords to find both those that are the most popular and the most specific. Generally most users only look at the top ten results so you will want to get your website promoted so as to get on this page for your chosen keywords. By using a keyword research tool such as the keyword lookup in the Google Web Master Tools kit you can find the single most popular keyword for your industry.

Conclusion

Wheww. What an amazing amount of work! I hadn’t realised when I started the process of getting a website up and running, how complicated it all is and how many factors you have to consider before even designing the website. The word web design is really a misnomer, as people often think it’s just about the graphic design on the home page, and the branding of the product. Unless you are a computer whizz, most people have no idea how much goes into designing and building a website and the systems that support the work you want it to do. I hope that this article gives you an understanding and insight into the whole process of website development from start to finish.Next time you type in a web address or click on a link to a website, remember all the above work that has probably gone into it!

Internet Marketers vs. Web Designers

This concept is confused by those who are new to internet marketing. I am going to try to make this a very simple explanation, yet please make sure that you contact me if you have any questions. This is very important and you should fully understand the difference between an internet marketer and a web designer before you choose to ask for internet marketing help.

Definition of Web Designers:

Web designers are those who are paid to design web sites for individuals or businesses. These people are usually pros with html code, php, and all of the other types of programming that is commonly found on web sites. They focus very deeply on the color schematics and graphics of a web page in order to produce the flashiest end result. Sometimes they even create sites in FLASH, which is a type of design that you may have seen on sites in the past with a lot of motion and movement on the page. Sometimes, the pages even have a short introduction scene. These designers can be very talented, and sometimes they charge very healthy prices for their services. I have seen some quotes as low as $5,000 and up to $15,000 for some business websites.

Even though the sites that typical web designers produce may be very aesthetically pleasing, you must ask yourself a very important question before pulling out your wallet. Do you want a nice looking site only, or do you wish to have a site that is designed to get you brand new customers. The two desires could change whether or not you go with a web designer or an internet marketer for your project.

Definition of Internet Marketing Help

Internet marketers do exactly what their name states, they market on the internet. The actual website in itself to them is not as important as the actual marketing of the website. This is not to say that the websites that an internet marketer produces are not aesthetically pleasing, because they certainly are attractive looking sites.

The difference is that internet marketers usually use a different web site design and mechanism in order to receive the most favoritism from Google. What good is your website, if you are not being sent new customers from the most popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN? Search engine marketing is crucial for internet marketers to acquire the success that they desire. However, do not think that search engine marketing is the only tool that internet marketers utilize. There are many other off-page optimization techniques that can be utilized to market one’s website, and this is a tactic that 99% of web designers do not wish to utilize with their customers.

John’s Philosophy for the Internet Marketing Helpline

My main goal of this article was not to diminish web designers or the skills that they possess. However, I did want you to realize that sometimes more than just web design is needed for you to have success with your new website. It can sit idle without many visitors per day, or you can choose the Internet Marketing Helpline to turbocharge your web marketing so that your new site actually reaches your prospective client base.

Designing A Web Site For A Certain Screen Resolution is Outdated

Introduction

Being a web designer working on website development projects I have learned that it is important to stop and think about what size screen resolution we should be building this latest website to?

I was reading somewhere recently that apparently these days the only answer to that question should be ‘all of them’ and ‘none of them’. What this basically means is that new websites should be built to accommodate all different screen sizes these days, particularly with the increased popularity of hand help web browsers, smart phones, net books and the like. Of course there is also the other end of the spectrum in the new huge wide screen flat screen monitors. I recently treated myself to a 24 inch Asus which does 1920×1080 which is big enough to get two web browser windows on screen side by side, but if you make one of them full size, the majority or websites look, well, just plain odd!

What exactly is screen resolution then?

If you are not familiar with screen resolution, the simple answer is that it is the size of your screen. However, this can be quite misleading because it is actually the number of pixels that make up the display area on the screen of your monitor. Still not clear? Well let’s look at some examples to help clarify exactly what screen resolution is.

Currently what would appear to be the most common screen resolution is 1024×768 (accounting for 62% of my website visitors). This is a screen that is 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels high. What is a pixel? A Pixel, derived from the phrase Picture Element, is basically one of the thousands of tiny dots that make up your display screen. However, this does not necessarily determine the physical size of your monitor (14 inch, 15 inch, 19 inch etc) because most monitors are capable of displaying the screen in different screen resolutions. It is fairly true to say that if you want to run your monitor at a high screen resolution then you will need a large monitor, the larger the monitor the greater the resolution it can display at (assuming your graphics processor can support a high resolution).

All getting a bit technical? Put simply the larger the screen resolution the more things you can fit on your screen before they have to go onto the next line, or before you have to scroll down or scroll right.

What’s this got to do with Web Design?

When creating the visuals for a new website design, traditionally the experienced graphic designer would be working to a specific resolution in order to make sure that the design fits in your browser window without having to scroll right. (Thankfully most website owners don’t demand you make their pages so that you don’t have to scroll down anymore!)

A popular screen resolution to design for is 1024×768 but when viewed at a larger screen size such as 1280×960 will have unused portions of screen so a skilled ecommerce web design company will take this into account and provide one of several solutions.

When designing at a fixed resolution you can deal with larger display settings by either aligning the site to the left and having a huge great big gap to the right, or you can centre align the website in the available space and then the extra screen resolution will be on either side of the content area.

However, the sensible, modern day approach is to make the site flexible to accommodate all screen resolutions by creating ‘fluid’ content that will flow to fit the available page space irrespective of what size screen resolution it is viewed at.

Also, because of the increased competitiveness of the web the challenge for a website owner is how to engage your viewers and get them to stay on your website for as long as possible and show them as much content as possible. One way to help with this is to make full use of all of the available space. Two great big blank areas either side of a tiny web page is simply just a waste of space. Imagine if you picked up a newspaper or magazine and only half of the front page had got any content on it, the editor would get the sack for sure! So by creating fluid web pages, web site owners can take advantage of larger publishing spaces available on bigger screen users, whilst optimising content for display on smaller screens too.

Another advantage with big screen displays is the ability to use the new area for re-publishing. Re-publishing is a way to put content from another area of your website onto a different page, thereby bringing it forward for the viewer. An example of this that we did on one site we created was to insert an alphabetical list of names of the products available on the website below the left hand menu on pages that were very long.

All pages tend to be different lengths, as determined by the content on the page, so we used a clever widget to create this list of product names and load it in the gap until it ran out of space. This was great for SEO too as it gave a direct link to specific product pages based on their product names without having to crawl through category pages first, also website users would often see something in the list they wanted and click straight through to the page and buy the item.

Ultimately this has evolved into what would now be thought of as a web 2.0 ‘tag cloud’ a list of tags that are usually user generated, to indicate and link directly to a specific content group or item. Using a tag cloud is a great way to fill stretched spaces on larger screens that you can fill with what are effectively links to other parts of the website.

How do you do fluid content?

Fluid content is quite simple to create, the majority will be words of course, which are naturally fluid so on a small resolution screen you might get 5-10 words to a row, on a larger screen you can get 20-30 words or more. However the challenge comes with images, and particularly website graphics. A photograph, whilst it can be made smaller and larger offline, it can’t be automatically resized by the web browser at the time of viewing (not taking into account the Zoom function in Internet Explorer).

The HTML code that makes up your web pages is again designed to allow fluidity by fitting content into the available page area, so some tips that can be employed to make content fluid include not using tables in the code (which are depreciated these days now anyway), not setting specific screen width in pixels, use 100% instead. By fading images into blocks of colour in the website graphics, you can create a stretchable element that will scale to fit all window sizes. Use little boxes to put stuff in, these can then flow around the screen as required without having to be in any particular place, they also help to draw the eye to special offers, discounts, newsletter sign ups etc, and can of course be styled by your graphic designer with curves and shadows and gradients to look great.

Conclusion

The finest Loughborough web design companies provide web designs that work on all screen resolutions because they are fluid and scalable in design, from the smallest mobile phone browser right up to the huge 27 inch flat screen displays running massive screen resolutions. This technology is available now, if you select the right agency to do it for you, so why exclude potential customers from viewing your website properly just because they are not using a standard setup. In the current economic climate do you really want to be excluding any potential customers?