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Events – How to Finance and Market Your Business in 2010
The event, created for small business owners in Palm Beach County, will provide key insights into:
- Where to obtain small business financing
- What a small business needs to qualify for financing
- How to easily and affordable remain connected with existing customers
- Where to find new customers and how to communicate with them regularly
During this session small businesses will receive live case studies from business owners who obtained financing and are successfully marketing their businesses through multiple-channels including email marketing, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and direct mail.
Speakers include small business marketing expert Lisa Sparks, Director of the SCORE’s South Palm Beach Chapter Hal Finkelstein and Certified Business Analyst Phil Scruton of the SBDC at Palm Beach State College.
When Friday, April 30, 2010, 8:30am – 12pm
Where Boca Raton Marriott
5150 Town Center Circle
Boca Raton, FL 33486
Refresh Miami – 29th April 2010
Join the team at “The Groove Spot” on Thursday at 7:30pm for this month Refresh Miami where they will have two great presentations that will help to be iPad-ready.
First Damian Montero will present “How to Make Your Website iPad Friendly,” showing how to leverage HTML5 in order to play videos and more on the portable device.
The second presentation is by Luciano Ibias, COO of Zila Networks, the company behind the successful Friends Around Me, who will talk about “iPad App in a Week: How To Port Your App From iPhone To iPad.”
Follow the April speakers on Twitter:
Damian Montero @damianmontero
Luciano Ibias @ibias
Please RSVP Via Facebook
iPad Crash Course
Date: Thursday, April 29, 2010
The Grove Spot
3324 Virginia Street
Miami, FL 33133
Time: 7.30 PM
The South Florida User Experience Meetup – 29th April
The South Florida User Experience Group will be celebrating its two year anniversary this month. This meet-up will be a good mixer for all the new people who have joined the South Florida User Experience Group in the last few months. Attendees are welcome to bring any site to put in front of the group and open it up for comments and suggestions.
This month’s presentation will be on remote automated testing: How to do it, what the benefits are, popular tools etc. This is going to be a great tool for anyone who works freelance or designs websites on their own. Testing can be an invaluable method for inspection into your sites usability. To do this, there will also be a demo of the Loop11 software, a great product for remote automated testing. The Loop11 competition will be launched while the meet-up and the details of the prize worth $1750 will be revealed as well!
Where
Panera Bread
1762 North Federal Hwy
Ft. Lauderdale FL 33305
954-567-5925
When
Thursday, April 29, 2010 7:00 PM
Comments (0)Web Design: Why it Helps to Go Local
If you are considering hiring a web design company to assist you in setting up your space on the internet, you should consider hiring a local web designer. There are so many design companies today to choose from and they are located all over the world. While it is fine to use a design company located far from you, it could become a problem if a face-to-face meeting is necessary in order to go over some fine details concerning your website design.
You can benefit in many ways by going local with your web designer. Maybe you would like your designer to walk through your company in order to get a good, overall picture of what you do. Perhaps some drawings on paper are necessary so that you can understand fully what the designer has in mind for your site. In both cases, having your designer located on the other side of the world are of no benefit. Just having some regular, short meetings at a local coffee shop together with your designer can help to clear things up that may otherwise take a lot of emails and phone calls to clarify.
If you need a website built for your local business, it is nearly impossible for an outsider to fully understand the nature of the people living in your area. If you hire a local web designer however, he or she will understand how your potential customers think and feel. Adding a bit of local flavor to your site’s design is always a great idea and certainly an outsider will never be able to do that as well as someone who lives near you.
Hiring a local web designer is also a great way to support the economy in your area. Communities everywhere are trying to reduce the number of jobs that are sourced out as outsourcing can eventually lead to both social and economic collapse. Instead of contributing to this detrimental effect, you will be helping other business people in your city or town.
Finally, if and when your website runs into problems, your web designer will simply give you a call and perhaps invite you to his/her office so that you can sit down together and hammer out a solution. On the other hand, if your designer is located far away from you in another time zone for instance, they may stop working on your site all together until they can reach you – which will delay the launching of your site.
A good resource for hiring local talent is www.craigslist.org. Another good resource is to simply search in Google for a local designer.
Comments (0)Top 5 Resources to Help Build Your Website
There are so many ways to build a great website that it can be somewhat confusing knowing where to start. The very first thing that must be decided when building a site is, what is the primary purpose of the website? Will you provide content? Will you sell products/services or is it simply informational? These questions must be answered before starting to put your website together.
Once you have decided what type of website you wish to build, then you must choose the best resources to use. This will save you a lot of frustration when building your site and it is not even all that necessary that you understand HTML in order to build an effective site.
Web Templates
A template is a complete website layout without the text and links. Templates give you a layout and format from which you can create your web pages. Templates have many uses. They allow you to create a website without needing to know any website design as the layout is done for you. Templates also help you to launch your site quickly as you need only to add the text and then load your site to the web. You can either buy templates or get them for free and they come in a wide variety of styles and colors. Once you download the template you like, in most cases they’re ready for deployment. Your pages will load quickly and your site visitors will have a nice browser experience.
Content Pages
Providing great content will make your site a place that visitors will want to come back to again and again and a ’sticky’ site is a successful site. The easiest way to make your site sticky is to provide helpful articles. Be sure that the articles you put on your content pages are keyword rich, informative, relevant and useful to your visitors.
HTML Editors
If you do not know how to write HTML there are many free editors available that will do the job for you. Choosing the right editor will determine how quickly your site will get online. The best HTML editors will allow you to quickly and easily add content to your pages. Depending on the editor you pick, it will make your life easy when adding graphics, icons, photos and background images to your website – in most cases it can be drag and drop.
Content Management Systems
A content management system (CMS) allows you to make changes to your content without having to hire a programmer. You can edit, delete, modify and remove any content you want even if you have no HTML knowledge or skills. A CMS offers consistency to all of your web pages. If you have a content-rich site and you need to update and edit that information on a regular basis then consider a content management system (CMS) to help ease the process of adding new content.
Blogs
[This bit is important! -->] The easiest way to publish content on the web is through a blog. Blogger and Wordpress are two of the most user-friendly blogging platforms out there today that allow you to quickly input your text and then publish it. Blogs are search engine friendly, so if you want to spread your information across the web, a blog is a good way to do that. Blogs are indexed often and quickly by the search engines so if you have your website connected to your blog, you should enjoy a good deal of traffic. Be sure when blogging to make good use of keywords so the search engine crawlers or spiders will pick them up for indexing.
Using the right resources when building a website makes your site contemporary and users will benefit by receiving something of value which will help to contribute to the continuous growth of your site. Your website will become attractive when you use the correct tools and it will display as it should in the different browsers used by your visitors, resulting in them being happy to visit your site again.
Comments (0)The Difference Between a Static Website and a Dynamic Website
If you are planning on having a website, it is important that you understand that there are two distinct types of websites: static and dynamic. We will take a few minutes here to explain to you the differences between the two, and once you are finished reading, you should have a very good understanding of both so that you can decide clearly which type of website is best for you.
Millions of us rely on a printed newspaper as a way to read the happenings in the world. A newspaper is in fact, a very good example of a static media. Once a story has been printed on a newspaper, it cannot be changed as its type has been set. You will simply have to wait until the next edition is printed in order to receive the latest news. Much in the same way, a static website cannot be changed until the webmaster or someone familiar with HTML or flash edits and/or updates the content.
A dynamic website, on the other hand, offers the owner the ability to upload information on their own, usually via a password protected interface. It is not a requirement that the owner knows HTML or website design. He can simply change the site as he pleases.
If you are attempting to rent out a cottage on a beach somewhere, and you just need to show a few photos of the outside and interior of that summer home, provide the rental rates and your contact information, a static site would be perfect. On the other hand, if you were in the real estate business in a very competitive market, you need to keep your information updated on a regular basis with your new listings. In this case a dynamic website is the perfect solution.
You may wish to go with a static website when:
- Your objective is simple. You will provide some text and some images in an eye-pleasing manner
- You do not plan to change the content often, if at all
- You are quite sure that you will not need to change or add any functionality to your site for some time well into the future
- You are not all that concerned with optimizing your site for the search engines
- You have no plans to enhance your online business
If you are serious about getting your site ranked well, you will have to update and refine your content on a regular basis. It is possible to change and update the content on a static website, but it is not convenient and does require that you know HTML. A static website can be looked at as an online business card as it is a good way of providing additional information about your existing business.
Advantages of a static website:
- Very quick to develop
- Inexpensive to develop
- Inexpensive to host
Disadvantages of a static website:
- Web development skills are required in order to update the site
- Not as useful to the user
- Content can become outdated
You may wish to go with a dynamic website when:
- You plan on selling products online
- You plan to update your website on a regular basis
- Your site will be updated by more people than just yourself
- You may want to add some functionality to your site at some time in the future
- It is very important to you to optimize your website for the search engines
- You want to gain visitors to your site
Advantages of a dynamic website:
- A highly functional website
- Very easy to update
- Fresh content draws visitors back to the site and helps in search engine ranking
- More than one user can develop/work on the site
Disadvantages of a dynamic website
- Takes longer to develop
- More costly to develop
- Costs more to host
Summary
If you are a small business owner or if the services and/or products you offer are few and easy to explain, then a static website would suit you just fine. But, if you have a lot of products and/or services and you want to allow your site visitors to be able to search through your inventory, a dynamic website is best. A static website is rather limited in its functionality while the dynamic site has a great deal of potential in terms of functionality, but it can be complex to use.
Comments (2)10 Tips to Help with your Website Redesign
In today’s online world, it is not enough just to have a website – marketing experts agree that your website should be worked on and improved on a regular basis in order to attract visitors seeking relevant and useful information, services and/or products.
Below are ten tips that can guide you in undertaking a successful redesign of your site:
1. Set Strategic Goals.
Instead of blindly jumping in to make changes your site, it is important that you think things through clearly by defining the purpose of the redesign. Jot down what your aim is. Is it to make the site more user-friendly, to better showcase your products and services, or do you want to offer visitors more informational text and/or photos?
2. Do Some Research.
You would not change the look of your home’s interior without first consulting family members or looking through design magazines for ideas. The same should hold true when you set out to change your website. Do some research to find out how your site is doing traffic-wise and how it is perceived by visitors. Consider putting up some online surveys or usability tests before making any changes. Once you get a good picture of how your site is currently being used, you can then formulate a plan to make the proper changes to improve the user experience.
3. Take Control of the Redesign Project.
Redesigning your website may require some outside help. Therefore you will need to set a budget and see to it that it is adhered to. You should also set up a time line which clearly outlines when certain aspects of your site should be modified. You need to be on top of the entire project, so be prepared to organize people, the details and the work flow.
4. Take a Good Hard Look at Your Content.
Now that you are undertaking a website redesign, it is time to look at your content. After getting some feedback from your site visitors, you know what it is that your users expect out of your site. Write some fresh content so that your visitors are given up-to-date and useful information. New, unique content also acts as ‘link bait’ which helps build external links to your pages. Optimized content is what the search engines thrive on, so weed out any weak content and replace it with something fresh and interesting.
5. Consider Your Site’s Usability
Site usability is a buzzword that is used a lot, but do you know what it means? In short, usability refers to how easily a visitor can get around your website, in other words – how usable it is. If someone has to hunt around for information such as your contact details and your ‘home’ link, then your site has a usability issue in its design which must be addressed.
6. Check Your Site’s Speed
When it comes to web design, one of the most important aspects is the speed of your site. Your visitors will leave very quickly if they have to wait over 10 seconds for a page to load. There are various free online tools that check the speed of your site. Google recently announced something that many in the SEO community already suspected: that the search engine will now consider site speed when ranking results. If your website takes too long to load, you may find yourself slipping in the search engine result pages (SERPS). Increasing the speed of your site may involve changing hosts or it could mean that you should look at a new publishing platform. It could even mean that you have to undertake a complete overhaul of the type and format of your site’s content.
7. Check your Site’s Meaning/Message
One of the most aggravating things when surfing the web is to land on a page and not being able to figure out what the website is about. Usually, these sites are rather ‘artsy’ in nature meaning that the design may look very appealing but you have to dig in order to find out the point of the website. Be sure that your visitors know immediately what your site is about when they arrive because if you don’t, they will leave in a flash.
8. Have A Back-up of Your Old Site
Before making any drastic changes to your website, be sure that you keep a backup file of the present site. In case your new website design fails to draw more traffic, then the old site can be reloaded.
9. Create Clear Contact Us and Informational Pages
To assist with local search results, be sure that you provide detailed address and contact information. If your products can be found in local stores, be sure that you convey this on your site. This will make it easy for your targeted audience and customers to interact and do business with you.
10. Test your Redesign.
In order to be certain that the new design works, have a few people test your layout. You can post a ’sneak preview’ on your home page a few weeks before launching the new design so that you can received feedback in order to ‘tweak’ your site so that it is designed as best as it can be.
These tips should give you a bit of guidance when you are considering a website redesign. If you think your users are used to your website content and layout, but it could do with some improvements to the overall usability, then introduce small changes gradually.
Comments (2)Its Official Google has Changed its Name to Topeka
It has a nice Ring to it.
They’ll be renaming their services too, our favorite:
Gmail -> TopeMail (like dope, with a T in front)
Google name change to Topeka
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Happy April Fools day
Read more here
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