…. these days. From your Uncle's neighbor's nephew to your Sainted Aunt, everyone claims webmaster status. How can a real web designer, developer, and/or host seperate themselves from these amateur, part-time and low quality look-alikes?

Start by creating a Business Directory.

Many legitimate web design companies have started this way. Create an online business directory. Splash out and purchase a catchy domain name maybe yourtown.com or something easy to remember and easy to pass on. On the website, provide a free business directory of local businesses. Make a section on important and emergency contact information. Have a section on other local phone numbers of interest, such as the library and schools. Feature a different business each month. If you are good, you can call the business that you would like to feature, tell them about the site, and tell them that you are going to feature them for free. This may lead to a conversation about a website. If they don't have one, or it is out of date, your foot is already in the door.

Then Offer a Community Forum

Forums are quite popular nowadays. People love to express their views on an unlimited variety of subjects. Harness this by providing a free place for local area residents to post thoughts on upcoming elections, construction, and even comment on local restaurants. Put a small ad at the top of the forum, mentioning humbly that the forum is sponsored by your business and is provided as a free service to the community.

You may then consider purchasing software such as TownLink (yourtownlink.com). Offer reduced advertising to area businesses to get the web design site off the ground. Promote the site as another free service that your company provides to the community.

Also create a website that promotes local apartments and homes for sale.

This is actually pretty easy if you use software such as OpenRealty (open-realty.org). Configure the software for your community, and promote listings to real estate companies and apartment managers in the area. Once again, offer this website as a free service to residents who may be looking for a new home or outside residents who are wondering about the area.

Make sure that no matter which of these services that you use that you point back to your own company in a small, non-intrusive way. Make it known that you are providing these things, and that you are a local-owned company. Always purchase separate domains for each purpose then put them all over town!

design site web
web site design
web page design
internet web site design
design internet site web
web design company
custom web site design
custom design site web
real estate web site design
design estate real site web
ecommerce web site design
design ecommerce site web
web design web development
flash web design
web design and development
free web design
design free web
web design software
small business web design
web site design and maintenance
design maintenance site web
web site design company
company design site web
web site design michigan
design michigan site web
design professional web
professional web design
real estate web design
web design template
design new web york
new york web design
custom web design
custom design web
ecommerce web design
web site design and hosting

A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

1) Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

2) Conveying your site's theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the "big picture" of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors' time.

3) Site optimization purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page -- they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

4) Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird's eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone.

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every tiny detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty, but with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers -- all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

rnrnComments and Track/Pingbacks:rnrnHow You Know When Your Website Design is Finished | FlashMint Blog
rnNetThink 21: creative web design agency » Welcome Garner's Jewe..
rnmj » Blog Archive » Grrrr…Web design…
rndustin.net » Blog Archive » ECommerce Web Design - Back to t..
rnRockholderdesign - Web Design » Blog Archive » Creating your..
rn25 SEO WEB DESIGN TIPS
rn10 Sites and Tools for Web Designers - steelfrog - A blog on graphic & ..
rnWeb Design Savannah GA Richmond Hill GA Websites » Blog Archive &r..
rnKentucky Website Design Community in Louisville, Kentucky | Intercept Desig..
rnKenneth De Baun
rnMiami Web Design » Blog Archive » Get ready domain names buy..
rnWebsite Templates - The Advantages « Website Templates
rnGreat Resources Elsewhere: June 20 to June 26 - CSSnewbie
rn20 Excellent Photoshop Tutorials for Web Designers | Design Reviver
rnGraphic Design Blog
rnAre You Being Scammed By Your Web Design Company? at liquidbrick.org - dom..
rnGrzegorz Kozakieicz wins May 1st Reboot award | Community Site News
rnHow to Create Landing Pages that Double Your Sales at iElectrify.com
rnTips to quality copywriting (web content) | Silicon Valley Web Design | Sac..

When a customer is looking for a provider of a service or a product, the first thing that customer looks at is the company’s logo; that’s why custom logo design is so important. This is especially true with web based companies, where the logo is generally the most colourful object in a page full of text. Your logo says something about who you are and what your company represents – you’ll want to make sure it’s saying the right things.rnrnThat’s where custom logo design comes in. Most of us don’t have the appropriate talent and training to create a truly effective corporate logo, which are precisely the reasons companies exist to do it for us. Further, thanks to today’s world of technology and the internet, those custom logo design companies are easy to find and a breeze to work with.rnrnBecause these companies have the training and skill necessary to design and produce a high quality, elegant logo for your company, any custom design logo you order from them will reflect well on your company. So many companies are sunk simply because a would-be customer takes one look at their ugly logos and looks somewhere else. A good logo will draw people in and make them look again. From that point, of course, it’s up to you to give them what they need.rnrnSo get online today and take a look at your options. Search for ‘custom logo design’ in the search engine of your choice, and look through the galleries of some of the major design firms. Prices generally run between one and five hundred dollars – a paltry sum considering what you get for the cost. Order a professional custom logo design and give your company the edge it needs