Posts from — September 2009

A good web page design that is suitable for your business is one that simply realizes its goal. Getting your business represented by a web site is an important thing to do which will spread the wings of your business influence even more. The key element in any web design is that it should be promoting your business or brand. Here are some web page design tips to help you get a clear idea.Do keep the web simple and effective using a design that can be up to a practical four-page web site, and not more than that. You’d want to engage your consumers without confusing them with elaborated page arrangements that can be a turn-off.

A good business web page is most efficient when it is designed to focus on the online branding. This will tell your consumers plainly about the brand of your business and what it is all about. Follow this through by painting a clearer identity by putting in a more specific description of your business’ role.

Avoid using any design templates that utilize Flash or colorful graphics. Your consumers will not appreciate the time wasted by waiting for your whole page to load. These types of designs have slow loading duration and are less practical as they are not search engines’ favorites.

A simple and reasonable cost shared hosting for your web page is the best option to represent your business site, especially if you are just starting out. This will save a lot of money and allow you to experiment first before making a final commitment.

Ensure that the design of your web site has an attached email address that is similar to your web site domain. Since branding is crucial, you must check that all the elements are matching.

A good web site design for your business should be an extension of your business brand. Keep it mind that with any type of design related to business web page, ‘less’ is actually ‘more’. Keep it professional by following these simple tips.

HostSG provides web design services to more than 1,000 businesses worldwide. See our portfolio and let us assist you to build a highly user orientated web site that focus on building serious internet traffic.

With the internet becoming a staple in people’s day to day living, it’s the perfect way to get your business or services noticed; however without an appealing website, chances of people spending time looking at your website are minimal. A superior web design is pivotal when trying to get people interested in what you have to say or sell.There are several ways in which you can make your site stand out from the rest; using HTML coding is a good place to start. However HTML, CSS and JavaScript are all foreign concepts to most of us. Using a website design team means that your site will be in capable hands whose main aim is increasing traffic to your site. In order to make sure that you get the web page that you envisioned, you will need to liaise with your web design team and decide which type of site you want. There are a variety of different forms of website on offer that an experienced design team will know about.

The first kind of website available is E Commerce websites, as online shopping is becoming increasingly popular, especially amongst younger people. If you are going to sell products online then this form of website is a must; it will give you the ’shopping cart’ feature that you often see on most online stores making your website look all the more professional.

If you don’t plan on selling anything online then you’ll require either a flash or a HTML website. HTML based sites are a standard website design which allow you to incorporate links into your site so you can have different pages for different sections of your website. You’ll even be able to use drop down menus that can break things down for your website visitors.

Flash on the other hand can provide you with some great interactive media images, so if it’s easier to explain what your website is about using pictures rather than text, this is a great way to do so. However, a website that is completely flash based site rarely gains high search engine rankings. It’s advisable to use a mixture of both Flash and HTML in order to get a high level of traffic to your site.

Although the three different types of website may seem straightforward, it is still recommended that you use a web design team in order to ensure high search engine rankings, therefore increasing site traffic to your site.

HostSG provides web design to more than 1,000 businesses worldwide. Contact us to see how we can help your business to prosper online.

Though most business today have a business marketing website, there are still a few out there that to do not have a presence on the web. Take a look at these reasons why every business should have a business marketing website and then try to find a reason not to build a website for your business.Your Business Marketing Website never closes. Unless your web hosting server crashes, your business website will be open all the time. Web hosting companies guarantee their servers will be up and running 99.9% of the time, so you won’t have to worry about that. Whenever a person wants to find out more about your business, get his or her questions answered, or purchase a product or service, they can do so. You can check your website information when you come to the office the next morning and process everything you received after the close of business the previous day. A website is a great way to make money while you sleep.

Your Business Marketing Website will reach a larger audience of people. Unless your business has multiple locations throughout the country or all over the globe, chances are you’re not reaching a very large audience. People all over the world are connected to the Internet and the World Wide Web, so you can take control of larger portion of your target audience, dealing with potential customers across the country instead of your local area. A business website will increase potential for sales.

You’ll be able to promote and sell your products and services to your customers. You can use your website to advertise your products and services through contest and sales. Providing access to purchasing your products and services whenever the customer wants to is an excellent way to ensure you’re not losing any potential sales. There are many different ways to sell your products online; many of them are free, or very low cost.

You’ll be able to provide instant gratification to your customers. If you sell digital products, offering instant gratification to your customers is a plus. As soon as the customer places his or her order and makes the payment, you can deliver the product right away via email, when you’re not even in the office. If your business sells tangible products which must be shipped or provides a service requiring interaction, you can provide an e-book, a video, or a podcast of some sort to allow for instant gratification while the customer waits for you.

Your Business Marketing Website will help enhance your customer service. By providing an online ticketing system you can have your customers issues logged and give them a way to track their issue until it is solved. You can also provide important information, such as a list of frequently asked questions, a mailing address, shipping information, and more so that the customer can find what he or she needs when he or she needs it instead of having to rely on a customer service agent via telephone and specific hours set forth by your business.

With all these reasons as to why a business marketing website is a key to a successful business, there’s absolutely no reason to avoid setting up a website for your business. When you see what the power of a website can do to strengthen your business, you will be thankful for the effort you put into developing it.

The prices of Servers may be dropping, but the purchase price is just a small part of the total cost of ownership.Server budgets expand rapidly once you factor in the cost of maintenance, as well as cabling, cards, rack space, adapters, switches, operating systems and other software licensing costs. Additionally, each new deployed server decreases server room cooling efficiency, which runs the electricity bill up another notch.

On top of the hardware costs, there’s the cost of hiring and training staff to operate and maintain the servers. The costs and complexity of managing a server are often beyond the financial and technical abilities of smaller companies which often do not have in-house I.T. staff.

Economies of scale, which generally dictate that costs drop as the purchase quantity of a particular product increases, do not work in the server world. And all of that is what is making virtual dedicated servers so attractive.

You are probably becoming familiar with the concept of a virtual server. Many organizations are beginning to deploy products like VM ware Infrastructure to create multiple virtual servers inside of one physical server. But the concept of a hosted virtual dedicated server is relatively exciting.

Essentially, you are renting resources on a remotely-hosted server. However, unlike the typical shared-server environment, such as a web server, you’re not sharing any of the server’s operating system with other users.

Virtual private servers, for all intents and purposes, function exactly as if your applications were running on a dedicated box. The server hosting company deploys a VM ware Infrastructure, partitioning physical servers into multiple virtual machines. Each machine functions exactly as if it were a single server. It has its own instances of the operating system, application software, virtual processors, virtual memory, networking, storage devices and even its own virtual BIOS.

In fact, the only real difference between using a virtual private server and your own dedicated server is a reduction in TOC that is difficult to realize using other solutions.

The cost savings begin not having to make capital expenditures to acquire the server. Costs are spread out monthly and are not carried on the organization’s balance sheet.

But the real cost-savings come into play when you start looking at what else you don’t have to buy. Most popular operating system software is included, so there goes the licensing fees. Most common server application software, such as Exchange Server, can also be included, which further reduces costs.

So for short money, you can deploy a hefty server, configured to your exact specifications, with a minimum amount of ramp-up time.

Ongoing benefits include the fact that the server hosting company takes care of maintenance and support, so replacement part costs disappear was well.

There’s really no downside, and you can look good to all around. HostSG provides affordable VPS hosting solution in Singapore starting from just S$51 per month.

1. Navigation Links

After planning the information structure of your site you should have some key categories in mind for the main navigation and some sub navigations to go under each.

Quiet often I see sites that do not have a landing page for their main categories but instead choosing to jump straight to a sub category. E.g. a confectionary company has “chocolate” as a main category link and “Cadbury” as a sub-category ensure that both “chocolate” and “Cadbury” has its own page and not shared that way each page can attempt to rank for its own content.
2. The 3 click rule

The general gist of the rule is to avoid having a structure that requires users to make more than 3 clicks to find your content, users naturally have a short attention span and if most of their time is spent trying to find what they are looking for on your site with confusing or overly long navigation chances are they will leave your site.
3. Allow room for textual content

Pages that are designed to showcase pictures of products should also allow room for a small textual description where possible.

Ensure that key images have an alt attribute defined, search engines are text crawlers and have no visual interpretation abilities so a picture of a donut is just the same as a picture of a cookie if no alt attribute describing the image is used. This is especially useful to differentiate pages have little textual from hundreds of other pages that share the same design template.

Example: img alt=”chocolate_donut” src=”http://www.abc.com/content/upload/images/donut.jpg”
4. Ensure crawlability

Do not use iframes to serve your content as search engines cannot read what is contained within. Opt for creating the content on separate pages instead of using iframes to dynamically populate pages.

Use flash sparingly, search engines are improving in their ability to crawl content within flash (loaded through xml) but is still second-rate compared to plain HTML link and content.

Flash should always be considered as a visual addition and not the driving force behind the operation of a website. The wow-factor of having a fully flash site complete with funky navigation and animations left right and center is not worth losing potential search engine traffic.

HostSG provides search engine optimized web site design services to more than 200 businesses. Contact us today to see what we can do for your business web site.