Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

Do you think you need to have email marketing as part of your business success strategy? Yes you do!

And if you haven’t started using email marketing in your business, now is the time to start. It definitely is for me, as I’ve finally just sent off my first email newsletter blast to my mailing list. Yes, it’s taken me this long…3 years! The funny thing is I do this for clients regularly. I design their newsletter templates, input their content and send out blasts via their email marketing clients, but never for myself. My excuse..too busy doing for others. Doesn’t this sound familiar.

These are the things to take into consideration when planning your email marketing strategies. Read the rest of this entry »

The first thing people do when seeking information about people, businesses, products and/or services is do an online search. This is where the process of elimination begins for your potential customer or client. Firstly, businesses without websites get disqualified, then those with out-of-date websites, next those with websites that are difficult to read and navigate and it goes on from there. Here are reasons why your business needs a website and remember it’s not just having an online presence but having one that speaks to your target audience and helps your connect with them.

Here are some important elements to having a website: Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a list of my top 10 favorite WordPress plugins.

1. SEO Pack

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

“ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites”

“Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines”

“Generates META tags automatically”

“For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.”

2. Twitter-tools

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I haven’t come across anyone yet who doesn’t have a favorite color or colors. For the longest time, my favorite color was blue but in the last ten plus years, I’ve added Red and Gold to my favorites list. There aren’t any colors that I dislike, because all colors are beautiful and I’ve come to appreciate colors that would have seemed a little bit off before I started designing websites.

In web design, getting the right combination of colors is important and many factors come into play, for example: the business focus, target market, and your personality as the brand and business owner.

I just had to re-post this cool article about colors that I’d read at websitemagazine.com, especially as I eagerly approve of the characteristics of my favorite colors and how it ties with web design.

Read the rest of this entry »

I recently had a client ask me about the pros and cons of having a flash based website and I thought…a good idea for a blog post. So here are some of the points to bear in mind when you are thinking of having a flash central website.
 
The good:

Interactivity

Flash’s Action script opens up a vast field of possibilities. Programmers and designers have used Flash to create interactive features ranging from very lively feedback forms to attractive Flash-based games. This whole new level of interactivity will always leave visitors coming back for more.

A standardized site

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I heard a very interesting comment on the news this morning: “Court defendants who were smartly dressed during their sentencing got lesser sentence terms compared to these who were dressed shabbily.” This got me thinking about websites, can you lose business by having a shabby website? How is your website representing your business? Is your website gaining or losing you business?

Here are five simple ways that your website could be losing you business:

1. Slow Page Loads: People get really frustrated when pages take long to load. If you have this problem then check the size of your images and ensure that their sizes are optimized to load quicker while still maintaining the integrity of these images. Find ways to optimize your pages as well, also contact your web hosting company about this issue if everything you’ve tried hasn’t resolved the issue.
2. Dead/Broken Links: No one likes to click on a link and it goes to a “not found” page. Use a good broken links checker regularly to ensure that all your links are valid. A great tool to use for checking links is the W3C links checker.
3. Inactive Contact Forms: Imagine someone who is really interested in your products and/or services and then they’d taken the time to complete your contact form, click on the send button and NOTHING HAPPENS! Many people would immediately move on to the next person.
4. Poor Navigation: It’s important to give visitors to your website many ways to navigate through your web pages. It comes highly recommended from the usability point, to have more than one way to click through pages.
5. Visible Contact: Not every potential client wants to use your contact form. So create other options for they to contact you via. Some people like to send emails and some like to speak to a person. Adding an email address link and telephone number can make a difference.

Taking into consideration the mentioned above points can makes a huge difference in whether you gain more business or not.

A few nights ago, I saw the Pfizer “Life Without Cigarettes” commercial for people who want to quit smoking and I can’t stop thinking about the technique used in creating the ad. The message was so simple, really direct and I immediately decided that I was going to quit smoking! The funny thing is that I DON’T SMOKE! I was so amazed at how powerful the message was, especially when I wasn’t even a target audience.

In web design, there is the tendency to sometimes get carried away by all the many fancy techniques and shiny things syndrome. So, I’ve been pondering on my style and how to tweak it so my clients can get their message across concisely and really quickly thus capturing their audience, get great conversions and repeat business.

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In our quest for providing you helpful techniques to maximize the internet to gain potential clients, we here at AI Virtual Solutions, are supplying you with the following tutorial for creating a simply e-mail hypertext link.

E-Mail Links From Your Page

This is what’s known as a mailto: command. It follows the same coding scheme as a hypertext link format. What this format does is place blue wording on the screen that people can click to send you an e-mail.

Here’s the format:

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Happy New Year!!!