Posts Tagged ‘web design’

Getting the Most Out of Social Networking Software

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Social networking can be used to successfully market any online business or business venture. There are many social networking websites that are free to use and, with the help of an affordable software program, can help businesses quickly connect with thousands of potential clients. Unfortunately, many companies and individuals have purchased networking social software that have not had as much success as expected. In order to succeed when using networking social software there are a few things that a business must keep in mind.

First of all, a company must have a clear goal in mind when choosing their social software. Is your business trying to increase product sells or is your business attempting to increase business or consumer contacts? Knowing this will help you choose the best networking social software available since some software is designed to be used only for adding more contacts to a companies profile while others are designed to help companies communicate with potential customers.

Secondly, what social networking platform will your company be utilizing? While a few software developers have created programs that can be used with many social networking sites most companies design software that can be used with only one social networking website. Try the various social networking platforms and choose the one that is best suited to you and your target audience before investing in a software program. Even though many networking social software programs are affordable no company voluntarily wastes money.

Third, spend time experimenting with your new software and the social networking platform. It will take time to get used to the program and even more time to get familiar with a new social networking site. The more time you spend playing around with the software and site the more comfortable you will get and the more professional connections you will make. Do not expect to purchase your software one day and have millions of leads the next. It takes time to get the most out of your software and social networking platform.

Fourth and finally, advertise your new online presence on your existing websites or mailing lists. Many visitors that are already using a social networking site will be interested in visiting your new profile and adding it to their own list of friends or connections. This will allow you to use your new networking software to communicate with existing visitors and customers that are already established on a social networking site. These users will often do a lot to promote your new profile by word of mouth either on purpose or by accident.

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The 5 Most Important Elements of Custom Web Design

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

When you are having a web site built for your company it’s important to make sure the company that you hire to build the site knows the five most important elements of web site design so that the design of the site isn’t a complete failure. Your company web site can be what sets your company apart from your competition so it’s important that the site be great. When you’re interviewing web site design companies make sure that you ask them about these elements of web site design to make sure they understand how important they are:

1. Branding and appearance – Your company website is your calling card on the Web, and in order for people to recognize the brand name and recognize the product branding is very important. You need to have uniform branding from the package to the website and on everything in between. Any custom web site design that you done needs to incorporate your brand image and your company colors into the colors and appearance of the web site.

2. Navigation – Whenever you have custom web site design done for your company one of the priorities of the design needs to be navigation. A website is no good it’s difficult for the user to figure out how to get around on the site. You want people that visit the site to look around the site, read the content and maybe shop on site. If the site is hard to figure out and hard to get around they won’t stay on the site very long.

3. Load time – Flashy custom web site design that is full of animation or large graphics is definitely not the way to go for a business web site. Not everyone that visits your site will be using a high speed Internet connection and a custom web site design that is full of Flash animation and large graphics will take too long to load. Your visitors will just surf away rather than wait for everything on the page to load. People that are trying to access the site from PDA’s and cell phones won’t be able to load the site at all. Any custom web site design should be simple and clean with no Flash if at all possible.

4. Search Engine Optimization – Websites today need to be search engine optimized. Even if the custom web site design company you hire doesn’t search engine optimize the content of the website they should do search engine optimization on the tags in the HTML codes of the site.

5. Functionality – If the site that you are having built is an ecommerce site then the company that creates your custom web site design should make sure that the shopping cart and payment processing systems that you want to use will integrate seamlessly into the site. The shopping cart and the check out process should be tested and re-tested before the launch of the site.

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