Jul
07
Your Small Business Needs a Web Solution Not a Website
01:54 pm
Why Your Small Business Needs a Web Solution Not a Website???
Raise your hand if you have a website for your small business. Now keep it raised if it is generating a significant volume of prospects or sales. Not holding your hand up anymore? You are not alone.Just a few years ago, small companies flocked to the web in droves, rushing to post their first website, anxious at the prospect of low-cost instant exposure. The web was going to be the great equalizer, putting small business on par with the big brand names, dangling the promise of visitors flocking to a company’s site to purchase its wares or partake in its services. Sound familiar? Unfortunately, for most small businesses and organizations, the promise fell short and company sales did not skyrocket from an unending march of site visitors.
So, what happened? For one, the web quickly became ultra competitive. Millions of sites sprang up in every business category making it virtually impossible to be found in the search engines. What little bit of traffic the businesses may have enjoyed when the site was first launched began to dry up. Also, as the web evolved to become a more interactive user experience, it became more technologically complex and many small business websites did not keep up. The other part of the problem was in the approach; not understanding that just putting together a website, even a pretty one, and finding some faceless company offering cheap web hosting services is not likely to make you the next great success story. A large hurdle that many small business owners and managers face is the tendency to compartmentalize the web into a few oversimplified tasks: grab a cheap domain name, find a budget small business website design and development person, look for some impossibly low-priced website hosting, and then expect their website to magically appear on page one of Google. Unfortunately, this ends up being a waste of time and money.
A Solutions-Based Approach with Professional Guidance
To create an effective web presence requires a solutions-based approach with clear ideas about what you want to accomplish and who the audience is you are targeting. The right elements have to be present; a well orchestrated website design with cohesive branding, solid technical acumen, clearly defined objectives for the organization, reliable small business web hosting services and some method of marketing your site and tracking the results. The web is constantly evolving and search engine competition is fierce. Being successful on the web requires consistently evaluating the site’s effectiveness based on your objectives, understanding the latest technologies and trends, having a dynamic website marketing plan and constantly fine tuning.
While you don’t have to spend a fortune to create real value on the web, you should also be realistic. Understand that being successful will require an investment that you should plan for and a clear vision of how your website fits into the goals and objectives of the organization. If you don’t have the experience and technical resources in-house, working with a professional web solutions provider, preferably one specializing in small business web design and development can provide great benefits. A good starting point in the process is to have an understanding of the core elements that are part of a successful website strategy and how they fit together.
The Elements of a Web Solution
1) Domain names - Choosing the right domain name is an important branding decision which impacts how your organization is perceived and also how it is found in the search engines. Purchasing from a cheap bulk registrar or choosing can spell trouble.
2) Website Design & Development Services> - Find a provider that specializes in small business web design and development. An organization that offers a solutions-based approach can assist your company in doing thorough needs analysis and in designing all of the elements to work well together. First impressions count!
3) E-mail Management - E-mail is a key communication tool for your business. The right system will help you maximize communications within the company, on the road and with your customers.
4) Social Media - Social media such as blogging, Podcasting and other web 2.0 tools can greatly enhance customer communications. Your web services company should be able to help you evaluate how social media tools can best benefit your web presence and business objects.
5) Small Business Website Hosting Services - All web hosting is NOT created equal. There are many nuances and technical consideration involved with hosting solutions. It is best to stay away from budget hosting companies. Look for a managed hosting provider who can help you select the right plan for your web solution goals, get your website up and running and support you as it grows and evolves.
6) Website Maintenance - How will your site be maintained and updated? Having both small business web development and managed web site hosting as a package is immensely helpful for maximizing web server resources, identifying problems and keeping the site maintained and updated.
7) E-Commerce - Will you be actually selling on your site or using it for lead generation or information dissemination? If you are selling products, who will create and maintain your product database. How will transactions be handled? What about web server requirements? Working with a professional can help ensure you make the right choices for your e-commerce site.
Business Process Interaction (database development, customer relationship management, integration with your business management systems) - A website needs to be more than just an ad on the Internet to be effective as a business tool. There are many ways the web can be used to improve your business processes and integrate with your existing systems such as accounting or contact management.
9) Website Marketing - How will people find you on the web? Will you optimize your site for organic search or employ paid marketing techniques or a combination? What directories should you list your site in? Search engine marketing has evolved to be a complex specialty. It’s critical that you understand the tools available for driving traffic to your site and if needed, know how to evaluate and engage a web marketing specialist.
10) Website Analytics and Conversion - Having a great site isn’t enough if your visitors aren’t doing what you intended; buying something, contacting your company or using your site for an information source. Does your site have usability issues? What kind of reporting will you use to track site visitors? What do you need to know and do to convert your visitors into action-takers?
It’s a Process and a Work in Progress
While there is certainly a lot to think about, creating the best possible website solution for your business doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Your website can and should be a work in progress, evolving as your business grows.Because most small businesses do not have an internal IT staff to handle the technical elements of web development and planning, working with a web solutions provider that specializes in small business website hosting services and small business web design and development is a good start. Such an organization can help you identify your goals, manage the technical aspects of your site and guide you in your marketing efforts. They can also help you work within your budget to develop a plan that combines all the elements into a cohesive whole for creating and maintaining a successful web presence.
Filed Under Tutorials and Website promotion | 2 comments
Jun
09
Reformatting your hard disk without affecting your data files
10:18 pm
Most of the time, our computer comes default with one single hard disk, and it is usually our C: drive. Our operating system, applications and data (usually under the “My Document” folder) are all stored in this C: drive. If you have been using the computer for quite a while, you will know that after a while (usually 1-2 years), the system become so cluttered that performance badly affected and the system seems to feel like it is corrupted. The best solution to this is to have a clean install. This means reformatting the whole hard disk and starts all over again. Usually this also means a tedious way to backup the data files so that you can restore them back later. There are a few ways to make this process easier.Partition Your Hard Disk
* If your computer only comes with 1 hard disk, it is recommended that you partition your hard disk into 2 partitions. Depending on the size of your hard disk, I would recommend your C: drive partition to be no more than 40GB. Reason is C: drive will be catered for your operating system and applications, which usually will not exceed 40GB. This could of course be adjusted according to your needs (at the point of installation). So let’s say you have a 160GB hard disk, which will leave you with 120GB for your D: drive, which will cater to your data files. Once your have your 2 partitions set up and Windows properly installed. Do the following:
Step 1
Go to your D: drive and create a directory call “Username’s Documents” (where username if your login name).
Step 2
Click on Start” and highlight “My Documents”. Right click it and select “Properties”.
Step 3
Select “Move” and search for the directory you just created, which should be in “My Computer” => “D:” => “Username’s Documents”, click on “OK”. When prompted, click “Yes” to continue.
Now your “My Documents” folder is moved (or pointing) to your D: drive. When you click on “My Documents” now, it will point to your new D: drive’s “Username’s Documents” directory.
Once you have your data files moved to D: drive, whenever you need to re-install / reformat your operating system / applications, you can just format the C: drive and leave your D: drive (which contains your data files) intact.
If you have more than one user, logon to their account and repeat steps 1 to 3.
Having 2 Hard Disks
* If you have 2 hard disks in your computer, or intend to purchase an additional hard disk, this will make things even easier. Assign the smaller hard disk (put it as your C: drive) as your operating system and application software hard disk, and the bigger hard disk (put it as your D: drive) as your data files hard disk. Once you have your operating system setup in your C: drive (assuming your D: drive is formatted), follow step 1 to 3 above to move your “My Documents” folder to D: drive so that you can save all your data files there.
External Hard Disk
* There are 2 possible uses for an external hard disk here.
First, you can use it as your portable data files hard disk. Secondly, you can use it as your data files backup hard disk.
To use it as your portable data files hard disk, install your operating system and applications on your main hard disk in your computer (usually your C: drive). Once you have your external hard disk properly formatted, follow steps 1-3 to move your “My Documents” folder to the external hard disk drive so that you can save all your data files there.
If you only want to use your external hard disk to backup your data files, I would suggest your download a free tool from Microsoft call “SyncToy” (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalpho tography/prophoto/synctoy.mspx) that can help you backup your files easily. Once installed, do the following:
Step 1
Run the program (Start => All Programs => SyncToy).
Step 2
Click on “Create New Folder Pair”.
Step 3
Click “Browse” and select the folder you want to backup and click “OK”.
Step 4
Click on the picture of the computer on the right. Click “Browse” and select the destination to backup to (Your external hard disk). Click on “Make New Folder’ if you have yet to create it. Click “Next”.
Step 5
If it is purely for backup, select the option “Echo” and click “Next”. Name your folder pair and click “Finish”.
Step 6
Select your folder pair and click “Preview”. It will present a list of files that will be copied/backup. Click on “Run” to start the process.
Step 7
When the process is completed, click “Close”.
When you use SyncToy, after the initial backup, only the changes will be copied, thus saving valuable time when doing backup. For example, if you copy 1000 files initially, and later make changes to 10 of it, and added 20 more files, only this 30 files will be copied when you do another synchronization, instead of copying all 1020 files again.
If you choose this method, after you reformat and re-install your operating system, you can just copy the data files back to the hard disk in your computer system.
Filed Under Computer tips and tricks, Tutorials and Windows XP | 4 comments
Jun
03
Top 10 Tips for WinXP Users
03:28 pm
Are you new to WinXp? Just upgraded, or gotten a new computer maybe? Or you might have friends and contacts who use it and you want to “show off” a little by teaching them a few tricks? I`ve collected 10 of my favourite WinXP tricks, each of them easy to use, and very helpful, and if you follow the instructions step-by-step, they work perfectly. So here goes:Top Tip #1:
Having a problem making your desktop icons stay exactly where you put them?
When you temporarily change your desktop to a lower resolution—for example whilst using Safe mode, Windows can wreak havoc with your careful positioning of desktop icons.
Right click your desktop click arrange icons and uncheck auto arrange. You can now drag & drop them wherever you want them. Note that if you start your computer in SAFE mode you will have to rearange them again.
Top Tip #2:
Accidentally moved your taskbar and want it back where it was?
Point your mouse to a ‘blank’ area inside the taskbar, THEN hold down your left mouse button, and DRAG it down where you want it to go. It may take a couple of tries to get it over.
Top Tip #3:
Feel like changing your Start Menu?
(1) Right click a blank spot on the Start Menu.
(2) Select Properties
(3) Select Customize
(4) Select the Advanced tab.
Most of those preset items which don’t have the option to check or uncheck will be there. For each item listed you’ll have the option to Display as link or Display as menu or Don’t display this item. Make your selection as you desire. Note that you will have the option to display the Control Panel as a menu, which you might find very useful.
Top Tip #4:
Getting grey popup boxes with ads in? Stop the spam like this:
(1) Select “Start”
(2) Select “Settings”
(3) Choose “Control Panel”
(4) Choose “Administrative Tools”
(5) Choose “Services”
(6) Right-click on “Messenger”
(7) Select “Stop”
To permanently disable Messenger:
(8) Right click “Messenger”
(9) Select “Properties”
(10) Change “Startup Type” to “Disabled” and click “OK”
Top Tip #5:
Having problems viewing sites cos your computer isn`t accepting the cookies?
Open a New Browser window.
(1) Click on Tools (in toolbar).
(2) Click on Internet Options.
(3) Click on Privacy.
(4) Click on Advanced.
(5) Click on Override Cookie Control.
(6) Click on Enable First Party Cookies.
(7) Click on Enable Session Cookies.
(8) Click OK.
Top Tip #6:
Want to change how you see your emails? Try this:
Click on “view” at top. “Layout” will allow you to fix what you see. “Sort by” will let you arrange the order the messages appear in.
Top Tip #7:
Want to disable the Automatic Update reminders in Windows?
Open Internet Explorer/Tools/Internet Options/Advanced tab, under “Browsing” take the checkmark out of “Automatically check for Internet Explorer Updates”, click Apply, click OK.
Another thing to try is to:
(1) Click Start
(2) Click Run
(3) Type in: “MSCONFIG” (without the quotes)
(4) Click OK.
(5) Under the Startup tab take the checkmark out of “Critical Updates”
(6) Click Apply
(7) Click OK
(8) Restart your computer.
Top Tip #8:
Got too many icons on your desktop?
Right click on an empty space on your desktop, highlight “Arrange Icons By”, the click on Run Desktop Cleanup Wizard
Top Tip #9:
Tired of seeing your pointer as an arrow or an hourglass all the time? Windows XP offers a number of alternative pointer schemes, such as Dinosaur, Ocean and Sports.
Open the Control Panel, double-click Mouse, and select the Pointers tab. (If you start in Category view, select Appearance and Themes, then click Mouse Pointers under “See Also.”) Next to Schemes, click the down arrow and select a scheme to preview its pointers. Click OK to apply the scheme to your desktop. Simple as that.
Top Tip #10:
Want to hear your computer talk?
Select Start, Programs, Accessories, Accessibility, Narrator. Or press the Windows key plus the letter “U” to open the Utility Manager. Microsoft Narrator, an accessibility option designed to assist readers who are blind or have impaired vision, starts automatically.
Once you’ve read through the intro screen (or let the Narrator do it), click OK and you’ll see a dialog box of Narrator options. Assuming you want to leave Narrator running, select the desired options, then minimize its dialog box. And if you’ve opened the Utility Manager, feel free to close it.
To turn Narrator off, click the Exit button or right-click its taskbar item and select Close.
Hope this has helped you get your WinXP working the way you want it to, and given you a little fun too.
Filed Under Computer tips and tricks, Tutorials and Windows XP | Add comment
May
03
Get Google Traffic Indirectly To Your Website
09:02 pm
Google is the most popular search engine. Thousands of searches are made each day on Google alone. Google is also a fast search engine, contains billions of pages and delivers good results. It’s true that there are fluctuations in Google but that’s the nature of search engines. It can be normal fluctuations or an algorithm change which can alter the search engine result pages.
You can enjoy top search engine rankings for quite a long time with Google but it can happen that you might suffer from a drop in rankings which can be temporary usually because of a glitch or these can also be permanent if you’re banned mostly attributed to black hat seo techniques. I’ve seen all these things on Google and the best thing to do is not to panic right away. Your rankings can come back with time. I’ve even experienced rankings recovery after 2-3 months without changing anything.
What you should do is always find other ways of driving traffic to your websites like article writing and submission, doing valuable reciprocal link exchanges with related and relevant sites as these alone can bring traffic. Imagine you get a valuable reciprocal link on a related site which brings you five targeted visitors per day, now say you have 10 such links, you already receive 50 targeted visitors a day and 1500 monthly targeted visitors.
If you focus on some article promotion initially, you can at least give your site some value as far as traffic is concerned. As a result, you have better chances in getting targeted reciprocal links. You have to offer something similar in return to your link partners. Some people are saying reciprocal links have no value at all and they are removing them from their pages but targeted and reciprocal links with similar sites are still of great value. The Internet is an interconnection of websites and you have websites linking to each other to form the web. You can find a valuable website from another website. You click here and you are there and so on. Each link you have has the potential to give you traffic. Of course a homepage reciprocal link is definitely better and a reciprocal link in content articles is also great. These are some sort of partnerships you can potentially make with other webmasters. Just need to be creative.
If we consider the traffic generation ways above like article promotion and reciprocal link exchanges, you have to realise that you can get Google traffic by using these methods. With article promotion, if your article ranks high in another website, and people find your article, they can potentially click on your link in your author bio and gives you visitors. With reciprocal links, if a user finds your partner’s website and happens to see your link say on the homepage or on a content page or even a link directory, you’ve got a visitor.
In my hosting stats, I saw visitors coming directly from my articles on other sites and visitors coming from my partners’ websites mostly from homepages. You can still get Google traffic although not direct searches to your site but still it’s good traffic. We can call that indirect Google traffic. When going after indirect Google traffic, you are at the same time working on your offpage search engine optimization meaning securing inbound links. With an article, you can get an inbound link with anchor text and with a homepage reciprocal link partnership or content article reciprocal link partnership, same thing. Not only will these techniques get you indirect Google traffic but they can give you some boost in your search engine rankings for your keyword phrases or at least gives you a solid foundation in link popularity. Once you get some links to your site, you have high chances to get your website indexed in the first place which is the initial step in search engine marketing. If you’re not indexed, you can’t rank for anything.
Filed Under SEO Tips and Tricks and Website promotion | 4 comments
Apr
26
Website’s success is the key.
12:43 pm
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!
Filed Under SEO Tips and Tricks, Tutorials and Website promotion | 2 comments
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wow its great to read ur poem in...
ek dum zakkkass.
Ekdam Zhakas