What does this mean for the average business with a web presence? It means that you want to optimize your site – not just for Google and other web crawlers, but also for small screen browsers.

Although there was some talk of needing a “mobile device only” version of every website, this kind of duplication is not necessary.  In fact, a cascading style sheet, or CSS, can be written into your web page, instructing the device as it loads your page, to optimize your site for the phone or PDA that is requesting it. So writing in CSS is the first step to optimizing your page for hand held devices and smart phones.

Use a program like the Openwave Phone Simulator to test your web page and see how it will look on a “generic” cell phone type device. If you know the specific parameters of a particular type of device (say, an Apple iPhone), then you can increase the parameters and get an accurate view.

Then optimize your content. Remember that too much text is too much for a smartphone device, and keep the articles short (no more than 500 words, on average). Many small articles with relevant links are better than one long article.

Make sure that the most important elements in your page will load in the center of the phone’s screen, and are accessible without scrolling.  Make sure your pages load quickly. Cell phones and smart phones have slower internet connections than most broadband providers, and you don’t want a clunky website that gums up the works. The customer will click the “close” box after a few seconds.

Many cell phone users will block the photos on your site from loading, so be sure to have relevant and interesting ALT tags that identify your photos. You want your page to make sense to the viewer who has no photo access.

With a little planning,  you will have a great website that is optimize for both PC and smartphone use.

Generally speaking, you may pay slightly more for extra quality service and particularly good care, but you shouldn’t pay a premium price for any service, because you are likely not getting anything more than you would for a moderate price.

If a web company tries to tell you that their service provides more so they are worth more, do some careful comparisons. You’ll likely find that they don’t do anything more than their more moderately priced competitors.

What are some standard prices for web services?

Registering
Let’s start with domain name registration, since that’s likely what you’ll want to start with.  A domain name itself should cost you less than $10 a month, or $120 a year.

For a basic package, including no extras, the cost should be even lower. You ought to be able to get a few bonuses like email, managing your domain name, and domain forwarding included in the $10 or under pricing.

Hosting
Many companies combine the domain registration with web hosting services, and that can be a great way to save money.

Hosting companies like Webdatamation generally offer two levels of service. At Webdatamation, we call it Entry Level Hosting and Professional Level hosting, but the names at other companies vary.

Either way, the entry level provides basic services on a shared server, while the advanced offers a dedicated server and usually more monitoring services.

These hosting prices can start as low as an additional $10 a month up to $100 per month for large companies with multiple layers of web pages.

One thing to remember is that the large majority of companies are perfectly fine with the entry level hosting.

If a hosting service tries to sell you on the higher level service and you are a small to moderately sized company, then they are likely trying to get you to buy more than you need.

Choices
At Webdatamation, we off the Umbraco hosting for a set fee, and we offer Sitecore hosting at a variety of levels and custom fees. We offer a variety of choices to each customer. That’s what you want to find in a good hosting service.

Web Design
Design costs can fluctuate a little more because of the nature of the work. Some designs are straightforward and simple, while others require a specialized skillset.

Overall, expect to pay between $50 and $80 per hour for a solid, skilled designer. If you have a complex task, you may need to pay over $100 an hour.

Webdatamation’s designers are not only expert, but a great value for any business. They have the know how to construct any element you need on your web site. Contact us for more information about value pricing and getting the most out of your site.

Know Yourself

Before you begin looking for a firm to design your website, think about the image you want to portray for your business.

What is the first impression you want customers or visitors to have about your company, and what do you want your site to say about you?

Do you want clients to think your company is modern and on the cutting edge? Creative? Dependable? Traditional? You’re website portrays that image in a few micro seconds.

So know what sense you want to portray,  and decide on some of the basic information you want on your site.

Great Connection

You want a web designer who connects with you, who captures the essence of what your business is about. The right designer understands you, and understands the kind of impression you want to make on your clients.

Talk to several designers and look for a couple who seem to “get it,” to grasp completely what your business is about and who you are.

You want to work with someone who takes your ideas and expands on them in ways that are good for your business.

Evaluate Their Work

Once you’ve chosen a few web designers who seem promising, then you should evaluate their portfolio of websites.

Once you know they understand your requirements, you want to be sure they have the technical and design expertise to back their vision up with product. Look through the sites they have completed and see if there are features and designs that you like.

Ask the designers about their ideas for your website. What elements do they suggests? What kinds of graphics? What kind of layout? See which ideas you prefer.

Determine Costs and Timelines

When you think you’ve decided on a firm, then discuss costs and timelines. These are two important items that can make or break a deal.

With Webdatamation, you will get quality web design at a reasonable cost. We’ll work with you on meeting deadlines, and are very responsive to customer concerns.

For web designers who understand your business and understand all the technical aspects of web design, speak to the experts at Webdatamation.

According to a group of researchers in Canada, you’ve got as little as one twentieth of a second (50 milliseconds) to make a great first impression with your website.

People form their opinions quickly about sites they see, although young people see much more detail in the first brief exposure. Informational content isn’t as important, but those initial impressions last.

According to scientists, people want to be “right” about their initial impressions, so a phenomenon called the halo effect comes into play. Once they get that gut reaction, they look for things that confirm that impression. So when they return to the site, they’ll find things that validate their first feelings.

If they had a good feeling about the site, they’ll return again, find positive things, and will often translate those good feelings into sales.

So what do you need to do with the design to create those positive impressions rather than negative?

Speed: Make sure you site loads quickly and reliably.

Simplicity: People actually recognize and remember sketches more easily and quickly than realistic photos, for example.

Visual Cues: Interesting, good design, good color, good layout, imaginative – these are the words viewers used to describe the websites they found visually appealing.

So what’s the message for you and your business website? First, it doesn’t matter if you have the best product or services in your niche, if your usability is off the charts, or if your customer service is the best around.

A slow-loading or visually poor website can generate initial poor impressions that translate into lost sales. A clean looking, quick loading and professionally designed website, on the other hand, brings visitors in and helps turn them into customers.

Let the professionals at Webdatamation create that ideal website for you. Put their expertise to work and generate great first impressions with a high quality web site.

Your online presentation is an important aspect of your business, and you want the appearance and functionality of your site to reflect your philosophy and your products in a way that is accessible and easy to use.

Build Trust

Your company website projects an image and an attitude. Really, the business website should be considered a part of your overall marketing campaign. The immediate impression that a visitor gets from your website tells them about your business.

If your site is well organized, well designed, and fully functional, then customers will trust your business and the products you offer. If the website looks amateur or filled with frivolous advertising unrelated to your products, they’ll likely have a negative impression and distrust your business.

Invest in great web design to create the image you want you business to portray.

Ease of Use

Great web designs are also easy to use. Make sure that there are plenty of links that connect customers with important information, and that they can easily get back to where they want to be on your site.

Today’s customers expect high quality, professional design on a website. They do respond to good marketing and great design, and want to be able to navigate around a site easily. They want to find the information, products and services that they need quickly and logically, or they’ll soon be off to find another site.

Functionality

Your website design also needs to be functional. Links need to be active, and the code needs to be complete. Simple coding errors can lead to “broken” websites that can’t be seen by viewers. Even simple things can prompt viewing errors. Not only does this deter customers, but your Google rankings drop with non-functional links.

You want to be sure your ecommerce solution is intuitive, security and functional so that your customers feel comfortable making purchases on your site. Any ease of use functions add to customer satisfaction, and that leads to repeat purchases.

Get Design Expertise

The web designers at Webdatamation know just how to design effective and creative websites that meet customers’ needs. Our designers can add any elements for interaction, information and commerce to make your site both highly attractive and highly functional.

In today’s business world, however, a having a web presence is a primary consideration for any business of any size, and should be a top priority.

Cost Effective Advertising

By using good search engine optimized copy and a great graphic design, you can attract people to your site, and keep them there. If you have an informative, useful site, other sites will link to it, giving you more free advertising. You can utilize a variety of different online tools such as videos, graphics, interactive games, calculators and photo collections that will help your customers and those who happen upon your site get to know your company and your products.

Building Community Connections

An effective website will help you make connections, both in your online business community and your offline community. When people can find your site easily, quickly learn about your company and what you do, and find a way to contact you, you have made great strides toward becoming integrated into the lives and lifestyle of virtual and actual neighborhoods.

New Means of Communicating with Customers

With a website, you have a simple way to gather information about your clients, such as their email address. Through utilizing this resource, you can direct promotional emails to your clients, run “web only” sales, and send them informational e-newsletters that provide information and promote your products.

Control Over the Message

With a website, you are in complete control over what image your business presents. Particularly for online businesses, you are able to create and preserve and image of your own making in a way that is difficult to do with traditional print advertising. A traditional brick and mortar business can use a website to extend and expand the business image they have tried to form in their store. The consistency will attract and keep customers.

If you aren’t satisfied with your business’s online presence, contact Webdatamation for ideas to fully utilize the online advantage of a business website.

Just remember that every other business and individual is also feeling the pinch. They want to find the right items to fill their needs without wasting money or time on irrelevant or non-vital products or services.

In order to survive and even thrive in this economy, a business needs to become essential to its customers. Small businesses have the advantage of being able to change course quickly to adapt to changing circumstances, where large businesses may take a long period of time to implement any reasonable change. So are there ways your business needs to adjust?

Examine the services and products that you offer. Can they be adjusted or improved to appeal to those on a tight budget? Can you offer an introductory value service to let people see what you have to offer? Do you cater to a specific niche or to a well-off audience? In that case, you may not feel the same pinch that other businesses do.

No matter what product or service you offer, you’ll need to get the word out to potential customers. Wise marketing is one important key to differentiating yourself from the crowd. While other businesses are pulling back from marketing efforts, you can step in to fill that gap.

Use SEO – search engine optimization – online advertising for a relatively inexpensive, organic marketing method, giving you value for your dollar and introducing potential customers to your products and services. SEO marketing through techniques such as article placement, directories, social networking links, and refreshing your website with fresh, SEO copy will raise your placement on SERPs – Search Engine Return Pages – and send more customers to your website.

Once customers reach your website, be sure you provide excellent, persuasive reasons for them to use your product or service. Let them see why they need what you have to offer, and you’ll find the way to thrive despite the tough economy.

GIMP is easy to work with and is ideal for anyone and everyone whoever wishes to create, edit and retouch any type of graphics, images or photographs. Whether you are a novice, an experienced graphic and web designer or a photographer, GIMP caters to all of your needs if you are on budget and looking for an open source Adobe Photoshop alternative. Though the project of GIMP was started by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis in 1995, it is now maintained by a group of volunteer developers. It’s features include channels, layers, brushes, masking tools, filters and effects, tabbed palettes, editable text tools, perspective clone, improved printing, and color operations. Its color palette includes RGB, HSV, colour wheel, CMYK, mixing modes and tools to pick colors from images and graphics. It also supports hexadecimal color codes. A few days ago the team released the latest version, GIMP 2.6.5 and this is a bug fixed release. The new improved features include GEGL integration for 32 bit color support and a more versatile easy-to-use free select tool. Another interesting feature of this latest version is the dynamic brushes. The brush dynamics let you map the different brush parameters like hardness, opacity, size and color to the input dynamics like pressure, velocity and random. To use this you need to map at least 2 brush parameters namely size and opacity to one or more input dynamics.

With this latest version, GIMP has also become easy to install as now there is no need to download and install GTX Runtime Environment separately. GIMP’s professional tools and latest plug in developments have not only made it stand apart among other similar open source applications but also a genuine alternative of Adobe Photoshop without the heavy price tag.

Phew! Would you still buy Photoshop? Of course, if your work demands more intensive image editing than what I have talked about earlier. Otherwise, as we all know, “open source matters”!

Thanks to the Google Maps. Satellite based imagery and point to point detailing of terrains as well as route planning, that is what Google Maps is all about.

Imagine you go on a hiking trip, you are not sure of the terrain and you wish to explore. Google Maps shows you the terrain and plans the route. It is a free Web mapping service application from Google that powers numerous map-based services.

Google created Google Maps API to help the developers in integrating Google Maps into their own web sites with their data points. Developers just need to apply for an API key from Google, which is bound to the web site and directory given whilst creating the key. If you want to create your own web page you need to include Google Javascript into your web page. The Javascript functions add points into your Mapping application.

Initial Google Maps API lacked a geocoder. One had to manually add points, latitude and longitude but now it has been rectified.

One of the main adopters of this API was the real estate mashup sites. Today even the weather stations use it for local weather predictions.

The Google Maps API has been now integrated with the Google AJAX API Loader which creates a common namespace for loading and using multiple AJAX API’s. This allows one to use the optional google.maps.* namespace for all classes, methods and properties that are being used today into Google Maps API. This replaces the existing G namespace. This framework allows to load one API key for all supported Google AJAX API’s and also gives a common namespace for each API. This allows different Google API’s to work together.

Generally, people familiar with Javascript, object-oriented programming and Google Maps will be able to work with Google Map API.

Google Maps API adds support to Mapplets, i.e. Map + Gadgets, which allows the developer to embed externally hosted applications within Google Maps. The Mapplets run within their own iFrames that help developers to create mixed code from multiple sites.

The Google Map API uses the browsers preferred language setting when it displays textual information.

And that’s a mistake. Good testing can not only help you get rid of stinker ads and landing pages, it can also help you optimize winning campaigns, improving their conversion rates and making them even more profitable. And testing needn’t be difficult or time-consuming, especially if you have the right tools. One of the best tools for helping you test and refine your search marketing campaigns is Google’s Website Optimizer. Even better, Website Optimizer is a free service.

Google deliberately designed Website Optimizer to be easy to use, even though the tool allows you to run complex, multivariate tests. At its most basic level, the tool lets you test different pages or combinations of elements on a single page to see how well they perform against a “conversion outcome” that you define. Google even claims that “you can launch a simple test in five minutes” in the video tour of Website Optimizer.

The problem is that to be effective, tests should be carefully planned to measure your desired outcomes. Another problem is that the results of your testing need to be interpreted properly so that you can be sure that any implementation based on the results will perform as expected. Testing is as much art as science, and it shouldn’t be done in an offhand or cavalier fashion.

Not sure where or how to start? Try Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer, by Bryan Eisenberg & John Quarto-vonTivadar with Lisa T. Davis. It’s a comprehensive guide to Google’s free testing tool, written for search marketers who are more interested in enhancing the performance of their search marketing campaign than in the analytic joys of multivariate testing. The authors don’t shy away from technical explanations when necessary, but the focus is always on the “whys” of testing even when looking closely at the “hows.”

The book is divided into three parts. The first part is a general overview of website testing and tuning using Google’s Website Optimizer. The first few chapters focus on the tool itself, but after that the focus changes to case studies drawn from the authors’ own search marketing campaigns. These are valuable not only as examples of how to test, but because the authors also share the processes and best practices they have developed to maximize the impact of the testing process.

Part two “What You Should Test” looks at more than 30 key factors that can impact conversion rates. These factors differ based on how conversion is defined, which also differs for publishers, retailers and lead generation web sites. Most of the chapters in this part follow a similar format, with sections on “questions to ask,” an exercise, “what to test” and “apply this to your site” tips. This is one of the best—and most thorough—guides to the overall website testing and optimization process I’ve read.

Part three, “Diving Deep For the Technically Challenged” goes into even more detail about the testing process, how things work, behind the scenes details of how Website Optimizer works and more. Meaty stuff for the more advanced search marketer who wants to know everything to gain a competitive edge.

The nice thing about Google’s Website Optimizer, apart from being free, is that it can be used to test campaigns running on Google or any other search engine. And the general practices discussed in the book can be applied to any testing tool, not just Website Optimizer.

Always Be Testing is an excellent book that tackles one of the most important aspects of successful search marketing. If you aren’t currently testing and want to know how to start, buy the book. Even if you are already testing and tuning your sites as part of your search marketing efforts, the case studies and best practices discussed in this book make it worth far more than the cover price when you apply the principles to your own campaigns.