Anybody could own a web site. But there are not many web sites that have a truly successful web site with traffic all day through. What these individuals or companies lack is the most essential factor of success, a low cost web site promotion that really works.

Let me offer my sincerest congratulations if your website has generated continuous traffic after your personal promotional efforts. For those people who may lack the required patience or necessary knowledge to properly promote their merchandise or talents, the following guidelines for utilizing an inexpensive web site promotion will be of great value.

The best technique for bringing people to your site, is search engine optimization or SEO. Making the most of the advantages of an effectively optimized website returns plenty of revenue for the online promoter. Unless you have background and experience in website optimization, it could be extremely costly to do it yourself.

An inexpensive, yet very effective, SEO method is to employ link exchanges, or offer links to and from associated web sites. This tool, depending upon the websites you want to exchange links with, may be free of cost. Contact the author or owner of the web site you want to have a link exchange with. You’ll be shocked by the spiking of your page’s ranking by getting your site optimized.

Composing really instructive articles packed with keywords is a guaranteed method of increasing the exposure of your online enterprise like never before. You can compose articles yourself or obtain them from article directories which let you post them on your site if you retain the resource or writer’s byline. Just don’t stuff your articles with keywords that even idiots would get bore of reading them. The readability , and invigorating nature of your publication remains the basis of whether writers return to your webpage or not.

What better will make your target visitors remember your website but with a very easy-to-recall domain name. Registering your domain name is not for free, but creativity is.

Furnishing simple stages for navigating your website is a method of making viewers comfortable with it. The amount of traffic generated by your website will increase by using this method.

SEO has been developing like any of the other approaches in the field of information technology. You can choose from a number of different techniques to assure that your website is consistently listed in the top ten positions of leading search engine results. Some may be costly but there are ways to get similar results for cheaper or you can do it yourself as talked about above.

Achieving optimal performance is the most important factor in a website design. One common error found in a web design is the existence of large and heavy files that require tremendous amount of patience on the part of the visitor to actually be able to view it.

Here are five important website design rules of thumb to observe which should ensure your website performs well. 1) Splash pages are not a good idea

1) Do not use splash pages; The splash pages are the fancy pages you see when you enter a website. These pages use elaborate designs created with the purpose to entertain the visitor with fancy animations, brilliant photos and include welcoming words such as hello welcome or click here to enter our website. They are merely fancy additions without any real functions at all. The most important thing is not to allow any room for users to think about leaving your site, and this is almost impossible if you are using fancy splash pages with slow loading times.

2) Overuse of banner advertisements is a big mistake; The most common place for these large advertising banners to be placed is close to the page header but the bottom of the page is also quite popular too. Banner ad tends to be ignored by most web surfers so it is a total majority of the web surfers so they would a total waste of your website space. There is a better way to add contents instead of using banner is by giving them useful information and then add their affiliate links so that they would seem natural.

3) Make the navigation as simple as possible; Keep navigation simple so that the youngest user can use it. Leave out any form of complicated menu that is flash based or the use of multi-tiered menu: they only add to complicate the layout. Remember, if users find it hard to navigate, they will leave very soon after landing on your home page. Your website design should include the construction a sitemap that will make it easy for them to find what they want.

4) There should be a clear indicator showing where the user is currently on the website; When you have successfully captured their attention and enjoying the whole experience perusing your website, you will want to make them know where they are at the moment without feeling lost. This way, they can easily navigate the exact section they want. Make sure that every page has its own title and that some form of breadcrumb trail is used to track the visitors step throughout the entire website. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means they will leave!

5) Do not use audio; Your favorite tune may be repulsive to some visitors, so use music sparingly. A sound file should not be played continuously it can be irritating on the user. When adding audio to your website, make sure to include some form of user control that allows them to mute or lower the sound as required. If you wish for the visitors to return to your site, learn to apply all these website design rules and you can reap the benefits of long term traffic.

Website Templates can be a life saver if you are just starting out in the world -wide -web. Templates can save you big money and time. It is common knowledge that “design houses” charge a minimum of 1k for a complete website filled with images and text. Again, this is the minimum they would charge and I would estimate that the average price of a website you will pay is approximately 2-3k. Why are you paying this much for a website?

Lots of people make a lot of mistakes while choosing web templates. The most common mistake web masters make while selecting a web template for web designing is picking up the common templates of the lot. If you pick a common web template, your website will not look any different from the rest of the pool of websites. In order to make a difference with your website, and to look unique amongst the rest, it is important that you select a different web template from the rest so that you stand out from the crowd.

In order to save useful time people tend to avoid web designing for web templates, and this is the reason why they tend to adopt ready to use web templates. It is good to give your website a unique touch, but make sure that you do not spend a lot of time in making changes. This will take equal time as web designing, and the whole purpose of saving time and effort will be lost. Therefore, make sure that you utilize the least of your time in making these changes yet keeping your website unique.

In the past, hiring a professional web designer is a must for online businesses. An inexperience web designer could very well do your business more harm than good due to messy and sloppy representation of your company. But today, due to the availability of web templates that allow you to design a website which is at par with professionally done website in terms of its design and structure, more businesses are going online.

So the question, where can you find affordable website templates? Dreamlinestudio.com is the ticket if you’re looking for something that can create a high-impact impression and not break your bank account. Website templates also have the ability to be modified to your liking, so after you change out the graphics, color scheme or move around the navigation you essentially have your own creation.

There is absolutely room for both in this vast universe we call the web, and both options have its strengths and weakness. The bottom line is cost. Do you have a few grand to spend on a website? If you don’t, a quality template will probably be your best bet. For approximately $100, you can purchase a very nice template and spend the rest on marketing and promotion. With the vast amount of money you will be saving, you can hire somebody to modify your template the way you want it for perhaps $300. I don’t believe in cheap recycled templates, but I do recommend looking into high quality templates that can present you the way you should be presented. You truly have one shot to make a great impression, don’t ruin it with a cheap overproduced template.

The real reason for this article is a recent beef with several “design houses” over charging the average person looking for a nice website. I know people have to make money running a business, but there is something wrong about producing a bill that is thousands over what a website is worth. There will be talk about what a website is truly worth but I have been in the design business for several years and have worked in a corporate environment. I have personally seen where we would charge 10 times what a website truly cost as far as manpower hours, and it made me sick to see that.

Many people are reluctant to have a low cost web design company do their web site for them, because they feel they might not get the type of quality results they would like. However, in these recessionary times, finding affordable web design is attractive to most people starting up a new business. The good news is that you can still have a web site for the business but without paying a fortune.

Naturally, the cheapest solution is to build the website yourself. You might even consider using the 30-day trial copy of Dreamweaver CS4 available for download at the Adobe website. If you do, you might also benefit from Dreamweaver training or, at least, free tutorials available on the web. You can also look for free web site templates by doing a search on Google for “open source web design”.

However, if you can afford it, it is still wise to invest a little cash and get the job done professionally at a price you can afford. Remember that when your business grows and starts to make a profit, you can always have the web site updated by a more creative web design company and for more money. Another thing worth remembering is that the web is an eminently international arena, so why not shop around internationally.

In choosing a web design company, you will need to assess your requirements and those of your company. For instance if your site is only going to contain information but not accept online sales, it will be much easier to create. If, on the other hand you are going to be making frequent updates to your site, you may want to consider a content management system.

Before making your final choice, you will also need to research the web design company’s track record before deciding to go ahead with them. This is actually one of the most important steps of all, since there is no better way of assessing their quality viewing their work firsthand.

See what you think of the sites they have created for other people and keep in mind that, if you are trying to find the cheapest web design company around, their work may not be as original as other more expensive companies. There is not way round this limitation.

Even if your first web site is in no way exceptional, the important thing is that it affords you a platform for marketing your business on the Internet. This in itself is one of the fastest and best ways to ensure your business quickly becomes profitable and successful.

Here are simple ideas for those checking out efficient web design and marketing:

- Selling Something Direct? Use A Simple Means Of Purchase. An intermediary service like PayPal is quite effective to begin with. If you have just a few products, their HTML buttons are an effective way to test demand. When you bring in over $1000 a month, get your own merchant account.

– Make A Better, Faster, Cheaper Version Of A Popular Product. You can walk a trail someone else has blazed. You can learn from their mistakes. The only downside is that the competition will have first-mover advantage and brand-recognition. However, you can also use them to publicise your stuff e.g. “My SnarkWodger 2.1 is faster and cheaper than Big_Name_Brand”; cue controversy, which equals publicity.

– Post In Popular Message Boards And Blogs to kick your campaign off, if they’ll let you use straight hyperlinks in your signature. This is a short-term measure if you want to acquire back-links. It’s a long-term method if you want to sell to discussion board members.

– Do A Press Release, and consider beforehand about how you could make it interesting to journalists. Spammers have lately taken to releasing shoddy news items to just get backlinks. A better idea would be to investigate how to write a good-quality release and then consider what would be actually interesting to put in it.  

– Have More Than One Web Host. Have more than one net hosting account if you have a lot of websites. Spread the web sites out over different accounts. That way, if one internet host goes ’splat’, it will be a minor irritation instead of a twelve-hour slog putting twenty websites back online. You can place the resource-intensive stuff on the superior, expensive host, and the lighter websites on the $5 p.m. hosts. You can then, using SSH and FTP, backup one site on-server and FTP it to another account directly. This can save a lot of time. It’s also much quicker than downloading a backup to your PC and re-uploading it somewhere else. Have you got a 2MB broadband internet connection? The 2MB is the theoretical _download_ speed. Ever try _uploading_ a fat file? A lot tardier, isn’t it?

– Webhost Features. Most geeks prefer Unix. It’s been around longer, and is more stable. Internet hosts offering Unix variants like Linux have always been cheaper. They also seem to offer a wider range of toys. I need SSI (Server Side Includes), SSH (secure Telnet), 10 MySQL databases, Cpanel, PHPMyAdmin and a UK IP number. And you can acquire this for $15 a month. Things like MySQL databases, Cpanel and SSH access are real sticking points for a lot of net hosts. If they’re generous with these, you’ve discovered a rare jewel.

– Submit Articles To Article Directories. What you require is a service or a software that will do this for you automatically. Submission by hand is soul-destroying. Ask in web marketer message boards about the latest softwares and services.

– Use Freelances For Jobs You Lack The Skills For. Is money tight? Try scriptlance.com or rentacoder.com. The key to getting the best work is to a) be as clear as possible as to what you require and b) write your specification in simple, concise terms. Your work will probably be done by someone who’s native language is not English. Most web marketers give a vague spec and receive work they’re displeased with. Pick somebody who’s had a lot of favourable reviews recently. Pay in stages. Use the freelance site’s escrow facility. Don’t expect to acquire more than you stumped up for, and don’t be a cheapskate; if someone does a good job, they deserve a bonus, not carping.

I hope these few basic pointers will be of some use to you in getting useful web design and marketing done inexpensively.

About the author: Niccolo Svengali is an author for web site designer and UK secured loans websites in London.

It can be difficult to set up a professional website on your own. An e-commerce site is very complicated. Many web hosting companies offer web hosting templates or package deals with hosting that includes templates in order to reduce the development time that it takes to create a website.

The hosting company you choose usually provides various types of templates from one-dimensional websites to more complicated functional websites. While professionally designed e-commerce websites can cost upwards of a few hundred and perhaps even thousands of dollars, simple templates can be much cheaper and may cost below $30.

Using a web template is much cheaper than paying a web designer $40 to $120 per hour to design a custom-made e-commerce website.

Besides the requirements of standard web hosting plans, Web hosting templates for e-commerce operations needs a shopping cart that supports online catalog and online payment processing. Web templates for e-commerce often include common pages and navigations for online shopping, searching or browsing products, adding items to shopping carts and making payment. The web templates for e-commerce do not include or connect to any specific shopping cart. It’s up to the webmasters to add shopping cart to the site.

An e-commerce turnkey operation is a different option to e-commerce web hosting templates. EBay Stores, Yahoo! and GoDaddy.com are the most popular turn-key e-commerce solutions for small businesses that want to setup online stores easily. Web hosting plans have varying fee structure. The price of the hosting plan is based on the number of transactions.

When comparing functionality, there’re many questions to ask: 1) whether a shopping cart accepts online check or debit card. 2) Whether there’s a limit on the number of products and categories that you can setup; 3) whether it automatically sends out an email notification once an order is placed at your web-site.

When looking at the cost of commerce operation, you’ll need to ask questions about: 1) how much it charges for each transaction; 2) is there’s a setup fee for a new online store; 3) how about handling taxes; 4) what’s the basic monthly fee for transactions.

Consult your web host on any questions you may have. They should aslo be able to recommend the best plan for your individual needs.

Picture this: suppose you want a car, but, you don’t have enough money to buy one for yourself, so you go in with four friends and everyone own a piece of the automobile. A schedule would be worked out and everyone would abide by the schedule of when they could use the car.

Now suppose, all of a sudden, you got a job where you needed the automobile a lot more often. But you only had access to the car on certain days at certain times and the job would not wait. Because the car is just as much of your friends car as yours, they are also entitled to use it. You end up losing the job opportunity because you cannot use the car all of the time.

The above is similar to the difference between a business using a dedicated server and a shared server. A dedicated server, just as the name implies, is “dedicated” to serving only your business. This means that you do not have to share space and bandwidth with other online business websites.

While a small business or personal website can do well with a shared server, a large or growing business would find a shared server just as much of a disaster as the car analogy illustrated earlier in this article. There is only a certain amount of bandwidth in a server, and it can only allow a certain amount of traffic through at a certain time.

A good way of understanding bandwidth is the analogy of a toll collection booth. The toll booth allows a certain amount of traffic through at a time on a scheduled basis. This is great, until everyone needs to take the same highway out of town, and they all choose the toll road. Then it becomes a disaster as people wait for hours to get through the toll booth.

Even though you might be willing to suffer through hours of long lines to get through toll booths when trying to leave town, your customers will not be willing to wait to get into your website just because you do not have enough bandwidth. There’s a good chance that if they try to visit your website but can’t get through, they’ll simply move on, never giving it another try.

In order to pay off your hard work on the website you’ve been working on for so much time, it’s necessary to have the right amount of bandwidth to hold all your clients. One significatn advantage a dedicated server provides is individual service. You do not share space with others. The server is dedicated only to your business, enabling traffic to flow quickly and smoothly.

A dedicated server is more expensive, but the guarantee that your website will allow customers access all the time is worth even more. Your shared server may be costing you customers and money right now. If you have a large or growing business, a dedicated server is the only way to go.

What makes you scream when you stumble upon a website? For me, it is cheesy music with no “off” button.

Signs of Webmaster Newbies

All of us have been “newbies” at one point in our webmastering lives.We spent hours at dhtml, javscript and graphics sites looking for copy-and-paste stuff that we thought would make our sites look impressive.

First timer’s websites are easily spotted with their smorgasboard of javascripts, animated gifs, sounds and other components. Unfortunately, this only makes a site look amateur.

Creating an Amateur Image

You might have a brick and mortar business that’s been around for the last decade, with tons of satisfied customers.On the net, however, your visitors do not know who you are.A professional online image will inspire trust.  When designing your website, here are some things to avoid so that your business does not look amateur or like a fly-by-night operation:

• Dark, heavy backgrounds with hard-to-read fonts – For a business website, it’s best to use a plain white background and black text so that your visitors can read it easily. Some first timers are tempted to have “fancy” backgrounds with different colored text. Not only is this hard to read, but if you have a product line, it is difficult to make pictures of your product line blend in with the background.
• Pages that are larger than the browser screen – There’s nothing more irritating that trying to read a web page that scrolls across the screen. Most web usters have their desktop resolutions set at 1024 x 768. Try to stay within those confines.
• Sound effects – Everyone has different tastes when it comes to music, but even if you discovered music that appeals to every single person alive, don’t make it automatically load on your site. With a music site, there are scripts that allow the user to click play and listen at his or her free will. This goes with audio advertisements or other background sound effects — provide a way to pause the sound or shut it off.
• “Cool” effects – About 8 or 9 years ago, it was real “cool” to have a flash presentation on the index page. Everyone was doing this. This does not establish your online reputation. Flash introductions involve a lot of effort to create and when it is all said and done, many look silly. These introductions can take a long time to load and generally, people will not view them. Another thing that beginners think is “cool” are page fading effects, animated images and scrolling text. When I first started designing pages, I added these things, thinking it made me look like I was adept with web design. However, the cold reality is that these effects are a waste of time and a turnoff. I’ve seen some sites, designed by supposed design specialists, where the links scroll by really fast and you have to “aim and shoot” just to be able to click a link. Do not bother with these effects. People visiting your site are looking for products or information, and are not there to look at animations that will give them a headache.
• No clear navigation scheme – Many people enter a website by the interior pages, not at the home page. You should give your visitors a way to easily click through your site. Menus that are on the left side of the page or on the top of the page are the most popular. Regardless of where you decide to place your menu, make sure that it is in the same place throughout your site. A missing or confusing navigation menu is a sign of amateur web design.
• No search feature – Particularly if you have a large product line that you are selling or if you have a content rich site, always include a search box to help your visitors. If you don’t know how to do this, try free services like FreeFind or Google search.  This makes your site “user friendly” and shows that you care about your visitor’s experience on your site.
• “Secret” prices - If you’re selling products, include the price. Don’t force your visitor to click through the shopping cart just to find out what the cost will be — many of them will not do it, anyway.
• Policies – An amateur site will not include privacy policies, terms of use and, when selling products or services, returns and shipping policies. It’s a good idea to provide contact information, particularly if you are selling products or services.
• Under construction pages – “Under construction” or “coming soon” pages are a surefire way to announce that you’re an amateur. If you are not done with a page yet, do not link to it. Add a link to your menu or sitemap at such time as the page is completed.
• No online shopping cart – If you are selling a product, provide a way for people to purchase your product online. If a web surfer is beyond the ‘research mode’ and ready to buy something online, he or she wants to be able to buy it immediately. Chances are, they do not want to send you a fax with their credit card information or mail in a check or money order. If you don’t have a merchant account, consider Paypal or, in the case of digital products, consider using a service such as Clickbank.  There are other quality shopping carts available for people who already have a merchant account, such as Mals-e.com, which also givesyou the ability to offer an affiliate program.

What’s Your Top Gripe?

Newbie or pro, you can voice your opinion about what makes a stinking website at the NotGuru’s survey about poor website design.  If you’re looking for software, giveaways and other things to help your fledgling online business, the NotGuru blog provides plenty of resources.If you have a couple of seconds to spare, take the site design survey and feel free to comment – the results are interesting.

Wissner-Gross studied the CO2 emissions caused by individual use of the internet. The research indicates that viewing a simple web page generates about 0.02g of CO2 per second. This increases to about 0.2g of CO2 a second when viewing a website with complex images, animations or videos.

Other analysts came up with different estimates. John Buckley, managing director of a British environmental consultancy carbonfootprint.com, estimates Google searches CO2 emissions to about 1g and 10g, depending on whether you have to start your PC or not. According to him, simply running a PC generates between 40g and 80g per hour. Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, estimates about the carbon emissions of a Google search at 7g to 10g within 15 minutes of computer use.

Google responded to this issue by saying that these estimates are “many times too high”. In their official blog, the search engine giant declared that their data centres are designed and built as the most energy efficient ones in the world. This meant that the energy produced per Google search is very minimal. The greenhouse gases a typical Google search produces is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. The standard for tailpipe emissions calls for 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven, but most cars don’t reach that level yet, meaning the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.

Despite misgivings arising on Google’s energy use, many have also sprung into the defense of the internet giant. Remarks on how Google remains one of the most eco-friendly organizations came from readers around the world. “Power use is a cost for Google and other computing companies, so bringing down power consumption of anything in its infrastructure is just good for its business, beyond the environmental impact”, Katie Fehrenbacher states, and added that if there was an easy way for Google to reduce that per-query energy consumption, it probably would have done so already. Kevin Marks says that breathing produces about 6g of carbon every 10 minutes, as much as Wissner-Gross’ computer estimate does. “I suggest you hold your breath while you search Google, to offset your carbon use,” he wrote. It is not even about Google, Nick Carr points out, “It’s about us,” and how much energy we use and waste every time we power our computers and other electronic gadgets.

Google being the Internet giant it is, will surely continue to be the attention of the environmentalists for some time to come.

It is intriguing to see how web development has moved on recently. The world wide web has turned from a niche for brochure-ware and intranets into one of the biggest software development environments in the market over just a few years. The web as a platform is a hollow dream no longer – you can now run and develop a web application without needing to host any sort of web page yourself and you can even get the data from a wide variety of other sources. Web development has created jobs around our country which is positive. Just watching the TV for five minutes these days is depressing enough – no jobs, un-employment crashes to a new high and the recession just gets deeper and deeper.

Moving web development on is a tricky business. When designing a site you now need to consider cutting edge graphic design and logo design. Simply building some for the web is not enough anymore, people want the full package. Unless you have a very compelling product or idea most clients will already have something in place web wise and chances are they have already spent a lot of money on it. Maintaining a website is much more common these days than creating something innovative. Yet in today’s modern web society just creating a site is not enough. You want to able to get your site seen. How can you get that done? Keeping on top of web trends is understanding the logistics of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Search engine optimisation is fundamentally tweaking your website to be visible with search engines such as Google and Yahoo! If you can get your site seen by these search engines the amount of revenue and visibility you can get from these search engines is incredible and it can completely change how a business works and earns money.

So what about the future? Well if I knew that I would be on a hot beach somewhere soaking up the sun. However what I will say is that the way some web developers deal with market forces and business people is wrong. What matters these days is how fast you can do the project and how quickly you can get it out there and onto the market. This goes against what I believe in as a web designer and I think businesses should stand up and fight against these ‘quick wins’. What do you think?