Why Invest in a Website?
It’s common to feel that a website isn’t an urgent issue in a business. Sometimes the website is even an afterthought – “Oh, and we ought to have a website, too.”
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.
Content Management System
The current explosion in eCommerce has highlighted the advantages of and excellent Content Management System (CMS) like Sitecore.
For businesses that consider their website and their customers who contact them online to be an integral part of their business, using a content management system is only logical. It will allow those businesses to provide a seamless, high quality online experience that open source or low-end solutions simply can't provide.
For many of our customers, their website is a strategic part of their business. The added security and performance features of a CMS allow these businesses to focus the website and the usability features that make the customer experience truly superior.
By giving developers and content providers a simple to use and intuitive system, a CMS allows the marketing department or the sales department to create website content and design elements of the site. These professionals understand the customers and their needs better than developers or IT departments. With a CMS, the control goes to the people with the ideas, not only to the people with the programming expertise
Small Businesses and the Economic Crisis
The current economic crisis can be a frightening time for any business, but is particularly stressful for small businesses. There is a great deal of uncertainty and many questions – can we attract any new customers? Is anyone going to be able to afford my product? Will our business survive?
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.
Sitecore Keeps Ahead of Web Trends
One of the many reasons we choose to partner with Sitecore for our content management system is that they keep ahead of business trends, and are ready for the future.
Sitecore recently identified the three key web content management trends for 2009 – do any of these sound like goals for your company this year? If so, let us help you implement them using the seamless integration tools Sitecore provides.
The first trend is the growth of ecommerce elements. Companies want to integrate more and more ecommerce tools into their websites. One of the most popular tools for businesses to implement is InSite Commerce, a program that integrates ecommerce solutions. It allows a business to manage multiple websites and allows a great deal of flexibility for customers.
The other top ecommerce solution used by businesses is Microsoft Commerce Server, which offers intuitive tools for integrating ecommerce solutions including an out of the box shopping solution.
Piwik as your web analytics software!
I know, you would probably argue with me on Google Analytics being the best of them all, but what’s the harm in knowing about this new web analytics tool on the block? Piwik, as its website claims, is an open source alternative to Google Analytics.
Piwik is a PHP-MySql based program. In order to get started, you have to first download this software from their website and get it installed on your own web server. It just takes as less as 5 minutes to set things up and get going. At the end of the set up process, the software generates a javascript code. You just need to copy and paste this code onto the web pages that you would want to track. There is also a plugin that would automate this process for you! Simple?
Okay, you would still probably argue that Google analytics is the most popular amongst all and that Piwik is just no big deal. However, let me mention here that alternative open source web analytics solutions have their own advantages:
Cloud’s the word for SEO
SEO is all about optimizing ones website to the highest order of ranking in the search results. Consequently, if your website can manage to achieve that position, its impact on your business will be profound. However, the bad news is, there are very few people who actually realize its importance.
There are a number of strategies through which one can optimize their own website. Of these, the one that is worth mentioning is the “Cloud”. Many of you might have this question in your mind as to, “what is a cloud?” and “what does a cloud has to do in SEO?” Well, let me throw some light on this. Clouds can be of many types, such as, profile clouds, link clouds, content clouds and so on. However, the most commonly, or rather the only form of cloud used or discussed in the SEO works is the tag cloud. When you are looking in some website page, you must have come across a section headed “Tags”. Under this head you will see a bunch of words, placed one after another, some appearing small in size, whereas, some big and bold. The difference in the size is dependent on the number of times each word or tag has been associated with an item. This whole section is called ‘word cloud’ or sometimes called ‘tag cloud’. In general, the tag cloud helps a visitor to have an idea about the well-liked tags that are present in that particular site. The individual word or tag is actually linked to a page where you will get contents related to the tag you clicked.
This has been a very useful tool for search engine optimization and is gaining widespread acceptance by websites who want to optimize their keywords for search engines. Actually, the whole idea behind a tag cloud is to help you “visualize” content that is most relevant to a websites based on certain keywords or the keywords you searched for.
Our Sitecore Services
You all know how much we like Sitecore. Finally after becoming a Sitecore Partner, we launch Sitecore Development services and Sitecore Hosting services. This blog’s page rank increased yet again to PR3. Thanks to all our regular readers. We rebuilt our website www.webdatamation.com in Sitecore. You can find more information about our Sitecore services using ...
