August 22nd, 2009 by admin




Every day, new websites are launched on the internet. The internet has become the playing field of many companies and I am sure that your competitors are using it to their advantage. If you do not want to lose market share, you should develop a good website. Even If you are conducting a small business, the requirement for a useful website design always exists.

The internet is full of marketing possibilities that are not available offline. The internet can provide new ideas of how to market your business by allowing you the ability to view your competitor’s websites. The information you acquire from spying on your competition can be used to enhance your marketing efforts.

Your customers can come from a variety of sources. Some will be referred to you by your trading partners, others by word-of-mouth, and some will find you while browsing the web. As time goes by and your company grows, your website is going to become a household name. A good question to ask yourself is how can you attract the initial visitors when your business is just starting out? The visitors are not going to find your website unless you make it stand out so that it comes up first, among others when consumers use major search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Web4half offers professional, cheap website design and development services for small business as well as large scale business enterprises. We can design—or redesign—every aspect of your site, from aesthetics to complete development. Our area of web development includes ecommerce solutions, extensive web-based applications, CMS etc across various industries and business organizations. You can view our designs by going through our portfolio.

At Web4Half, we produce websites not only aesthetically pleasing, but also consistently clean and easy-to-navigate for the visitor. For more details visit us on http://www.web4half.com/website-development-company.php



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Posted in Web Design | 1 Comment »

July 5th, 2009 by admin




A good web designer knows there are certain things that you just shouldn’t ever do to a website. Some of them have to do with loading times and others are just faux pas and will turn visitors away from your website. The problem is that many websites out there are outdated and thus display many of these qualities. Also, many websites have been designed by the owner of the company using a free design tool or by an inexperienced amateur who, while they may know some things, isn’t a seasoned web designer with a team of designers behind him or her. Does your website have these basic flaws?

Slow loading graphics or videos. The Internet is where people go to see what they want and when they want. If you are holding them back by posting a high-resolution video of your latest product on your homepage or having intricate logos and banners on every page, visitors will respond by not staying very long. This a web design flaw seen in websites from the previous “web generation.”

Browser Compatibility. Firefox reads different than Internet Explorer reads different than Safari reads different than Google Chrome reads different than Opera reads different than… well you get the point. There are tons of browsers out there and you don’t want to chance leaving some of your viewers out! Do plenty of testing with the biggest browsers and you should be covered if all looks the same with each browser.

Grammar or Spelling Mistakes. It seems simple this is actually something that turns me away from a website almost immediately.

Too Many Colors or Fonts. It’s definitely ok to integrate visual appeal into your web design and pretty fonts and colors are a great way to do it. I’m writing about the website that uses eight fonts on one page, all of them a different color. In my opinion, once you get more than three fonts or colors, you are out of the design theme and that’s when the clashing begins.

There are definitely many other common mistakes that web designers make… maybe we’ll see more in the future here. My suggestion is to look for these in your current website design or consider all of these as you plan for a new website. CODANK of Charlotte, NC can help you makeover your obsolete or otherwise outdated website. Call for a free quote.



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Posted in Internet | 1 Comment »

January 29th, 2009 by admin




Search engine optimisation is becoming increasingly important for the success of small businesses today. Recent trends indicate that the internet is replacing traditional media as the leading source of information and E-Commerce is replacing high street retail as the leading sales channel. Search engine marketing is particularly important for a small business as costs involved are often lower than implementing a nationwide or even a local marketing campaign using traditional methods of marketing such as print media or advertisements in niche publications within the industry. In addition to search engine marketing offering a higher return on investment, the recent trends in consumer behaviour indicate that intact search engines have a wider reach than even television in some market sectors.

 

Search engines also provide small businesses with a common platform to compete effectively with established corporations. Effective Search Engine Optimisation can enable small business owners to compete for products and services with larger companies; something which would not be possible in traditional media. The emergence of Search engines has thus been a major boost for small businesses.

 

The ultimate goal of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is to get visitors to your website. Search engine optimisation can bring highly targeted traffic to your website form search engines when users search for your products and services.

 

There is a tough competition to in the world but only 10 can appear on the first page of a search engine like Google for a particular search phrase. Search engine studies have shown that if a Web site does not rank among the top 15 of a search result, chances are it will not get noticed and subsequently not generate any traffic to the website.

Here are some search engine optimisation tips for small businesses



Create a simple but clear and professional Web site. Your website is the first impression or your business so it is important for your website to be professionally designed.



 



Organise content. The information on the website should not be cluttered. Information should be categorised meaningfully and content should be appropriately categorised into different sub pages of the website. If users fail to find what they want immediately, they are likely to go to another site.



 



Position your keywords correctly. In addition to selecting the right keywords for your website, positioning them strategically within your content is crucial. The main keywords should be in the title, description and within the body.



 



Distribute your keywords strategically. This is a basic SEO technique. Position keywords or key phrases at the start and the end of the document as the beginning and end of a page are given more weight by search engines while searching. Keyword density is also important. Keyword density refers to how many times the keyword appears in a web page. E.g. a density of around 2-5% is considered good. This is 12 repetitions in 400 words.



 



Your keywords should be a part of the link texts. Another effective SEO technique is including keywords in text links that you use in your pages. Instead of using “Click here for more info” as your link texts, mention your keywords instead.” The use of keywords is the link text has a positive impact on SEO.



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Posted in Business Opportunities | 1 Comment »

November 14th, 2008 by admin




Like most small business owners, Beverly Irwin knew she needed a Web site to help market her services as a freelance makeup artist. But she cringed at the prospect of spending hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to establish a presence in cyberspace.

So Irwin called Exxia.Net, a Davie-based Web design and business solutions firm. And within a few days, her customized Web site was up and running.

“I called other Web designers and got prices of between $800 and $1,200,” said Irwin, who lives in Fort Lauderdale. “I had heard about Exxia.Net, and when I called them, they were right within my means.”

When Roberto Samayoa founded Exxia.Net in 1998, he envisioned creating an online business directory for Broward County, a sort of localized Google.com that would allow consumers to, for example, enter their ZIP code and the word “doughnut” and obtain a list of doughnut shops in their neighborhood. Each business that signed onto the concept was to receive a one-page Web-based advertisement.

“We had a hard time getting businesses for the directory,” said the 31-year-old entrepreneur, “All they were interested in at that point was to have a Web site.”

So Samayoa segued into the Web site design business. And by 2002, he was so busy designing sites that he brought in a partner, Todd Weidert to help handle the workload. Although the two design sites for all types and sizes of businesses, they realized that a market opportunity existed for a company willing to design Web sites for businesses on a budget.

“Most Web designers are expensive and overpriced,” Samayoa said. “So we thought rather than overcharging the customer at the beginning and making, say, $1,000, let’s keep them as a lifelong customer and maybe make $10,000 off them over time by charging what should be right.”

The average Web site Exxia handles costs about $1,500 to design, Samayoa said, although the firm designs sites costing from $45 to $20,000. It recently completed a site for Fish, a new seafood restaurant in Fort Lauderdale. The cost: $1,600, which included all the photography.

Samayoa said that most of Exxia’s customers come by way of referrals, although he sends out direct mail offers to newly formed businesses as well. The company now has about 100 regular customers, for which Exxia provides Web hosting and other services such as networking and commercial photography.

Although customer growth has been steady with an additional five or six new customers each month, Samayoa did have a hurdle to overcome early in the company’s life. “It took us about a year to find a company to host our servers that wasn’t so expensive that we couldn’t make a profit,” he said. “It really was a challenge to find someone that would charge us less but still be reliable.”

Exxia’s big test came during Hurricane Wilma. All of its customers’ Web sites remained up and running throughout the storm, thanks to its choice of a hosting company in Miami that had a generator and enough gasoline to run it for 37 days, if necessary.

Samayoa feels good that he can grow a business and make money while providing services desperately needed by many small businesses.

“We’ve created a business model that allows us to charge less than anyone else and still make a profit,” he said. “But the main idea is to really give other entrepreneurs a chance to put most of their money back into their businesses rather than into their Web site.”



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Posted in Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »

January 15th, 2008 by admin




A great and effective way to make certain that your small business or company’s website appears on the result pages of search engines, such as Google and MSN, is to use site tags. Even though Pay-Per-Click campaigns and keywords are just as important, HTML tags tend to do a little more.

HTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, is the main markup language for all web pages.

HTML elements are tags, as well as text, which act as guides to a web browser as to how the document is to be interpreted by the browser and ultimately displayed on a user’s computer screen.

Search Engine Optimization involves appropriate and well-written content. This same content is important because it deals with the user interface portion, while HTML elements involve the crawler-face portion. A website and its SEO ranking depend solely on the behind the scenes tagging of the different pages. Viewers do not see the HTML’s, but without them they would never see the page at all.

Proper HTML and title tags help inform a search engine a lot more about a site than written content within a website. Search engine spiders and crawlers use these tags for determining the web page topic. There are many aspects to tagging a website, so businesses are suggested to hire web designers and Search Engine Optimization professionals who are experts in this field.

HTML Examples







Elements may represent headings, paragraphs, hypertext links, lists, embedded media, and a variety of other structures.

About CODANK Charlotte Web Design

CODANK is a top Charlotte Web Design and Internet Marketing Company located in Charlotte, NC. The company is dedicated to providing a broad range of web design services. CODANK specializes in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Graphic Design, Online Marketing, and Web Design and Development.

For more information, visit CODANK Charlotte Web Design and Internet Marketing Company at www.codank.com



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