Last week I stopped by a client’s office to talk business. While I was there, he told me he bought some domain names to forward to his own business website. This is a great practice for business websites, and we highly recommend it. Type-in traffic has some of the highest conversion rates among any advertising avenue. For example, we have registered a few domains such as Web Designer In Colorado.com and Web Designer in Denver.com. If a person types one of those domains into their browser, they will be forwarded to our main website, Shycon.com. While these domains don’t rank for anything, the type-in traffic of a couple hits per year each will really add up over time. The domains will easily pay for themselves over the course of a few months and you always have the ability to develop them into websites should you choose to do so.

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Email marketing is the most undervalued and underused marketing tool within a business owner’s arsenal. If you have a business or retail website and you aren’t collecting emails from your visitors, then you’re missing out on a lot of potential revenue. Don’t ignore email marketing anymore!

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An online web site builder is a platform that allows people to build and update their own web sites. They can cost anywhere from $10 to $50 a month, or more depending on the features. While they seem like a great bargain, there are a number of reasons that any business owner should never use them.

And when we refer to “updating your own web site,” we do not mean a content management solution that a website developer has integrated for you. If you have a website specifically designed for your business with content management built-in, these issues discussed below do not apply because custom integration should address all of these problems.

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Let’s define effective when it comes to web site design. Effective means visitors. It means visitors who turn into sales, leads or ad revenue. Web sites are simply online advertising, and if you don’t see a return on your investment then it hasn’t worked.

This is a topic of special interest to Shycon Design(and likely to many other professional web design companies). There are a lot of web design companies out there. A lot. It seems like everyone and their uncle’s friend’s brother can do some sort of web site design. With that said, I can probably repair basic mechanical issues on my car, but does that mean it won’t break down in the middle of the freeway next week?

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It’s been said before, and we’ll say it again: Every business needs a web site! Just by knowing your business needs a web site already puts you ahead of your competition (the competition that refuses to come into the 21st century, that is.) But finding a great web site design company to build your business on the web can require a lot of time and research if you don’t know what to look for.

Using this guide, you can make the process of finding the best web design company for your business much easier. If you know what you want in a web site beforehand, you will make it much easier for designers to give you a fair and accurate price quote.

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Web standards are standardized specifications for internet markup languages such as HTML, CSS, and XML. “What the heck does that mean,” you ask? Every web site must be coded with some form of internet markup language to make it readable by an internet browser, such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. These standards were formulated by the W3 Organization so web designers all over the world can create web sites with one goal in mind: make the internet a better place.

Why should you care? There are plenty of web sites that do not conform to web standards, so why should you? If you’re a business owner and you have a web site, there are actually many benefits to having a web standards compliant web site. In the competitive world of internet marketing, every little advantage you have helps.

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Search Engine Optimization and Marketing (SEO/SEM). Everyone is talking about it. (We are!) Many business owners know the power of ranking high on the search engine results page. More and more continue to realize it everyday. Every business wants to be at the top of Google and Yahoo’s search results. The number 1 spot for a search term gets about 50% more clicks than the second result, and that could mean the difference between making and breaking your business online.

Because of this desire to rank high, it’s easy to get sold on empty promises. Unfortunately, there are a lot of shady companies out there that offer services that do nothing but waste your time and money. There are things to look for to tell whether a search optimization and marketing company is going to help your business, or just plain sell you snake oil.

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How do you know when it’s time for a redesign of your business web site? If your business web site gets targeted traffic, makes you money, or provides leads, does that mean you don’t need a redesign? Not exactly. Web technology changes almost daily. Even if your web site is only a few years young, there are things that you can do and add to it to make it even better. While there are no specific guidelines for knowing when the time is right for a redesign, you can ask yourself a few questions that will give you some help with the decision.

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