Archives 2010

Are you analyzing your competition? If your business niche is competitive and you’re even moderately successful online you can be sure that your competitors are likely looking closely at you. The web can be very transparent in terms of being able to see how others are achieving success. That’s why new businesses can quickly rise to success and that’s why successful businesses need to be vigilant about competitive analysis --- so they can use the information to continue to grow and maintain their success online.

What sort of competitive analysis should you perform?

If you’ve defined where ...

Years ago if you wanted advice with issues going on in your life you turned to Ann Landers who’s column could be found in many different newspapers across North America. During her 56 year stint she became known as an expert advice columnist.

Now, years later, many people turn to the Internet for help and advice. Therefore it makes sense that companies use the Internet to do exactly what Ann Landers (or the Ann Landers column) did. You can offer advice based on your specialty and become known as an online expert in your field.

Companies who position themselves ...

Django web development has been around for about 7 years.

This post is to give you an overview of the various products and why we decided to use them in our web development process.

The following are some of the products that I will be highlighting:

• WebFaction
• Django
• Django-CMS
• Django-Blog-Zinnia

WebFaction:

I will begin with WebFaction. WebFaction is the hosting provider that we use for our projects and highly recommend to all of our clients. They vary from most other hosting providers in a number of ways. They do cost a bit more than your average hosting provider, however, the ...

In this day and age, it’s not enough to have a website – you need to have an optimized website. Millions of people use search engines every day to find information that they need. If you can provide the information that they are looking for, you can earn their business. But none of this can happen if your website isn’t optimized.

Without optimization, your website simply won’t be found. It doesn’t matter how great your product is or what a wonderful service you offer. If you’re not being found in the search engines, your business doesn ...

Whether you’re a large company in downtown Calgary, a small company on the outskirts, or an entrepreneur with a business in your basement in Timbuktu, search engine optimization, or SEO, is an essential ingredient of success.  Because the world surfs the web to make buying decisions, you’ll want to be the company that they find when they’re ready to buy whatever it is that you sell. Being found online at the top of Google, Bing, and Yahoo by your target customers would be a lot like having prime real estate, such as one of the big anchor ...

Copywriting is an important part of the success of your website. Your web copy needs to motivate your customers and prospective customers to take action. But it also needs to get the attention of the search engines so that you can obtain great organic rankings in the search engine results pages. That’s why SEO copywriting is so important in 21^st century marketing. By writing for your audience, and based on the fundamentals of search engine optimization, your business could get traffic that turns into customers.

SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the act of designing your website ...

Will a content management system help you grow your business online? Yes! And here's how. Content sells and today’s websites need to be more than a simple brochure that gives clients and prospects a glimpse into your business. Your website needs to work as a rich and interactive lead generation tool and a good content management system (CMS) can make it easy for you to help it do that.

What is a Content Management System?

Once upon a time, before content management systems, updating a website could be pretty labour intense. Non-technical people really couldn’t do it ...

Do you find that searching the Internet for a web design firm, that designs professional business websites with all the features that you require, to be extremely time consuming?

Have you ever noticed that some companies offer an amazing looking web design for your business, but do not include SEO strategies when building your site? Without built-in SEO strategies your website stands a good chance of being ignored by the search engines such as Google. So now you have a beautiful website but you need to go out and hire a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firm because you realize that ...

Outstanding web design is achieved through creativity and discipline. The technical programming you don't see is soaked through with beauty and allure. Captivating to people visiting the site and enticing to search engine spiders, outstanding web design leads to a healthy bottom line. This collaboration of art and science can materialize in lots of packages, but there are some distinguishing features that set apart the best sites from the mediocre ones.

Four Important Features of Outstanding Web Design:

Harmony

The synergy between each separate feature of the site with the whole is the primary key to outstanding web design ...

Launching a Website Without a Plan

A great thing to do before you begin contacting web developers to create a website for your small business is to take some time and draw up a plan. Make a list of the items you want to include on your website such as specific content and images.

Next, try to figure out how many different pages you will need on your site, as shown in the diagram below.

As for design, surf the Internet and find websites that appeal to you both in layout and colour schemes so that you can show your ...

Having a successful and  professional website is more than having the right design and the right domain name. You have to have something on the website itself to communicate with your potential customers. Writing for the web is an important part of marketing your business online.

Here’s a quick overview of the purposes that writing serves for your website and how a professional copywriter can help you make the most of your online space.

Two Purposes of Writing for the Web

Unlike writing in a magazine or writing in a newspaper, writing for the web has to fit two ...

You no doubt know about the benefit of having a website for your small business.

However, there is a right way to create a small business website and several wrong ways.

The design, content and feel of your small business website can make or break your business.

Unfortunately, there are several areas that new website owners miss when they are having their website created.

In order to create a website that will get you new business time and time again, you need to pay attention to the following common mistakes.

1. Hastily Choosing a Domain Name.

Your domain name is ...

Many business owners know that they should have a website online, but don’t know exactly why. Common marketing conventions tell business owners that they need a website, whether or not they plan on selling online. But if you’re on the fence you may be wondering how a professional website can help you. Here are several good reasons to work with a website designer to create an online presence for your business.

Customers are looking for you online.

In this day and age, consumers in all industries search online for their needs – even locally. According to a 2009 study ...

Professional Web Studio is excited to announce the launch of a redesigned website for GEML Construction Inc. GEML Construction Inc. is based in Windsor, Ontario and they are a rapidly expanding company. Their crew of highly trained professionals specialize in architectural millwork and finish carpentry. Examples of their outstanding workmanship can be found in businesses throughout Ontario, such as McDonalds, the LCBOs, Starbucks, Tim Hortons and Moxies Restaurant, to name a few.

Having been in business since 2004, GEML Construction launched their original website 3 years ago. Their original website included a photo gallery of their completed projects as well ...

The Internet began to gain popularity in the mid 90's. Many companies, large and small, immediately recognized how valuable a website would be for their company and they went out and spent thousands and thousands of dollars to have one developed for their business. Over the years some of those companies have paid a great deal of attention to keeping their website up-to-date with new content and new features, while others have probably continued on with their original website, not realizing that their website was due for a redesign.

So why should companies even consider redesigning their website?

Well ...

When designing your website, making it user friendly is one of the most important things you need to consider. Your website is your main marketing tool and it represents you and/or your business for all to see.

Everybody has visited a website that was most definitely not user friendly. How long did you stay on that site? 20 seconds perhaps? This is certainly not how long you hope to keep visitors on your own site.

To stop this from happening you need to ensure your website is user friendly otherwise it will completely fail at accomplishing whatever it is ...

If your town is like so many others, you may have noticed businesses that closed due to the fact that they lack a steady stream of customers. Local businesses have always dealt with the problem of how to generate leads to help them stay in business. Of course without new leads, a business could go under in no time at all.

Traditionally, business owners have depended on newspaper ads or the yellow pages to help them generate new leads. Those ads can run thousands of dollars a month, and have basically become ineffective, seeing as most people are now shopping ...

You may question the necessity for using a custom website design on your website, since so many free web design templates can be easily downloaded. Using a custom website design to construct your site means that you will have to spend a lot more time building your website than you would if you were using a template. As well, depending on who you work with to design your website, you may find that a custom website design is also more expensive.

However if you are serious about using the Internet to attract lots of new clients and grow your business ...

Have you ever stopped to think about how long it might take for people to view your web page? Do you know just how long it takes for your site to load up?

Many people that are looking for information begin to lose patience if a page takes too long to load. This is why search engines, like Google, are trying to make the results that people acquire more efficient.

You may wonder what this means.

The ideal web page shouldn't take more than two seconds to load if you are using a connection that is high speed, and ...

At one point in time, a small business owner had to rely on word of mouth, and a little advertising in the newspaper, to bring in customers.

Even though word of mouth is one of the most effective business promoters, advertising online with a website designed specifically for your small business is more applicable nowadays.

No matter what kind of business you are running – whether you're a vet, electronics wholesaler, florist or a plumber – there will always be online shoppers available at your disposal.

If you aren't around to round up customers, there are others who will be ...

Let's say you have taken your business online. You've set up your website and started to earn some profit from the new clients you have attracted, but you just aren't earning as much as you like. Even if you are, you'd likely want to maximize your profit potential to its fullest extent, and you want to know how to do that. Thankfully, you're in luck, because here are 10 effective ways to drive traffic to your website.

Drive New Traffic to Your Website - 10 Effective Ways To Do That

With these tips, you'll be ...

Plenty of careful planning is necessary to build an online business. If you want a successful business, you'll need a thorough plan. One of the first major decisions you must make is whether to start a blog, or launch a website.

With a blog you can continually add new, updated content. It's driven by a database, and the design is independent from the content.

A basic static html website usually has 5–20 html pages. Typically material isn't updated as regularly as it is for a blog. If you do a search on the Internet on this ...