The introduction of HP and other Microsoft based tablets at the CES this month, along with the rumors of the new Apple tablet set to debut later in January represent only the latest in the touch world innovations.

HP has a whole line of touch computers, including a line of sleek desktops, as does Gateway. Printers are adding web access with touch technology, and allowing printing directly from the web.

Additionally, you’re looking at faster cell phones with bigger screens, the netbooks, and the tablet PCs.

What does that mean for the web developer and the web commerce company?

More people will have quicker and more portable access to your websites. They’ll have the opportunity to interact with them in quicker, easier, more intuitive ways, if you’re ready to provide that capability.

For the web business concerned with ecommerce, think instant gratification for your touch customers. Is your ecommerce interface smooth and seamless? Will you be able to capture the customer’s purchase easily?

When developing for touch screens, remember that the input is very similar to mouse clicks, with only a few differences. However, you’ll want to make sure you allow for those differences.

For example, design your onscreen buttons slightly larger than you would for mouse clicks to accommodate fingers. You may also need to think about providing your own status feedback (loading, etc.) since the touch screens don’t provide that information.

While it’s useful to keep in mind that previous versions of the “slate” or “tablet” computer has not taken off with consumers, there’s no doubt that innovation in the mobile computing area is the current game.

With the indisputable success of the iPhone and iPod touch, technology companies seem to have the attitude that bigger will be better when it comes to portable touch screens. There’s no doubt that bigger will be better for many kinds of websites, especially those that are graphically and textually heavy like print news websites. Magazines and newspapers could benefit from larger tablet computers, as could many other sites.

Regardless of whether or not the tablet/slate computers take off, the touch technology is here to stay, and will only become more popular. Adjust and plan so that your website has a seamless ride into the touch era of computing.

As we all know, Google is committed to retaining that top billing, and they have responded to Bing and created some innovations of their own. Bottom line for both search engines is more relevant results for their users, and that means that SEO – search engine optimization — is even more important than ever.

While details will be coming forward for the next many months, many bloggers and some other sites have noticed a drop in their SERP rankings with Caffeine and Bing. This doesn’t need to happen, however.

In fact, smaller websites actually have a better chance of raising their rankings, if they use carefully targeted SEO.

Relevant Content
Good content becomes even more important than it has been in the past. If your site can match more precisely what the user wants to find, then you have a better chance of a high ranking.

Be specific in your content pages, and they will have a better chance of rising to the top. Carefully choose your keywords; if anything, specific keywords have become more important.

Be sure to include long tail keywords that get specific about your offerings: red mardi gras beads for parties instead of mardi gras beads or party beads. Think about brands, too: Canon digital cameras instead of digital cameras.

The titles of your pages are important. Each page should have a unique title specifically matched to the content you’re featuring. And you don’t want to ignore the Meta descriptions, even though they still don’t figure into the SEO searches. But if your page lands high up on that SERP, then you want to have an engaging, accurate and catchy Meta description to encourage the click.

The bottom line – although it will take more months to really see how Caffeine and Bing are going to respond, SEO continues to be highly important to web design. Money spent on SEO is money well invested, with the new search engines as much as the old.

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.

Suppose I have a website that is an equivalent to exporter-importer yellow pages. A prospective buyer visits my website to see if he can find prospective sellers for his product. After every 2 search pages I ask him to register or login.  He gets frustrated and leaves my website for another similar website which allows him to search prospective sellers at length and only asks for registration or login when he wants to see the contact info. I lose a customer, but with web analytics I can find out why my customers are leaving the site. Not just this! In addition to this behavior or design analysis, the analysis also includes detecting the personal preferences of customers who frequent one site and determining if a customer will repurchase the service or product you are offering. This detection and analysis is done by monitoring the amount of purchases in terms of money by a customer in the past, finding out the geographical locations from where you get the maximum or the least number of visitors or customers and finding out the number of visitors who actually turn customers of your service or product. Other metrics include predicting which products or services are most likely to be bought by your customers among many others.

Web analytics can also help you to determine the effectiveness of your marketing and advertising campaigns. Until then, play around with the analysis tools provided by your web hosting provider or you can even get started with Google analytics. Uncover hidden secrets of what your customer wants!

“So what is the big deal?”

Web 2.0 had revolutionized the way in which websites present their content to  users. Structured layouts, the use of layers in presenting information, the buzzwords that replaced flashy banners, sleazy elements, pop up(s) and so on. The message was loud and clear: if you wanted to increase your website traffic and do business, your design had to be “user friendly”.

Today, Web2.0 has achieved whatever it had set out to achieve. The user now  see terabytes of information, laid out on a palate in a precise, structured and presentable manner. Well today, more or less this is what your perspective of the internet is. However, what does this information convey to its machine counterparts?

Of course, we are talking about all sorts of servers and end systems that collectively participate in delivering your requested information to your browser. With an increase of focus towards presentation, the information content has become more abstract for the machines to process. The machine views a web page as simply information stacked between HTML tags and formatted in ways that hide the intrinsic meaning of the information. Thus it is a difficulty to further process and mine this information for the machines.

This is exactly what Web 3.0 is being built on. However, it is not here to replace Web 2.0, but will render a parallel layer in addition to it. The new layer will add semantics to the information that will be transferred over the web. Machine intelligence can then be applied to process as well as mine this information so that web sites are no more dull pages of text and graphics.

Welcome to the world of web services and the domain of a new Web 3.0, where smart and intelligent services revolutionize what simple web sites have to offer. Web sites will now not only present information, but also expose certain methods that will allow you either full or partial access to the information repository of the service. This will assist an organization to offer their services to their B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Customer) clientele in an open platform or framework. What is ultimately being aimed  at here is, structuring information for the machines so that they can communicate themselves and present information to you that will be more customized and relevant. Unstructured information shall pave way for more structured and relevant content. A new open framework would slowly evolve for more intelligent computing.

More on this later. Till then, let us keep an eye on how things are likely to evolve!

Skeptical consumers require more from your websites’ proposition to relinquish their reservations. This requires persuasion and persuasion marketing.

SEO, relevant and persuasive copy as well as usability all need to work harmoniously in order to shatter prior expectations about what users need from a website in order to take action. One aspect presented without the proper balance of the other can leave the visitor on the fence when it comes to making a decision to purchase.

Transforming a prospect into a customer involves multiple emotional and intellectual layers to facilitate trust. Often, the resolve of the prospect is weathered by a natural layer of mental and emotional buffers to offset the sales process. Just consider it natural reaction to being bombarded from disruptions from advertisements attempting to breach their awareness from every angle.

If you realize it or not, your pages are waging an argument of relevance, persuasion and validity. If you win, conversion occurs, if you lose, then your just another stepping stone for your competition who has structured a better offer, argument or call to action.

When dealing with new visitors, your website has a 50/50 chance of winning their vote. Visitors, unless endorsed or referred by a third party (like an authority site, or trusted friend or reference), have a tendency to reserve judgment about a new product of service until the argument of value, impulse and need are mitigated and a clear decision is determined by which action to take.

The primary component to sales is security and trust, without it your page is just another website that made the click and run list. Stickiness for your design and visual appeal all play a part, but the tone of your content and context, call to action and supporting information are the logical areas any visitor will assess.

Every time a new visitor lands on one of your pages, there is a mental checklist that occurs under the surface of their roving eyes. They either (a) within 3-5 seconds fast-track the checklist and like the page or the style of information exchange or (b) look for reasons to pick it apart and move on.

Don’t feel bad, this is nothing personal, just call it our new protection mechanism from over stimulation. Going back to the fact that consumers are constantly being bombarded from all sides and mediums available from billboards to bumper stickers and everything in between, it is only natural to protect your psyche from any random or fleeting advertorial or advertisement you engage online.

Making your argument stick is no longer just a sales pitch, it is a mark of distinction your pages wear like a badge that convey a more human element of appeal to your website. Just like a formal business letter in many instances was the norm from a different era, now an informal email works just fine to get the point across. Similarly selling has taken on a more sophisticated yet transparent approach to the methods of yesteryear.

We are now faced with a transition from conditional stereotypes for business as they are replaced with more rudimentary needs such as:

• Why Should I Pick You?
• Are You Qualified? If so, How Qualified?
• Under Who’s Opinion?
• What Credentials and Accountability Do You Have?, Show Me Proof?
• Are You Knowledgeable? and Last but Not Least, What are YOU going to do for ME?

Granted, this dialogue may not be obvious, internalized mental checklists such as these are not uncommon if someone is skimming your content for relevance. Only 17% of all visitors actually read your content word for word, most just skim for a reason to dig deeper.

So, if you are thoughtful enough to offer one part design, one part relevance and one part persuasion you can create the perfect combination for conversion to occur.

Just like clapping with one hand presents its own challenge, content that does not address or convey expertise for your product, service or brand will not sway your preferred audience the competition that understands the premise of persuasion.

So, before you think about how many keywords to optimize your website for, how to reach your target demographic or how many links you need to build to take the top ranking spot.

Make sure you have something worthy and remarkable enough to get your visitors off the bleachers and into the game, otherwise you are just cheerleaders for your competition who has structured the better argument to overcome the inertia of indecision with the fervor of their sales offer.

]]> http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/09/how-persuasive-is-your-marketing/feed/ 0 http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/09/how-can-a-web-design-company-gain-competitive-edge-with-joomla/ http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/09/how-can-a-web-design-company-gain-competitive-edge-with-joomla/#comments Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:56:34 +0000 admin http://www.kronikmedia.co.uk/blog/?p=156
A web design company needs to monitor the advancements in technology closely in order to remain competitive. A Web design company that offers only static websites is limited in its viability in today’s information driven economy. Website design has evolved in recent years. The information publishing needs are more complex and powerful than they have ever [...]]]>

A web design company needs to monitor the advancements in technology closely in order to remain competitive. A Web design company that offers only static websites is limited in its viability in today’s information driven economy.

Website design has evolved in recent years. The information publishing needs are more complex and powerful than they have ever been before. A web design company needs to offer dynamic features on their websites in order to remain commercially successful.

With the WEB 2 revolution and the recent success of social media websites such as You tube, Face book the days of static html websites are limited. Today no matter how small or large a company may be; it needs to present new quality information on its website in order to retain customers and also to rank higher on search engines such as Google. A website today needs to communicate with its audience and present a certain level of interactivity in order to be successful.

Designing websites in Joomla offers a web design company with many advantages. Websites designed in Joomla offer powerful features that traditional websites fail to deliver. Joomla enables web design companies to deliver dynamic database driven websites that can meet the growing needs of businesses however small or large.

Web design companies across the world are using Joomla to meet the dynamic needs required by websites of today.  A web design company can benefit equally by using Joomla to design websites for smaller businesses as well designing websites with more complex requirements.  Using Joomla a web design company is able to offer a powerful yet easy to use dynamic website at an affordable price.

Joomla is a free open source software. However a web design company does incur costs in producing a professional Joomla based website. As with any other programming area, Joomla requires skills and experience to implement. The core features are however easy to use and customise and can meet the needs of diverse businesses. A web design company can customise Joomla to meet a client’s requirements in a matter of days as opposed to months for a bespoke custom made system.

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