“I do not have a website” is the last thing on earth any smart business man or woman would say these days especially in this cut throat competitive business world. The absence of a website implies losing significant business. Owing to the dominance of the Internet on modern life, having a professionally designed website to promote and sell products and services is the most cost effective option. The benefit of having an online business is endless since everyone can reap the advantage from the entrepreneur, to customers and even wholesalers.

The Present State of Affairs

Gone are the days when people searched through yellow pages to find products or services. It’s the Internet that acts the best search tool. With 95% online searches being made everyday, it is an undeniable fact that consumers prefer to browse through various web portals before making a decision to buy a product or service. With a website, a business can be accessible twenty four hours a day to millions of potential customers worldwide. If a business does not have an online presence, they are losing out on serious business everyday.

The Returns

Here are some of the rewards an online presence can endow a business:

• The most important advantage of online presence is the reachability to the global audience with a few clicks of a mouse. It enables a business to deal with thousands of customer at the same time. An online presence not only provides the scope to deal with the present customers, but also helps to drive in new customers. In fact you can now educate your present customers about new launches or even your existing products without being present in person. Your website does in all! The end result is great business without much effort.
• Online presence builds up credibility for the company. Since customers are able to view company profiles and more company details, an entrepreneur can easily win over the trust of their customers through an online presence.
• Online presence helps the customers to get endless number of services under a single roof. They can go through the details of a product or a service. An entrepreneur on the other hand doesn’t need to spend money to make a brochure to get in touch with the customers.
• Options like live chat or email queries allow the customer a chance to interact with the company. Contrary to the media advertisement, anonline advertisement easily reaches the target audience who are looking for products or service. An entrepreneur gets a good return on your investment.
• If an entrepreneur wants to alter the price of their products or services, they can do so in no time on the internet. Whereas introducing the new price via media requires a new advertisement strategy which is often quite expensive.
• With passing days, web space is becoming more and more affordable. Promoting a company on web doesn’t cost too much now. Online presence relieves the entrepreneur from the cost of real estate, business rates, insurance, water, maintenance and many more costs.
• Online presence saves time, money and energy of the entrepreneurs.

A website adds value to a brand, promotes its products and services and provides an added medium to communicate with customers. Therefore, it is extremely important for a business to adopt a website. Updating the website with useful information is equally important. After all, it gives the visitor a reason to come back to the website frequently.

Reprinted from Rahul Rungta

Okay, you are ready to join the masses and put up a web site. You’ve put a lot of thought into the design and are ready to go. Perhaps you should give more thought to using a web site template.

For many people, it makes more sense to use a pre-designed web template instead of creating a site from scratch. Using a pre-designed site template allows you to get a professional design at a fraction of the price a custom design would cost. A good template is automated or has HTML tags to show you exactly where to put your text. This saves you precious time. Also, a web page designed by someone just learning HTML is more likely to have mistakes than one designed and tested by professionals. Mistakes in web site code can prevent some users from being able to see a web page or can even cause lower search engine rankings.

There are millions of web sites on the Internet and there are more being born every second. Even though there may be more than one web site using the pre-designed site template you choose, the likelihood of a visitor seeing both sites is not great. Every site is unique in the data it presents. Web templates present data quickly and professionally without the hassle of designing anything.

Being that many web templates are under $50 and many custom site designs are well over $5000, it is easy to see how web templates can save money and time. Web templates are a good way for someone to learn HTML. By becoming familiar with code that has been written professionally, a webmaster can pick up on things along the way. Instead of having an amateur web site at the start, an HTML novice can have a professional site from the beginning with a pre-designed site template.

Search Engines also play a factor in choosing web templates. Sites with HTML mistakes do not fair well in search engines. Particularly in older versions of Netscape, forgetting one “table” tag can mean the whole page won’t show. A good web template has been designed and tested in many environments, to W3C standards, for maximum compatibility. Instead of thrashing your way through mistakes, take advantage of competent template designs.

If you are just starting out, a web site template is almost always the way to go. There are thousands of sites offering them for sale for very low prices. Why waste your time when you can use a template to get off to a quick, professional start?

When creating new design for clients, XD Web Solutions will help you decide if templates are a great way to get started based on your budget, site, and design needs.

Partially reprinted from Solutionfinders

Setting up your own business establishment means you need to build a strong corporate image as your first task. Without brand recognition you cannot go far and the best way of brand building is creating a unique image of yourself – one that stands out in a big crowd. This can be quite comfortably achieved by getting a graphic design done that makes a powerful impact in the market.

Now graphic designers are fused with the skills and know-how to offer you a company logo that itself is promotional in nature. Graphic design can spruce up your website and other company advertising platforms with a truly professional look, which is what every new company needs.

Graphic designing encapsulates designing various marketing necessities like websites, brochures, flyers, business cards and print advertisements. Naturally it would be advisable for you to hire the services of a professional graphic designer as they are better equipped for the task with their experience and talent pool. Hiring in-house graphic designers can sometimes be highly costly.

Since the growth of any business depends on proper marketing and grabbing the attention of the target audience, the responsibility should logically be rested on none other than professionals ready for the job. Professional graphic design firms offer cumulative services that include market research and analysis by the graphic designers to come up with a saleable concept.

Communicating  your graphic designidea to others can sometimes be a challenge. This is one good reason why you need to put your money and trust on professional graphic designers because they are veterans in the business of graphic designing and have their heads immersed constantly in the latest market trends to make the best suggestions.

Contact us so that we can help you get started with your graphic design needs!

Partially reprinted from kmanish

Screengrab! is another great, free extension that makes it easy to save a web page as an image – it’s a screen capture tool for Firefox!

With it, you can save anything that you can see in a browser window – from a small selection, to a complete page.  I also use Snagit (a more robust, paid screen capture software) but if you want something that is free and easy to use, try ScreenGrab! now.

Basically Screengrab! let’s you take what you want from a web-page: the entire scrollable document, just the visible bit, or a draggable selection. Screengrab will even save just the contents of an individual frame.

Screengrab! captures Flash and Java applets as long as you have Java installed.

I’ve used both ScreenGrab! and Snagit and they each have their qualities, but again, if you just want a free solution to capturing images from the web, ScreenGrab! will quickly and easily do the job.

Calling all Bloggers!! Here’s another great reason to use Firefox, the faster, more secure, and fully customizable browser and soon to be number one browser! Okay, enough about Firefox and on to the real reason for this post (wink).

If you blog and write posts (about anything; it doesn’t matter the topic!) and want to make sure you optimize each post to the appropriate keywords, then look no further than the SEO Blogger plugin for Firefox.

SEO Blogger is a free Firefox plugin that gives bloggers a mini version of the Wordtracker keyword research tool in their editing window.

It saves you a lot of time, allows you to stay focused on your current task (writing that next great article), and compares keywords instantly – all without leaving the Firefox window!

The image below shows my screen as I’m writing this article and using SEO Blogger in the same browser window:

The tool sits alongside whatever blog publishing software you’re using so you can do keyword research and optimize your posts as you write. Then, simply hit “Publish” – and you’re done!

So as a designer, I was curious as to what grade my own site will receive and if I designed my site properly. And, yes, I am not ashamed to say that I did not get an A – at least by the SiteReportCard’s website. Am I shocked? NO.

SiteReportCard is a very useful FREE service that helps you identify broken links, website load time analysis, HTML validation, and much more.

My site, and any site that I create, is already built with web standards in mind and is XHTML and CSS validated.

But I wanted to see what this site had to say about mine. So what were my results?

Well, there were 6 warnings, a high load time, and several possible misspellings. However, here are what the results indicated:

• the warnings were not completely valid/useful so really not much to correct;
• the high load time of 190 seconds is misleading as that’s the reported load time for someone using a 28.8K speed modem;
• and the misspellings included my company name (yes, it’s spelled funny – Xtreme Designz), blog (not sure why their dictionary isn’t updated to include that web 2.0 term by now), the word Skype, and e-commerce (though there are several ways people spell this word, including “eCommerce” with the capital “C”). It did find a legitimate misspelled word for which I am very grateful!

So what do I give myself overall? An A of course!!

Try using this FREE service on one of the URLs on your site and see what results you get. It’s at least a good start to figuring out how to make your site better.

Oh and if you need help in making some of the corrections for your site, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’m around!