Starting Your Own Web Design Business

Here are a few tips for web designers who want to start their own web design business. I know it looks easy to start out, but trust me - It is harder then it looks. I am a full time designer and I have ran into nightmare projects as well as unwelcomed clients. Here are a few tips to keep things fairly easy and organized.

• Get your domain at godaddy.com with hosting too. Build your design website. It must have the following: home, about (optional), portfolio (important), and your contact e-mail.
• If you are having the issue of not having a current portfolio, just go to craigslist.com and make a few posting for a free website for people but make sure it's only 1-5 pages for this deal. Otherwise, there are some people out there who would gladly take advantage of you. Be sure to post your URL in the footer of the website once you have completed it.
• Make business cards, only if you can afford it. There are also places on the internet where you can get free business cards. The only cost is shipping, and the catch is that they will have their website address on the back. If you don't mind that, it's a preety good deal I would come to think.
• Create your Web Design contract. This is very important because if something happens like lets say, you complete the rest of the website layout and your client refuses to pay you - you will have a contract to show in case you decide to take this as far as the court room. It also gives the client a sort of reminder that your design business is serious when it comes to creating a website. There are a couple sites that give you examples of free websites that you can fish around for. Make sure the contract terms include website details of what is to be done, payment details, estimate and length of project, and full name and adress of your client along with phone number. Those are the essentials.
• Don't wait to get paid until after the website is completed: This is the first mistake I made when I first created a website for one of my first clients. The project I was creating, well he wanted revision after revision. A month went by and we were still doing the revisions. I finally completed the site and he decided he didn't want it anymore. So, all that work was spent for nothing but a good lesson was learned. That's also when I learned - a contract would have served me great in that situation. Always take payment after a preview of the layout or do it in 3 billing steps. Before, in the middle, and after. I prefer to bill my clients in 2 steps which is 50% and 50% for final website.
• The client is always right: I know that a lot of you web designers have a great sense of style and creative values. That's what we were hired for, right? Well, sometimes there are clients who come along and once we create their website - they want changes, correct? Yes! Most of the time this happens, but some of the people want their business website to look almost personal. For instance, I had someone who said to me "Let's have a yellow backround and falling raindrops for my site." Well, that would look terrible. But I guarantee if you argue with the client and say no, your out of money. Just politely do what they say. If you don't like the website you created for them, just don't add it to your portfolio. For instance, I only add the best websites to my portfolio. The ones I don't like are saved, but others just can't view it.
• Where do I find clients for my web design business? The best place to find clients is getafreelancer.com. It is a bidding site just like EBAY, but only for web design projects and data entry as well. However, if you don't have ratings on that site it is preety difficult to win the bids without feedback so I suggest using craigslist until you get a feedback of at least 10 or more on there.

To learn more about starting up your web design business, visit: http://webdesignsbyapw.com/?p=24

Adrianne P. Izaguirre

Effective Web Design

Use of graphics and content

You should use graphics very carefully and scarcely, in particular the use of flash and animation things unless you website is just only related to graphics. The reason for that is that they may distract the reader from the original content. In addition they take too much time in loading. But it does not mean that you may not use graphics at all. Too much text is also not a right way to put up your content. You need to mix the content and the graphics in a perfect way so that page is not so annoying and the user may not be frustrated.

Layout and design

A dull layout and design of your website's pages may make it unreadable and as a result difficult for you to keep visitors on your site. Some of such mistakes that lead to a poor web design are:

1. Text is too small to read
2. Color combination's of text and background are poor making the text hard to read
3. Large graphic files take too much time in loading
4. too much blinking content
5. Unclear navigation
6. large graphic content that does not fit to the screen
7. Non stop animations
8. Unnecessary scroll bars
9. Unorganized alignment of elements.
Some of the things that make your webpage an excellent page for viewing

1. Just stay away from bad design features that are given above.
2. Text must be easily read
3. Intuitive navigation buttons and bars
4. Fine use of graphics to divide large areas of text
5. A site map
6. Link colors must match with the color of the webpage
7. Once played animations must be automatically turned off
8. Pages download quickly
9. All pages have instant visual impact within 640 x 460 pixels

Planning
Planning for designing is a key to the success for your web design. The design must be nice looking, elegant, clean and eye-catching for the visitors.

Some of the points that you may need to look after while planning a web design.

Your choice of colors
Are these colors that you chose admiring?
What graphic elements you want to show to your visitors?
You may decide the layout you want to give to your website.

For more articles and resources about Web design visit Charlotte Web Design. Web Design Charlotte provides professional design for web, print and internet Marketing.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Youssef_Ali

Three Goals of a Great Website

Today I will discuss what separates a great website from the rest, essentially what are the goals of a website, and what each of those goals trying to accomplish.

The first goal of a great website is it gives your company a "face". Let me ask you this, how many times have you looked for a service or a product on internet and clicked on number of websites before you landed on one that you liked? Now think what made you choose that one website over the others? I am sure it was number of things, but one of them is the first impression. That is what I mean by a "face". A first impression is very important, we experience it every-time we meet our new clients, and same principle applies to a website. A great website will address this issue by having a proper layout, design and color use, the simplicity of it, and how the website captures your initial interest. All of these basic principles if structured properly will make your website stand out from the rest.

The second goal that a great website aims to accomplish is to relay relative information to your potential client using a properly written dialect. So many times I come across a website that seems to grab my attention but then I start reading a product or service description and I am lost, bored, resulting in me going to another website and doing business with someone else. I would have to say this is a number one mistake that many businesses make who have their own website that were done by an amateur. Every medium whether it is a book, newspaper, magazine, or web for that matter has their own style. They have those styles for a specific reason, to grab your attention, keep your interest, and in some cases persuade you. It is utmost importance that a website be copy written by a professional. A good copy written website will have relative information that is tailored to your target client, grabs attention from a potential client, make them stay on your website longer, and ultimately persuade them.

The third and last goal that a great website will accomplish is to properly communicate between you and your client. All website should obviously have a contact page with proper phone numbers, e-mail addresses, fax etc. That is good, but it is just the beginning. A great website will have "events" page that relays relevant information, it will have a blog page that will be updated weekly, and it will have an option for clients to sign up for news letters. This is important because it will remind clients about your services as well as provide relevant information, which will encourage potential clients to come to your website when they need their problems solved.

If your website accomplishes all of these three goals you will be well on your way to having a great website that does more then just sits in the vastness of internet among million other pages, it will start to generate additional revenue for you.

Eugene Yeroshevskiy

http://www.binarywebdesign.com

What You Should Know About Web Design and Hosting

I recently received a call from a business in the Healing & Health industry. This person asked her web design guru for a simple addition to her web page. He refused to do it and told her to log in and do it herself! When she decided to give the web design work to me to do, he deleted her entire web site and database! Are you ever the true “owner” of a web site that you paid money to own? The people that you as a business owner trust with your entire online business, are these people worth of your trust? Your business is the one way of serving online clients, are the people behind it worthy of your trust? It is no joke to lose a web site that existed for the past 6 years and the database with all your client contact details and the people you resell to monthly!

How can business owners protect their web sites and online assets? Web designers should make a full backup copy available to every site owner on request; right after the web design is complete and online. As the web design progress, a new backup copy should be available to you. Content managed web sites or the so-called Database websites, the actual database and a backup of your normal web design should be available to you. Ask your web design person up front, even before you choose a particular designer, if the source code and web design files would be available to you.

Graphics and content for your web site
If you as a business owner pay a person to design graphics and write up content for your web site, you are entitled to this content and in reality the owner of it. Web design Tip: Your web graphics are utilized on letterheads and business stationary – why pay another graphic designer for this – insist on the content that is rightfully yours. You own them because you paid for them.

Let us look at domain hosting.
I have also come across very suspect hosting companies. Some hosting companies physically disable the standard functions in the control panel of their server, so the owner of a web site cannot log in and create web site backups! Why would they do that? Yes there are space limitations on any hosting server, however why would one keep a backup on the same server? Should the hosting server ever have a problem it would only make sense to have your web design backed up elsewhere.

Let us look at Server Reliability.
Some hosting companies look very promising up front. The smaller company that is just entering the wild world of online advertising may find nothing wrong with his hosting company. Now it gets to a point where the business would like to start selling online and promote his services through having an online blog and a bigger better web site is required. Therefore, he pays the regular web design person to do the web design and host it where it was all the time… The business and site gains hacker attention and is down three out of five days! Make very sure your server is secure. If you have to, get your web design done and host it on a server for a probation period. If you are not happy, use your backup copy of your web design and get a reputable hosting company to move the web site for you.

Always think of the future
It is very unpleasant and unprofessional to have online clients get to your business web site and it is offline. Error pages drive visitors away and 90% of them will not return as they start to fear that your web site is not trustworthy to open on their computers. Everybody by now knows that often we get lead to suspicious web sites through e-mails. I personally recommend rather paying a little more for a lot more in future by hosting with a reputable company.
Support Does the hosting and web design company provide you with a phone number so that you can call them when you have a problem? Do you have to talk to a server through e-mail with hardly any human intervention? I have found that when hosting companies provide you with a phone number to talk to a real person, they more then likely have the structure in place to provide you the excellent service that you need for something as important as your business web site.

Web design South Africa, Hosting, SEO services. By Terence Coleman the company owner of a web design caompany in South Africa http://www.hosting-webdesign.co.za

The Web Design Business - 5 Surefire Ways To Fail

Several years ago, I launched a small web design company in a rural area of California. Market conditions couldn't have been better, my skill level was above average, and I had a large pool of aquaintences to which I could market.

Within 12 months I went broke.

My business failed because I made some very fundamental mistakes, and made them consistently.

I now work in the web hosting industry. I have had the opportunity to interact with numerous self-employed web designers and have found that the mistakes which I made are extremely common, and usually fatal.

If you are hoping to make a go of your business over the long term, you may want to memorize my top 5 mistakes, and avoid them like the plague.

If, on the other hand, you are determined to run your web design business into the ground, the following list may be used as an expeditious roadmap to failure.

1. Underprice your services

This is the most common mistake web designers make. The temptation is to break into the business by producing a few cheap websites in order to build a portfolio. Don't do it!

Remember that you will only be spending about 40% of your time designing sites. The other 60% will be spent hustling up the next client. If you think your time is worth $10.00 per hour, consider asking for $30.00. This will give you sufficient revenue to pay for all the non-paying time you spend marketing your business.

2. Fail to set and enforce boundaries

Everyone loves a nice guy, and the temptation to be one is a trap which many of us fall into. It's crucial to remember, though, that you are in business for one primary reason - to make money.

You will, doubtless, encounter clients who will pay you for a small website, then end up wasting all of your time with questions about how to remove spyware from their computer and requests to add "one small thing" to an already completed website.

You can avoid this, somewhat, by establishing clear boundaries with the client from the very start. A contract is useful here. Make sure that your client knows exactly what can be expected of you, and what you expect of them.

If your client asks for extras, and you're amenable to providing them, give them a quote. Never toss it in for free. The only thing you have to sell is your time and expertise. Don't give away either.

Remember, you're in business. Try asking a service station owner for a little free gasoline. They would be shocked by your question. Likewise, you should be shocked when someone asks you to provide free service.

3. View your clients as temporary

Many of us get into this business because we love creating something new. By the time we finish a website, we're tired of that site (and sometimes that client) and we're ready to start a new project, and put the old project well behind us.

This attitude can cut deeply into your potential gross.

Over time, your client will need numerous updates to his or her website. updates are sometimes bothersome, but can add a significant revenue stream to your business. More important, a satisfied client becomes one of the major links in your marketing network.

4. Ignore recurring revenue opportunities

During the best of times, web designers live from project to project. While finishing one project, you will be lining up the next.

Every business, however, has slow stretches.

Unfortunately, your own creditors will still expect payment, even when your own revenue slows down.

A wise web designer looks for ways to provide his business with some sources of recurring revenue. Even $400 a month which you can count on can get you through a dry spell.

There are numerous ways to set up some recurring revenue. Take a look at maintenence contracts with your clients, reselling webhosting, etc.

5. Build pretty websites which do nothing

Your best source of advertising is word of mouth. Nothing generates great word of mouth like a satisfied customer. You can build the flashiest, prettiest, most cutting edge websites on the net, but it's all for naught if your site doesn't perform.

Every website has a purpose. That purpose might be to sell goods, leverage an advertising budget, disseminate information, assist in personnel management, or one of a million other possibilites.

Your first job, as a web designer, is to ascertain what the web site is supposed to do. Once you find that "thing" - the thing it should do - make sure that the site you deliver does that particular thing like nobody's business! By doing so, you will ensure a client who will sing your praises at the Rotary Club, Chamber of Commerce meetings, and to his or her friends and family. A client like this is golden, and will bring a steady stream of customers to your door.

John Pierce is the Customer Service Manager for 123 eCart - http://123ecart.com - and the webmaster of the Find My Shopping Cart Directory - [http://findmyshoppingcart.com]

5 Big Design Mistakes - Learn how NOT TO KILL your Buisness

The first thing you should remember when creating a web page: MAKE IT EASY TO NAVIGATE!
No one will give two pennys on your super designed site if they cannot find what they need! Create a site so that it will combine design and usability!
I have made a list of what I consider to be the worlds biggest web-page design mistakes. Look at this mistakes and learn from them!

I.Stupid, useless and annoying elements that don’t let the visitor find what they want.

1.STUPID SPLASH PAGE. Ok, maybe you will say that a splash page(if it is well done) could look cool. Yes it could. But think of the visitor’s time. That splash page is very often longer than it should. You could actually kill your sales. What do you think that a potential customer would prefer? To stay and look hours at your splash page or to go and buy the product that he wants so much? When you create a site, try to think more at the potential customer than how to expose your flash-creator skills. They don’t care about you, they care about themselves!

2.APPLETS AND PLUGINS. Use them ONLY if you really need them. Not just to spice up your website. Again, think again more at the visitor. Maybe they don’t have installed a certain plugin and your content wwill not work. Then, your website is useless and the potential customer goes to the competition. Now that’s really cool.

II.Thinking at Internet Explorer as the supreme ruler
Any professional-made website should be compatible with any internet browser. This is a rule. Always check your website to be friendly with all major browsers: Opera, Firefox, IE. Don’t send your visitors to the competition just because they don’t use IE.

III.Stupid created navigation.
A thing that any webmaster should do: Spend hours and hours thinking how to simplify the navigation! Ofcourse I’m jocking but when the site is created one of the first question you should ask yourself: “Is this site easy enough to navigate?” If your answer is no, then is bad. Really really bad. The visitor should be able to know at any time where in your website he is; He should now in just a few seconds how to reach the information he needs!

IV.To much information on one page
Structure the information. DO NOT put everything on just one page. Do not put to many menus on the page. Try not to kill the visitors eyes. Try to keep a easy to read layout. Most of the visitors hate to scroll.

V.Text
Do not use small texts. Why there are so many sites on the Internet with texts of such a small size? I have no idea. I tell you again: kepp your webpage easy to read. Use texts big enough so that the visitor can see what you are trying to tell him through the page.

This article was created by Lighezan Alexandru webmaster at SourceGsm: cell phone specifications.

Choose the Best Colors for Your Website

Color is often the last thing on the minds of website designers. We've all been subjected to websites with horrid color combinations. Yes, there are websites with purple text on a black background, and so on. You want people to view your website with ease. Hurting their eyes is bad for business.

What do you think when you visit a website with terrible color combinations? Your reaction is probably negative. Don't make this mistake with your website. Take time to carefully plan which colors you'll use for text, backgrounds, and links. You can increase your site's efficiency by paying attention to your color scheme.

The goal of any website is to attract and retain visitors. If your site's colors are headache inducing, visitors will run away screaming. Black text on a white background may not be exciting, but it's easy to read. That's why it's the best choice for reading text online. Visit any of the large, professionally designed sites and you'll see black text on a white or light background.

If unsure which colors fit together, look at a color wheel. You can get a list of RGB color values (or HEX values), and see which colors are appealing when grouped together. A color wheel will help you balance your color palette so all of the colors are complementary. Another thing to consider is the color of emotions.

Colors evoke emotions using what is called "color psychology". For example, white is often used to symbolize good. Purple is often used to symbolize royalty. And the most universal of them all is green, which often symbolizes money. Take this into account when choosing colors for your website. Also remember that different colors mean different things in certain parts of the world.

Here's a list of some colors and their positive and negative connotations:

Red

Positive: passion, strength, love

Negative: danger, blood, anger

Blue

Positive: stability, peace, confidence

Negative: coldness, obscenity, depression

Green

Positive: nature, wealth, fertility

Negative: inexperience, jealousy, greed

Yellow

Positive: sunlight, joy, idealism

Negative: hazards, cowardice, dishonesty

Purple

Positive: elegance, creativity, nobility

Negative: arrogance, profanity, confusion

Orange

Positive: energy, enthusiasm, playfulness

Negative: danger, warning, fire

White

Positive: purity, peace, security

Negative: sterility, defeat, cowardice

Black

Positive: power, sophistication, elegance

Negative: evil, death, mourning

The goal of marketing is to connect with the public. What better way to connect than emotionally? Color can help accomplish that goal. Color psychology may sound like a joke to some people, but it's been proven to work. By choosing the colors of your website based on color psychology, you can increase your sales.

The bottom line is you should pick your colors carefully. Don't pick a color just because you like it. Red may be your favorite color, but if your business is monetary issues, red may not be the best color for your site. You're free to try various color combinations, but remember the colors you choose may carry a set of preconceived notions.

Want Professional Graphics For Your Websites In Less Than 72 Hours! Let eCoverGeeks design your websites/blogs, guaranteed to boost your sales and conversion rates, check out our stunning portfolio at http://www.ecovergeeks.com

Top 20 Tips to Make your Website Successful

Make your website simple, clear and easy to understand

Within three minutes, the visitor should be able to tell what you sell

Have a clean Description and title for your web page

Give reasons for visitors to buy from you or visit your site

Explain the difference between you and your competitor

Have your website built by a professional designer

Host your website with a reputed hosting company

Color scheme is important in a web site. Have a color that suits your business and give it a professional look.
Avoid funky colors

Avoid too much graphics. Use them sparingly if you want to use graphics

Design for visitors. Not for the search engines

Maintain a consistent look on all pages. Use the same color, same font, and same navigation bar

Have a site map so that visitors might not get lost

Check and make sure the font size is readable

Avoid too much information or images in your home page

Have individual pages for services, about and contact page. Do not mix all in one single page

Use standard colors, layout and links. Visitors are used to the standard look like blue underline is a link

Make it easier for visitors to reach your home page easily and from any where in your site. Have clear headings for each paragraph

Include H1, H2 tags

Remind your visitors to bookmark your website

Include your Phone number and other contact info in all the pages

The Fox Internet Marketing Solutions
A Division of the Fox Advertising Agency, Inc.
9114 58th Dr. East, Suite 103
Bradenton, FL 34202
Phone: 941.758.2404
FAX: 941.756.6484
Email: info@foxadv.com
Website: http://www.foxadv.com

Are Webmasters Actually Ninjas?

1)Webmasters enjoy working at night when no one else is around and it is quiet. Ninjas work at night under the cover of darkness.

2)Ninjas where tight fitting black clothing and black shoes. Webmasters wear tight fitting black T-shirts.

3)Ninjas rely on cunning skill and black magic tricks to accomplish their mission. Webmasters often resort to black hat SEO tricks in order to get their pages ranked well in Google and Yahoo.

4)Ninjas use smoke bombs to disappear. Webmasters are much more advanced in this area. They do not even need smoke bombs. They often disappear without notice. You have a better chance of getting a Ninja on the phone in 2005 than you do your programmer.

5)Ninjas use deception as a tactic to confuse and spread fear. Webmasters deceive everyone. Only they can understand their massive file structures.

6)Ninjas use their special insight to view the source of their enemy’s power. Webmasters use ‘view source’ as an age old intelligence gathering technique about their enemy.

7)Ninjas use a secret code to communication to other ninjas. Webmasters use heavily coded languages to IM other designers. No one has any idea what they are talking about.

8)Ninjas have been known to throw sharp metallic objects when encountering an enemy. Webmasters have been known to throw metallic data processing units across the room when encountering a blue screen.

9)Ninjas are hired because the client doesn’t want to confront the enemy himself. Webmasters are hired because the client doesn’t want to confront “HTML for beginners” himself.

Steve Hansen

http://www.seounderground.com

Work at Home as a Webdesign Freelancer

It's not important if you don't know how to program, design, optimize sites or do similar things. You can still earn money doing things everybody knows. Start working from your home today, without any extra investments.

You can do many "non-technical" things. Some of them are writing (articles, reviews ...), data research/collection (finding specified info on the web), data entry (mostly copy/paste), translation and many more. Off course for all those technical people, there are things like programming, design, seo and others.

Sites to find jobs/projects:

Ranoo.com - This is a great website. Most of my projects were done on this website. And I recommend it. While it's name determines that most of the jobs are in web development, there are other not so technical jobs as article writing, data entry, data collection (research) and others. You don't need to pay for sign up, their fees are one of the lowest (4%) or 4 $ and you can withdraw money in many ways. They also offer escrow system, so you are ensured from cheaters. Users can leave a feedback about each other - which is a nice option.to post a project is free and the webmasters are not charged.

Rent A Coder - I did only one project over this one. The overall mood on this site somehow isn't right, but never the less, you can find lot's of different jobs there, not just coding. Also there are some restrictions that make communication with the buyer a little difficult, and they don't offer bank wire withdraw - which I like to use. Their fee is 18%, one more reason for me not to use it to much.

Freelancers Network - This is a UK based website. So naturally many of the jobs are UK specific. Of course there are many jobs that you can work from anywhere in the world from your home. The good thing it's FREE, yup no fees, at the same time, that's the bad news, and it might happened that you finish the job, and not get paid. That cannot happened when using escrow systems.

There are many other websites. But these should be enough for you to start. Eventually you will realize that it's best to concentrate on one or two of this websites. Mainly for the reason of feedback. Most freelance websites offer a way that buyers rate service providers after project is completed, and few good rates, with some nice words about you can work magic in getting future bids.

you will realize that many of the people which you found over this sites, will contact you latter for some additional work (if you worked ok for the first time) - so you will start to build your regular clients.

Good luck with your bids!

The Web Design Business - 5 Surefire Ways To Fail

Several years ago, I launched a small web design company in a rural area of California. Market conditions couldn't have been better, my skill level was above average, and I had a large pool of aquaintences to which I could market.

Within 12 months I went broke.

My business failed because I made some very fundamental mistakes, and made them consistently.

I now work in the web hosting industry. I have had the opportunity to interact with numerous self-employed web designers and have found that the mistakes which I made are extremely common, and usually fatal.

If you are hoping to make a go of your business over the long term, you may want to memorize my top 5 mistakes, and avoid them like the plague.

If, on the other hand, you are determined to run your web design business into the ground, the following list may be used as an expeditious roadmap to failure.

1. Underprice your services

This is the most common mistake web designers make. The temptation is to break into the business by producing a few cheap websites in order to build a portfolio. Don't do it!

Remember that you will only be spending about 40% of your time designing sites. The other 60% will be spent hustling up the next client. If you think your time is worth $10.00 per hour, consider asking for $30.00. This will give you sufficient revenue to pay for all the non-paying time you spend marketing your business.

2. Fail to set and enforce boundaries

Everyone loves a nice guy, and the temptation to be one is a trap which many of us fall into. It's crucial to remember, though, that you are in business for one primary reason - to make money.

You will, doubtless, encounter clients who will pay you for a small website, then end up wasting all of your time with questions about how to remove spyware from their computer and requests to add "one small thing" to an already completed website.

You can avoid this, somewhat, by establishing clear boundaries with the client from the very start. A contract is useful here. Make sure that your client knows exactly what can be expected of you, and what you expect of them.

If your client asks for extras, and you're amenable to providing them, give them a quote. Never toss it in for free. The only thing you have to sell is your time and expertise. Don't give away either.

Remember, you're in business. Try asking a service station owner for a little free gasoline. They would be shocked by your question. Likewise, you should be shocked when someone asks you to provide free service.

3. View your clients as temporary

Many of us get into this business because we love creating something new. By the time we finish a website, we're tired of that site (and sometimes that client) and we're ready to start a new project, and put the old project well behind us.

This attitude can cut deeply into your potential gross.

Over time, your client will need numerous updates to his or her website. updates are sometimes bothersome, but can add a significant revenue stream to your business. More important, a satisfied client becomes one of the major links in your marketing network.

4. Ignore recurring revenue opportunities

During the best of times, web designers live from project to project. While finishing one project, you will be lining up the next.

Every business, however, has slow stretches.

Unfortunately, your own creditors will still expect payment, even when your own revenue slows down.

A wise web designer looks for ways to provide his business with some sources of recurring revenue. Even $400 a month which you can count on can get you through a dry spell.

There are numerous ways to set up some recurring revenue. Take a look at maintenence contracts with your clients, reselling webhosting, etc.

5. Build pretty websites which do nothing

Your best source of advertising is word of mouth. Nothing generates great word of mouth like a satisfied customer. You can build the flashiest, prettiest, most cutting edge websites on the net, but it's all for naught if your site doesn't perform.

Every website has a purpose. That purpose might be to sell goods, leverage an advertising budget, disseminate information, assist in personnel management, or one of a million other possibilites.

Your first job, as a web designer, is to ascertain what the web site is supposed to do. Once you find that "thing" - the thing it should do - make sure that the site you deliver does that particular thing like nobody's business! By doing so, you will ensure a client who will sing your praises at the Rotary Club, Chamber of Commerce meetings, and to his or her friends and family. A client like this is golden, and will bring a steady stream of customers to your door.

John Pierce is the Customer Service Manager for 123 eCart - http://123ecart.com - and the webmaster of the Find My Shopping Cart Directory - [http://findmyshoppingcart.com]

9 Ways to Gain Your Visitors Respect

The internet is filled with sites and they are good and bad. Some have been
known for a long time and some still struggle to get the respect and fame they think they deserve.

Although not all your visitors are web design professional they still can put
their finger on a good site and sense the ones that are not that ok. But how
can you convince people your site deserves to be known and respected? How can
you make them feel your site is better than other thousands they could find on
the same subject?

Elegant design

You need a nice looking site. Don't overdo this either, but try to offer your
site a unique and nice feeling. Branding is also important. Try to come up with
a nice logo.

Create a nice layout, try to have a consistent colour theme and use nice fonts.
Don't use templates unless they are unique and you have got the only copy. There's
nothing worse for your "respected" site than a theme people have seen for 50
times before.

Avoid animated gifs, annoying backgrounds and music.

Good and interesting content

Don't just throw links and downloads. Nowadays people need more, not to mention
the search engines would love your site more if you offer them some content.
Organize the content logically and update it frequently.

Good way to advertise

We all need to live and some try to do this from the site they run. It's ok to
have an ad campaign or two. Just don't over do it. Don't fill your pages with
many banners and advertising links. They would make people lose respect for you
not to mention ruin the entire layout.

A good behaviour online

Don't think people cannot trace you just because you are "anonymous" online.
wrong. if someone wants to trace you all the way to your lair, there's nothing
you can do against it. But you can use this in order to get known, in a positive
manner.

Post in forums and respect. People will come to know you eventually from seeing
your good posts and nice behaviour. When they'll see your site this could mean
more visitors and perhaps some clients that are almost convinced you really mean
business.

Respect towards your visitors

Don't treat your visitors bad, offer them a pleasant experience and make them
love the place. Offer them a feed-back form and respond as fast as possible to
any questions they might ask. Word of mouth is a serious promotion. Use it in
your behalf.

Good organization

Don't take prisoners, let people know what's on your site and how they can reach
the information they are looking for. A sitemap is a good thing to add to your
site if you've got more pages. It's also a good trick for the search engines
optimization. Have a good navigation system and don't make people have to guess
what's going on in your little place online.

About information and contact page

For a business and even a personal page, a good about and contact page can do
wonders. When people see a nice site they tend to want to know something more
about the person running it or the business presenting it. And a contact page
is a must on every site. For a business offer phone numbers and addresses, for
a personal page at least an email address.

Updates

Frequent updates make search engines love you, not to mention your visitors.
If you cannot update the information on a daily basis, try at least a monthly
update.

Jonathan Yates
http://www.internetworldchat.co.uk
Internet World Chat is a discussion forum for webmasters to get tips or advice.

Shameless Flashers - Using Flash Tools To Create Spectacular Websites

Flash is a powerful technology that can help you create spectacular websites, tutorials and demos. Find out which inexpensive tools are available to you that have very low learning curve.

SWFText

SWF Text is an author tool of Flash text animation. It embraces 150+ text effects and 20+ background effects, and users may also customize all the properties of a Flash, including font, text color, and layout, etc. With SW FText, a user without any experience of Flash development can easily create a Flash banner or an introductory page within a few minutes. And all you need do is to input text, select font and animation effects. While a veteran Flash designer may use SWF Text for text animation in a project, which sure greatly saves your time and effort.

Sothink SWF Decompiler

Sothink SWF Decompiler is a tool to browse, view and parse Shockwave Flash movies (.swf files). It can extract sounds, images, movie clips from a Flash movies. What's more, SWF Decompiler can decompile the action scripts in a Flash movie and turn them into neat and readable code. Sothink SWF Decompiler can convert your SWF to FLA. It supports exporting the whole movie file in FLA format, compatible with Flash 6 and Flash 7. Sothink SWF Decompiler supports Action Script 2.0 fully. It supports exporting ActionScript 2.0 while converting swf to fla and supports exporting the .as file and Flash Project file (flp) while the swf file contains AS 2.0 class. Within the program, it can decompile the code written in Action Script 2.0 and display the readable code in Action Script window, with syntax highlighting.

ScreenFlash Professional

If you want to build animated, interactive software tutorials in the shortest time, ScreenFlash is your best choice. It is the easiest and most effective tool for demonstrating your software product, adding animations to your application's Help system, or training novices. ScreenFlash captures the action and sound from any part of Windows desktop and saves it to a Macromedia Flash movie file. You can also edit the movie by adding button, sound, picture and text, which can create an integrated interactive demo.

More Flash Resources:

SWFText

http://www.deprice.com/swftext.htm

Sothink SWF Decompiler

http://www.deprice.com/sothinkswfdecompiler.htm

ScreenFlash Professional

http://www.deprice.com/screenflashprof.htm

John Deprice owns and operates http://www.deprice.com

6 Steps To Your Own Website

A lot of people these days are interested in getting their own place on the world wide web. Whether it´s a personal site like a blog, or a business site, they all need to have a decent plan before they get started.

A few years ago I started designing and creating websites myself. I started just to show off to others, but I noticed it wasn’t as easy I thought it was. I mean, it is easy to get a site online; you just buy a template, pay a coder, and pay some one to insert content and advertise for you then you’re done. But if you want to do things yourself, that’s where it gets tricky.

After a few sites, I managed to find a certain pattern in the process of creating and managing my websites.

1. I always start with an idea for subject and content. Believe me - never create a website about something you hate and know nothing about. Instead create a website about something you know a lot about and like to tell other people about. What also works is writing about a subject you would like to know more on, after doing your own research. Newbies can explain information to other newbies easier then pro´s explaining information to newbies.

2. Then I think of a design to go with it, to reflect its idea. Like if your subject is Boats, then don’t go with a flaming red design. Sure it could do it, but I would prefer for a blue, water-like design to reflect its subject.

3. If the design is done, you need to get it coded. Some create their designs while they code, but I prefer to use a graphical program to first create the whole design, just the way I want it to be. Then I slice it all (contact me if you want to read an article about that) and save it for the web. I usually have a small group of coders I trust to code my designs and they send it back to me when it’s coded.

4. Well then everything is almost done you would think. You got a design coded and everything. But the answer is NO. You are just starting. Sure you have a site and all, but you do not have hosting or a domain name. In order to get your site up and running, you will need something called hosting. It’s like when you buy a house it needs to be on ground. Well the hosting is the ground here, and your website is the house. Without hosting, your site is almost useless. These days you can choose between free hosts, which in my opinion aren’t great, but if you want to start and try out, I’d suggest you work with a free host first. And then there is paid hosting, you pay for a certain amount of server space and bandwidth and sometimes extra features.

5. Now if you have chosen to go for a free host, then please skip this step, cause you probably won’t be able to use it. A domain is needed for people to find your website. For example if you website is called BoatFish, then you could make the domain http://www.boatfish.com or http://www.boatfish.net, whatever you choose for. There are quite a large number of extensions you can go for. But I always suggest you go for a .com domain name. People tend to look for them more often than for a .net or any other extension.

6. The most important part of your website is your content. People stay or come back to your website because you have good content, or leave if you don´t. So please write up some good content for your site before launching it; this can cost you a lot of visitors. I can’t show you how to submit content, or what kind of content you should be submitting, this is something you should look into yourself.

7. Now you got everything you need to get your site online. And still you are not done at all. You can site around and wait for people to come to your website, but not many will. That’s why advertising will be your best bet to go for. You can link exchange and/or go for SEO. Search Engine Optimization is a great way to get many hits towards your website. I do not have any websites that haven’t been optimized for search engines, because I know seo’ing brings in many visitors, and customers. SEO means Search Engine Optimization, which means that it will try to rank you as high as possible at search engines. If some one searches for a keyword regarding your website they will see your site and click on it. This is seriously a great way to get many, many visitors.

8. Now your site is done and you can keep submitting content to your site, to keep visitors coming back. Good luck! And let me know if this helped you in any way.

---

If you want to get more articles or Webmaster related information go to Http://http://www.webmasterspalace.com. It’s a place for all webmasters to unite and get their resources from. My name is Klaas Koopman and I am a Dutch Webmaster. You can contact me if you need anything Webmaster related. Thank you for reading. For Designs go to http://www.kkportfolio.net.

Effective Webdesign

The Basics

Before starting on how to design a website effectively, how about clearing some basic web design concepts? Designing Effectively

Now that you know what web design and related terms mean, lets get down to the real thing: Designing Effectively How to balance artistic design with practicality and functionality.

Use of graphics and content

Unless your website is all about graphics, how to make them, edit them or just a bunch of links to graphics websites, I suggest you use graphics sparingly, especially the flashing, twirling kind. They not only detract readers from the content, but they also take ages to load. You do not want your readers to leave your website because your graphically attractive page does not seem to load fast enough. Then again, too much text is boring. So mix and match the graphics and text on your page, having enough white space so that the page is not plain annoying.

Layout and design

While designing, keep in mind that poor layout and design will make your pages unreadable and difficult to keep your visitors on your website for long. Some of the things that make a poor design and layout:

1. Text that is too small to read
2. Color combinations of text and background that make the text hard to read
3. Large graphic files that take forever to load
4. Multiple things that blink
5. Unclear navigation; over complex navigation
6. Paragraphs of type in all caps, bold, and italic all at once
7. Graphics that don't fit on the screen (assuming a screen of 640x460 pixels)
8. Animations that never stop
9. Complicated frames, too many frames, unnecessary scroll bars in frames
10. Cluttered, not enough alignment of elements

Some of the things that make a webpage stand out from the crowd:

1. Stay away from bad design features listed above.
2. Background does not interrupt the text
3. Navigation buttons and bars are easy to understand and use
4. Good use of graphic elements (photos, subheads, pull quotes) to break up large areas of text
5. A large site has an index or site map
6. Link colors coordinate with page color
7. Every graphic link has a matching text link
8. Animated graphics turn off by themselves
9. Pages download quickly
10. All pages have the immediate visual impact within 640 x 460 pixels

Planning

Most of the time, all it takes to design your website effectively is a little planning. When designing a website, it needs to be clean, uncluttered, attractive and easy for users to read and find what they need. Begin with a webdesign plan:

1. what colors do you want to use?
2. Are these colors complimentary?
3. What items - text, images, data - do you want to put in your pages?
4. What layout do you want? Look at other websites and then decide.

Follow the above steps to get a website that speaks for itself and your business. You can always contact me for suggestions and webdesign projects.

Tasneem Rangoonwala is a freelancer Web Development Co-ordinator at D.zigns Enterprise Solutions, offering webdesign, development and other related services.