Tropins Blog

The popular search engine Google indexes over 8 billion websites. Is one of them yours, or is your website just floating around in cyberspace and you’re hoping your customers will just find you? Is your website a benefit to your organization or company? Is it just an expensive showpiece or is it of true value?

These are some of the many questions that can be asked when launching a new website. With so many different websites being published (some amazing, awful and otherwise), it would be safe to assume that most current business plans underway include the utilization of a website, and that most active companies are utilizing the Internet to some degree. If you are interested in publishing a website, or already have, here are some key elements that may help towards its success:

1. Domain Registration: Be sure to register your domain name (www.yourdomain.com) yourself or have it done within your organization, as opposed to letting a third party register your name. Without control of your domain name registration, you can expect to run into some unnecessary delays if the third party becomes unavailable, which is surprisingly common. You also run the risk of having the registration setup incorrectly or even losing the domain. Purchasing a domain is very easy and available at less than $10 a year, so it is a very inexpensive yet potentially valuable asset.

2. Hosting: After domain registration is complete, you will be in control of where to host your website. Your website will be hosted on an Internet server, a computer that will house your website files and process any functionality such as shopping carts, email, databases, etc. Shop around for hosting options, they vary from inexpensive do-it-yourself options, to managed hosting plans, to exorbitantly expensive plans that are unnecessary. What you need to accomplish with your website will determine what your hosting needs are. I have seen small, compact sites be very effective, so beware of purchasing 500MB of hosting when you may only need 10MB.

3. Design and Development: When it comes to website design, less can often be more. Your website should load quickly and yet be visually stimulating. Try to maintain a consistency of look with any pre-existing marketing material you have in place. Avoid bombarding your visitors with tons of miscellaneous information and links, keep your content precise and to the point, and be sure all of your links work properly and that information is presented in an organized manner. Further development can allow you to take online orders, process payments, store customer info in a database, etc. The type of development you need will depend on what your company wants to accomplish with the website. The bottom line is that even a simple website should be beneficial to your organization when well designed.

4. Caution: Keep in mind that anyone, anywhere in the world, can access your website, so take caution with what you make public. The Internet offers wonders of information exchange, but sadly that can sometimes work against us, depending on who accesses the information and for what reasons. One very bizarre and extremely sad case was the young pregnant mother that was murdered and her baby stolen, after her killer saw a picture of the pregnant woman on the Internet (selling dogs) and then setup a meeting pretending to have an interest in a dog. Focus on publishing informative content related to your products and services only, and keep personal or sensitive information private as much as possible.

5. Marketing: Once your website is designed and hosted you will be ready for visitors, but how are you going to get them to visit your site? Make sure a major search engine indexes your website. If the website is coded correctly, this will be automatic but may take a few weeks. Be sure your website address appears on all of your marketing material, and direct customers to your website for specific reasons, ie. coupons, specials, additional info, etc. Also, explore the many online marketing opportunities as well as traditional print ads.

6. Maintenance: Be sure to pay all domain registration and hosting fees on time. If you would like to be able to update and edit your website yourself, some professional website designers may offer this service. You may be surprised how easily it can be done and being able to do self-maintenance allows you to get the most out of your website.

Good luck and have fun publishing!

Michael Faeth is the owner of website and print design shop GLOBI Worldwide. Our clients include local and national companies, both large and small. For more information and to see our portfolio, contact http://www.globi.us or 559.355.3619. Special thanks to Suzanne Crosina-Sahm for editing the article.

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We would all like to have the best looking website, that’s a fact - but if we keep in mind that our main objective is to finally sell our product or service online, we’ll realize that maybe design is not the most important factor when it comes to achieve this objective.

Professional design is probably the most time consuming part of the web development, so my first tip would be, before you are contacting a Web Design Company, to browse the Internet for companies which offer similar services and products - you will find probably hundreds of them - save in your Favorites four or five websites which you really like, print out these, and show the printouts to as many people as you can, especially to your existing customers, and ask them which one it’s more likely is to make them take an action (contact, buy, subscribe) on the site. This way you have conducted your own little “marketing pool” which will add weeks and weeks of online presence and business.

Based on this little pool you’ve conducted you know have a good idea on how your website should look like to entice your visitors to buy your service/product.

The next step would be to contact the Web Design Company of your choice and show them exactly want you want, cutting this way 80% of the design time. The designer will probably make suggestions and additions, some off them good ones but most of them just so they can mark up the price of the design.

I would advise that you should be really firm on your feet if you really want your website to be up and running ASAP.

Another very important aspect of this design contracting process is that even you showed them exactly what you want, you have to realize that you are not the designer’s only client and the designers are working on probably tens of other projects too, so I would advise you to put in the contract you are signing a very firm deadline for the site design, and ask for penalties on the design company end if it’s not done in time, this way you will ensure that your project is prioritized.

Mr. Josh Szatmari is a Web Marketing, Search Engine Optimization Specialist & Web Developer, currently the Vice President of Performance Development Corporation and the Web Development Director of Hilton Head Rentals.

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Salehoo: Mexican Religious Home Decor Wholesale
The directories justify the cost of the list by saying that their list has the best suppliers and not only that, they have been verified and they accept secure payment methods. What does that mean for you? Absolutely nothing, I mean how do you tell by verifying someone and making them accept payments through secure methods that they are not dodgy? And if and when you do get ripped off by these suppliers there will be no help or support from the list owners because they can’t do anything if a supplier runs off with your money, and you can be rest assured that they certainly will not reimburse you a penny you paid to the supplier, so what’s the point of paying for a list? What does that mean for you? Absolutely nothing I mean how do you tell by verifying someone and making them accept payments through secure methods that they are not dodgy? And if and when you do get ripped off by these suppliers there will be no help or support from the list owners because they can’t do anything if a supplier runs off with your money and you can be rest assured that they certainly will not reimburse you a penny you paid to the supplier so what’s the point of paying for a list? I bet you know many people that view Ebay as a good place to make some residual income and where do you think they will try and locate stock from? That’s right the same premium list you are using to buy yours from and the next thing you know is that half of your category on Ebay is filled with sellers offering the same stuff you are trying to shift.

Start off with a list of 5-10 different ideas While your catalog can be in print or online it is crucial that is clear and informative. Founded in 2005 by New Zealand born entrepreneurs Simon Slade and Mark Ling Salehoo is currently a trusted choice of over 50000 retailers and eBay sellers from all walks of life

Salehoo Us Dog Clothing Wholesalers:
When you purchase wholesale sources upfront, there are a few advantages. The best part is that you can have absolute control of your merchandise. You can avoid the risk of offering products that are not instock or available for shipping. In addition, with wholesale products you have a better chance of finding a wider selection of goods.

The only reason I took a look is because he’s also a friend and when he’s given me advice before he’s been dead right. The easy road is the one most often traveled and you will learn that it leads no where. See Salehoo Review.

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The time it takes to load your site can make or break a visitor’s first impression of your site. If your site takes too long to load, the visitor will click “Stop” or “Back” and leave your web site. If you are a business and offering people important information, it is critical to have a nice design, with a quick load time.

You may want to check out the load time of your page, to indeed see if your site loads quick enough for the average user. A great site tool can be found at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ where you are able to enter your site and it displays a report on the time it takes to load your site on different connections, in addition to tips to decrease load time.

Upon doing a speed test, if your first page takes a great time to load in the visitor’s browser, it is in the best interest to do some redesigning to decrease load time and increase the number of visitors that will not click back on the browser. We must remember that not everyone is running on DSL or Cable modem. Many users still dial up using a 56K connection. As web designers and site maintainers, we want to ensure our site’s load quickly, as to not lose potential visitors to your site.

Images, Sounds & Animations are the major menaces to download time. While these add nicely to a site, they may take up a lot of time to load. If you may avoid large sized files, please do. Many images may be optimized to look the same, however taking up less space, and download more quickly. Many image editors such as Adobe Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro can perform these tasks.

Sounds & Videos should be avoided on your main page, as they take up most time to load. Keep these for inner pages if possible. Videos and sound files can be from 100 KB to 1 MB in size or larger. If the user needs to load a 500 KB video file on a 56 K modem, it will take upwards to 89 seconds to complete. This definitely could turn the user away from your site. So keep these files to a fairly small size, or avoid if possible.

Text can also play a significant role in the load time. If you have a large amount of HTML code and large amount of content on your main page, it will also increase the load time. Text however is not as significant, as the entire text you have on the site may not be even the same size as a couple of pictures combined.

So limit the large sized graphics on your web sites. Your visitors will appreciate the fast loading site with the information being presented that they are looking for!

Learn more web design tips at Emenki Web Solutions and Web Design Burlington Ontario area at www.emenki.com

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We all want to have the most attractive website that leaves a
visitor wide-eyed and completely dazzled. Usually an extremely
attractive website design involves lots of graphical elements,
increasing the overall page size which causes the page to
download slowly to the browser. This article will provide some
useful tips on how to keep your website design attractive but
still downloads quickly.

As the average internet bandwidth rate per computer is raising,
more and more webmasters allow themselves to develop complex
websites laden with heavy graphic elements. In extreme cases you
can find websites that take as much as a few minutes to load
their content in your browser. Of course the user will never
wait that long for a website to load, and will move on to the
next website in his search results.

So why are webmasters still developing slow loading bloated
websites? Primarily due to a lack of knowledge of simple graphic
optimization techniques that will allow them to maintain an
attractive website while keeping the page size smaller.

How many of you are aware of the fact that a box with rounded
corners can be achieved using CSS code only, without the need
for any graphic image. Well it is possible! Before those of you
familiar with CSS say that it cannot be done for every type of
browser and a relatively high level of programming is required,
I say that dealing with the most common mistakes web designers
make regarding optimization can have simple solutions.

Never limit the web designer by placing any restrictions that
impact the final outcome. You might make the claim that what a
web designer can do with graphic software is impossible to
implement by code. I disagree. When the design is finished and
you are ready to slice it into small images to be used in the
html code, your creativity is been tested. Everything you do at
this stage will affect the total page size. If your design
contains rounded shapes that overlap each other or areas with
color gradients, then you must slice it carefully so the outcome
is a small file size.

Let’s look at what efficient slicing means:

1. Do not make large slices that contain lots of different
colors. Use a small number of slices where each slice contains a
limited number of colors.

2. Do not make a large slice that contains the same graphic
structure. Slice a small portion of it and duplicate it in your
code. This is a very common mistake that webmasters/programmers
make when dealing with gradient color background.

3. Do not use JPEG file format all the time. In some cases a GIF
format will be much smaller in size. A rule of thumb - a slice
with high number of colors will be smaller in size using the
JPEG format rather than the GIF format, and the opposite is also
true. Check each option separately. Every 1KB that you reduce
from the image file size will eventually add up to a significant
reduction in page size.

4. If you have text on a solid color background, do not slice it
at all. Use code to create the background instead. Remember that
you can define both the font style and background color of the
area using CSS.

Advanced Techniques

Graphically optimizing a website is more than just knowing how
to do image optimizations. There are some advanced techniques
that required a high level of programming. CSS2 has much more to
offer then CSS does. Although not all browsers have adopted this
standard yet you should be ready for when they do. JavaScript
also gives you a set of options to create some cool effects
without needing to overload the page with Flash. Using limited
tools like JavaScript compared to an advanced application like
Flash to create the desired effects can be difficult. However
think about the outcome. For a onetime effort you can
differentiate your website from others. You will have an
attractive professional looking website that loads quickly.

Back to the Future

As PDAs, smart mobile phones and mini laptops are used with
wireless internet connections for internet browsing, publishing
fast loading web pages will enhance the browsing experience not
only for those using wide bandwidth connections but also will
make the browsing experience user friendly (or may I say,
bandwidth friendly) to the wireless clients.

For those who insist that web design optimization is not
necessary because everyone will have high bandwidth connections
eventually, I agree up to a point. However, the software
companies are creating applications that use more bandwidth
because they know it is available for them to use. Get used to
writing well optimized web pages because this cat and mouse game
will never end, and it is better to learn the rules of the game
then it is to be bitten.

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