Provide Useful Information
Internet browsers aren’t interested in a page filled with bland text. People want to find useful information, and they want to find this information quickly. When you make your website efficient, your conversion rate will increase – it’s that simple. Fill your webpage with details, facts, and figures that your clients can use. Skip unnecessary filler that does nothing for your webpage.

In order to make a website efficient, creative web design is vital. Not only should a website be memorable, but it should also provide readers with a way to purchase an item immediately. A strategically placed “call to action” button is the difference between a webpage that is ignored and a webpage that sells.

Create Call to Action Buttons
From its first inception, your website should have a direct purpose. In most instances, this purpose is to sell your product or service. Call to action buttons help readers decide to contact you, fill out a form, or purchase a product. The size, placement, color, and positioning of a call to action button can make or break your website.

Readers must be directed to call, sign up, purchase, or browse a website. Otherwise, a reader simply becomes confused. If there’s one thing that you can do to increase your web site popularity, it’s hiring a skilled design team to create an effective call to action button. Numerous studies have shown that without a well designed call to action button, a website simply won’t increase your conversion rate.

Combine the Right Elements
Far too many websites try to please every possible customer. Rather than attempting to cater to every human on the planet, know who your target customer is. By knowing your customer, you can create a website that speaks to a specific type of person. Forget about cramming graphics, colors, text, and lots of buttons onto one webpage – this kind of design is confusing.

Instead, focus on useful information, quality web design, and call to action buttons that increase a site’s conversion rate. If you want your online business to succeed, don’t underestimate the power of creative web design. Your website is the first thing that people see when they locate your business – make a lasting first impression.

SEO for businesses today must consist of much more than using the latest design trends. Designers should also be designing sites that take the full range of people viewing the site into consideration. The largest and most successful companies know that they have to offer different versions of their web content so as to appeal to everyone who accesses their websites.

If a company fails to present its online information in ways that are suitable for all types of cultural audiences, it is sure to miss out on potential customers who cannot relate to how the information is being presented. Take a quick look at the McDonald’s U.S. website and then at the site for Indian customers and you will notice very stark differences in how the information is presented. The Indian site is heavy on color and is much more interactive. The U.S. site on the other hand is more minimalistic and straightforward in nature. This illustrates how web design for businesses should be approached – by understanding how people from different cultures prefer to have their information presented.

It is absolutely essential to the success of your business that you focus on the website user experience for so that your visitors, no matter where they are located, have a successful visit. Studies have shown us that if a visitor to your site has a successful visit, he/she is three times more likely to recommend your site than if they find the visit unpleasant. Successful websites are often customized or localized for foreign markets, taking the local language into account, social standards and aesthetic preferences. Localizing a website is a rather complicated chore but it is necessary. Making versions of a site for different cultures shows consumers that your organization is willing to accommodate their needs. When a user sees a version of a website in his or her language, even if they are proficient in English, results in that user having a very favorable experience.

Users from around the world have special needs related to entry fields on websites for names and addresses, dates and measurements and information about regional product standards. Considering all of the issues related to international usability, it is recommended that international usability testing with users is done. This testing can be done from wherever you are located as you could make telephone calls to users to ask them to think aloud as they navigate the site, assuming of course that you can locate these foreign users who speak your language well enough to complete a telephone interview.

The internet is called the world wide web for a reason and more and more web design professionals are realizing that the emphasis today must be placed on the first two words: World Wide. If you want to truly go global and succeed with your website, resist going with those web designers that offer those too-good-to-be-true web design deals and instead work with a team of experts who understand the importance of website globalization optimization and how to implement it.

WordPress and Plugins

Of course, you will have to know how to tell when something has gone wrong so that you can then get on with fixing the situation. Perhaps you, like many beginners are using Wordpress since it’s very versatile and user-friendly. Most of the technical problems that arise with Wordpress are due to plugin installation issues. For example, if your theme is not working as you wish, a recently installed plugin may be to blame. Check the status of all of your installed plugins and be sure to always update to the latest available version of WP. Wordpress has a good troubleshooting system in place that walks you through most problems as well as having a forum available you can access to get help from experienced users. If your data is corrupted beyond repair, the only solution is to reload your data from your backup source. For this reason you should be sure to backup your database on a regular basis to avoid losing everything.

Web Hosting

If you find that your site is unavailable for extended periods of time, get a hold of your hosting provider to see if they are having issues. If it is experiencing hardware failure for example and is having problems with just one component of the server, the entire server can be unavailable. All you can do in this case is wait for the hosting provider to fix the problem. Your site may be unavailable during peak internet usage hours or parts of the internet may simply be slow. Quite often, by the time you figure out why your site is unavailable, it will have somehow fixed itself.

Coding Issues

If you are seeing a blank space below your footers on some of your pages, the problem most likely is in your code. Some browsers will cause this to happen and may require a background color to be applied to the html. You can troubleshoot this problem by seeking the help of experts in coding forums online.

Housekeeping

You may receive a comment on your site from a visitor telling you that your site is not visible to them because they are using the Google Chrome browser. The reason for this could be that  Chrome detected code on your page that loads content from or redirects to a flagged site. To fix this, you will have to remove all links, iframes, etc to any blacklisted sites. You can also try using Google Webmaster Tools to determine whether or not malware is present.

If you are running a business online, you want to be sure that your site is available at all times so that you can always be found by those potential customers out there who are searching for your products and/or services. You can easily locate website security tips for businesses on the internet wherein you will be walked through steps necessary to solve site issues and problems you may be experiencing.

While all of this may seem overwhelming, the fact is that many things can go wrong with your site regardless of how careful and diligent you were when constructing it. A good way to avoid problems with your site is to use a website downtime program such as mon.itors.us. This service instantly reports your site outage and response time. By taking advantage of this free website, server and traffic monitoring service you are assured that your site will maintain a high up-time and optimum level of availability. You can use this service for your e-commerce sites, blogs, forums, company and personal pages.

DESCRIPTION:
‘10 Key Elements of a Startup’ Presentation by Seth Elliot and Panel Discussion

Startup Founders and Partners Panelists
Seth Elliot
Alex de Carvalho
Ulises I. Orozco
Ryan Abbott

Seth Elliot

• Founder and Author of The Unchained Entrepreneur – Write regular articles offering tips and techniques on how to start, build, grow and finance entrepreneurial ventures.
• Managed $25,000,000 sale of internet anti-piracy company to a NASDAQ traded digital rights management firm.
• Co-Founder, Startup Forum – Co-founder of organization to foster a vibrant startup community.
• Venture Coach, The Launch Pad at University of Miami – Volunteer mentor providing advice to entrepreneurs.
• City Council Candidate, New York City (2003) – Served as candidate for election to the City Council of New York in Lower Manhattan – an area that includes the site of the former World Trade Center.
• Co-Author of Patent (US70762475) for Personalized Multi-Service Computer Environment – system and method for tracking a user history for presentation thereof in a web browser display.

Specialties

Seth is an Articulate Artist of the written and spoken word.
If you are thinking of starting your own adventure as an Entrepreneur or are in the midst of doing so already…You won’t want to miss the Presentation and Panel Discussions this month.

Alex de Carvalho

“The Traveling Man with The Plans to Help you Succeed”

• VP Business Development and Community at VoxMed
• Social Media Director at Medimix International
• Founder at Social Media Club South Florida
• Founder at Mobile Monday Miami
• Adjunct Professor at University of Miami School of Communication
• Co-founder and Concept Creator at StartPR.com
• Founder at BarCamp Miami
• Co-founder at RefreshMiami

Ulises I. Orozco

“He is Silicon Beach”

• Founder at jCompare.com
• Founder at Kolegio.com

Ryan Abbott

“New Tech Community Welcomes Well Rounded Newbie to Florida”
Partner at www.Loudpixel.com

Ryan is a software and web application developer based out of Ft. Lauderdale. He has experience planning, designing and implementing client-side and server-side applications and has worked with everything from compiler code to PHP. Before joining Loudpixel, Ryan was a software consultant working for clients like Michigan State University, the State of Michigan and the City of Chicago.

However if you need to backup the entire server with all databases at once here is what you do

$ mysqldump --all-databases -p | bzip2 -c > databasebackup.sql.bz2
Enter password:

This will save a bz2 file with all the databases.

To restore the databases back use the following (take care not to restore it to a server with the same table names – it may corrupt your data)

$ mysql -p < databasebackup.sql
Enter password:

Exercise Bike for Web Site Designers

I came across this cool article about an exercise bike that includes a laptop stand. I think I know a few Facebook addicts that would love something like this

Read more here at the Bnet blog

However, it appears that most people who use Google Analytics have little idea how to segment, data mine and use Google Analytics data to improve their online businesses. Given the rich features and massive number of options, most webmasters fail to grasp the full potential of Google Analytics unless they are ready to dig deeper. What we at Cenango are going to do is carry out a blog post rally encouraging webmasters to explore more on Google Analytics and encourage them to go beyond the nice dashboard.

Google Analytics Dashboard

Google Analytics is truly a great program that can help a business improve their marketing efforts. With advanced segmentation and vital information arranged in such a way for easy data mining, Google Analytics lead the way for today’s web analytics.

We have developed a very efficient web development process, optimized to minimize time, cost and resource inefficiencies. Therefore we are capable of providing our clients with superior results and exceptional service at very affordable prices.
We are very confident that we can beat the price of any US based web design company by 10% based on an acceptable quote.

Terms & Conditions:

• The quote needs to be from a registered US based web design company (corporation)
• The quote needs to be detailed and has to include a full outline of functionality
• The quote must be dated within the last 3 months
• The web design company will be producing your website within the United States
• Using this offer also means that you get our money back guarantee. No questions asked.

Send us your quotes to info@cenango.com or call us Toll-free on 1(800) 365 1842 for more details.

Over the years we’ve setup multiple email campaigns for our clients to send out newsletters using our bulk email web application. For the first time in our seven-year history, we’re getting ready to send out a newsletter to our loyal fans.

One of our nightmares is having our email flagged as Spam. It is a real nightmare as there are lots of things that can go wrong. Some of the most serious being, our domain name being blacklisted by ISP’s or worse getting a $16,000 FTC fine per ’spammed’ email account. Yikes! Enough to send any sane marketer into hiding!

We’ve all received our fair share of not-so-delicious spam and the last thing we want to do is spam our clients.

So why go through the risk? Many of our clients have expressed interest in getting updates on new trends and tips and tricks with regards to website design.

Our goal with the newsletter is to disseminate purely educational content – targeted at our audience of business professionals. Content that is new, engaging and ultimately practical for their business.

We’ll keep you posted on how well it is received.

Just to be on the safe side, I did some research into the legal aspects of email marketing. If you’re considering sending out bulk email, I would recommend reading the FTC CAN SPAM ACT guidelines: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm

Here are some of their basic guidelines:

• Don’t use false or misleading header information.
• Don’t use deceptive subject lines.
• Identify the message as an ad.
• Tell recipients where you’re located.
• Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you.
• Honor opt-out requests promptly.
• Monitor what others are doing on your behalf.

Most of the CAN SPAM Act rules are quite standard, basic email etiquette we’ve all read about. But one thing that seemed a bit confusing was: (btw I’m no legal eagle – so double check this) if you send an email to a customer (whom you’ve done business with before) with a coupon or gift (e.g. Win an IPAD) and the only way they can redeem that coupon is to take some action (click to register etc) and they forward this email to a friend – your email could be considered to be in violation of the CAN SPAM ACT. Why? Because you have not done any transactions with their friend and it is considered unsolicited email from you.

Email marketing can be very effective if done correctly and hopefully, beneficial to the receiver as well. Case in point, my weekly Kayak.com travel alerts – flights to Aruba are $199 next week -sounds exciting, I can’t go, but Thanks Kayak for tickling my travel taste buds .