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The easy answer is “more often than you think.” Web sites are a process, not a product. You should constantly look for ways to improve your site — a tweak here, an update there. And if something isn’t working, you need to fix it right away. There’s no reason — and no excuse — to wait.Even if you think the site is working fine, the Web changes so rapidly — in terms of design, technology, bandwidth, audience, and many other factors — that you simply can’t afford to leave well enough alone.You should reevaluate your site design every three months. If it’s been a year since you’ve made major changes to your site, you’re way past due for an overhaul.Finally, remember that we’re not just talking about changing a few graphics here and there. When you update your site, you need to rethink everything, including content, navigation, graphic design, publishing procedures, the tools you use, and even the site’s goals and objectives.Source: http://www.allbusiness.com

A website is an online identity of a company or of an individual involved in Internet Marketing. The task associated with the website is to represent a company, sell company’s name, attract more visitors, generate more business leads, promote more sale of company’s products and services and ultimately, help to gain more return on investment.

In this era of advanced technology, electronic commerce have highly dominated the marketing practice, and due to easy availability and affordability of the Internet, people are running after it and making huge profit at the comfort of their home.

As a serious online business person, what is important for your business is, to prepare a website that is well designed, attractive, easy to navigate, highly usable, good content, full of relevant information, enough functionalities and are capable of retaining visitors for long and make them come back again.

We know, Web is the visual interface and what people look on the Web will be manipulated and interpreted into their mind and perception. So being a website designer and programmer, you must be careful about the use of color effects, lights, visual effects, positioning and size of contents and use of search engine friendly technology, so that people must remember your website name first and search you first on the Web.

To achieve all the above mentioned strategies, your website building needs a professional touch from qualified website designers and developers who can put their best acquired knowledge and experience to make a suitable portal that can turn each visitors into potential buyers.

In fact, there are two types of website design such as; static and dynamic website design. You can opt for static as well as dynamic website design where former is based on simple HTML code and latter is developed with advanced and sophisticated technologies based on the information provided in the database. Dynamic website is actually selling these days, because apart from its beauty and diverse applicability, it gives the ease of quick and self information updating facility to site administrator without being proficient technically.

Another important factor for a well designed and programmed website is the quality search engine optimization (SEO) service. SEO is the basis of search engine marketing success, because website optimization process spice-up the website with relevant keywords, facilitate one-way link, enhance link-popularity and place website at top or near the top of search engine result page that ultimately help in attracting motivated buyers and more traffic to website.

If you want to excel high in your online business, aforesaid strategies of website design and development must be dealt with great care. There are numerous such companies which can give promising website designing and development solution at an affordable rate, at the same time, false promise making dudes are also in plenty. For affordable Website design and development, you can even think of any offshore website design and development company with thorough research on their portfolios.

source: http://www.buzzle.com

In the present market, as businesses feel the pinch, your website should be viewed as ‘an employee’ - it costs you to develop and run it, so you must ensure that your company is getting the most from it. A recent report by BT Business found that the vast majority of small businesses are not using their websites effectively enough to attract customers. One in six of the business web sites reviewed had no e-commerce facility to sell to customers and just 11% maintained their website every one to two days.

Here are ten tips to build and maintain a website that will help expand your business:

1. Make sure that your website is built properly, and that you either know what you want, or are willing to spend time planning it with a reputable web agency
The planing stage is by far the most important; once site build begins any changes can cause serious functionality problems. This is because a website is essentially a mass of interlinking threads, and if you change one thread it can have an effect on other threads. It is almost impossible for a web agency that has started build, to provide the resource to properly check all the possible outcomes from all the possible scenarios related to the changed sections at this stage.

2. Actively use your website
Simple things such as regularly updating content, ensuring links are relevant and working, and using good quality images will make for a more positive user experience. It may be worth hiring someone specifically to manage your website if it is considered a key part of the business. A website could be considered a living thing, or at the very least organic; the more it is used the more it will grow.

3. Don’t rely on Search Engine Optimisation to paper over the cracks
Optimisation is an important consideration when planning the structure and design of your website, but shouldn’t be used as a shortcut to improve a site’s ranking if it hasn’t been built well or is being used incorrectly. Also, you may well be paying out a great deal of cash for very little ROI, and some SEO techniques employed could result in your site being blacklisted by the search engines.

4. Test, test and test again
Get your friends to test the site, your family even. Thing is if you’re building or working on a site you become accustomed to it, making it difficult to objectively assess userbility and accessibility.

5. A website needs to be simple to navigate and interact with
You must make it as easy (and safe) as possible to use a website. There are so many good sites out there that a user will quickly switch off, and probably never return if it is not easy to navigate round your site.

6. Be realistic about monetisation
For instance, charging for membership is not necessarily the right commercial choice. Web literate people are used to being able to register on most sites for free, and could be put off. However, if you have a large membership/user base it will be more attractive to potential advertisers.

7. Know your audience
If you can categorise your audience as market segments, this will be attractive to and make it easier to secure advertising from relevant businesses or organisations. It will also enable you to make informed decisions about how to develop your site if you know your user-base.

8. Make sure that your site is designed well
Functionality is about how the site works, design is about look and feel. Remember that design is subjective, therefore someone will always dislike it. As long as design doesn’t offend anyone, then you’re doing OK.

9. If your website was built 3 years ago, you may need to accept the fact that you should have a new one
Technology changes rapidly, and an old site with poor functionality may dissuade users from paying you a visit.

10. Know when to stop planning, and start building
Websites are amazing, with an almost infinite range of possibilities. But if you keep on adding and changing things, you could have the worlds best website that no-one will ever see.

Source: newbusiness.co.uk

According to Janet Attard, more and more small businesses are realizing that having a web site is no longer an option. It is a necessity because consumers, businesses and government buyers all use the web to buy products and services directly and to research those purchases they will eventually make offline through more traditional means.

Having a web site and profiting from it don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand, however. In fact, some web sites are so poorly designed and constructed that they drive customers away instead of getting them to open their wallets wide. You can minimize that problem by following these basic principles of sound web site design and navigation.

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