A lot of factors contribute to the failure or success of an online business. There’s nothing more important to your business both on and offline than a well planned and constructed website. The design and development philosophy at Mystique Creative is based on four principles: attract, engage, convert and support.

Attract – Design and develop a user-interface that specifically appeals to your best prospects. It needs to project an image of credibility while compelling visitors to take a desired action. So be sure that it is easy to navigate through and search engine friendly (traffic is key to success for any site). Make it easy for them to find the information they are looking for and to act on that information.

Engage – Engage your visitors through effective messaging, site architecture, tools etc. Keep the site customer- centric maintaining a focus on their needs. If they can’t quickly figure out what’s in it for them a competitor is only a click away.

Convert – Plan how you will convert visitors into customers. Each website has a unique conversion funnel based on the specific attributes of your business and the products and/or services that you offer.

Support – Remember – it’s all about the customer. They should be provided, online, the tools and information they need both before and after the online transaction.

Websites are meant to evolve and stay up to date with changes in your users’ tastes. Be ready to adapt and add features such as blog’s etc based on your customers, and prospects alike, feedback.

I’ll throw my hat in the ring here. We have a content publishing engine with robust functionality including ability to publish white papers/articles, polls, surveys, blogs, newsletters, and set-up an on-line store. You can also have different levels of registration and automatically route and track inquiries.

You use the functionality you are ready for… it is a system easy to grow into and easy to manage.

It requires NO IT support or knowledge of HTML — you can do all the updates yourself once the initial lay-out is complete. We have a creative team who can help you with lay-out and design and a tech team that can get you at the top of Google search or give advice on effective Google ads.

Hi – Regarding the setting up of a website – the first issue to be aware of is: No one knows everything. Tech people may not be good design people. Marketing people may not know how to use the full capabilities of the Internet. The person who is good at SEO may not know design.

Internet and computer technology is too vast for one person to know.

My recommendation is to put together a team of the best specialists – visual, marketing, tech, blogger techs, e-commerce techs, etc. They will work under the direction of a project organizer (note: must have common sense).

If I can help – let me know. I produce powerful, compelling presentations and upgrade or develop sites to accomplish job #1 – that is to quickly endear the online prospect to your company. The rest follows – blogging, social networking, loyalty, confidence, clients and sales.

I think it is MOST important to start with your business plan and your business model. Then look for the methods and tools that will empower your business.

www.COREFACT.com has an interesting product. Let me know if you want to know more about it.

I have a Management Consulting and Marketing background, and web-design experience, for small businesses and local business professionals. Email me for more info or discussion.

Step #1 : Start with setting up of a purely static business (corporate) website which represent your business online. ( Quality web design is the primary skill required, quality hosting infrastructure is another requirement).

Step#2: Plan for a Web 2.0 enabled e-commerce website but preferably in two phases . Firstly the e-commerce site and secondly Web2.0 features such as blogs, discussion forum etc. Don’t forget to consider these features at planning stage.

Your planning should also consider Planning for Internet Marketing (commonly known as search engine optimisation / SEO). WIthout this planning the website may well not exist. Other important things to consider are e-commerce model and payment processing systems.

Step#3: Consider adding features blogs, discussion forum etc. Many of these are available as third party tools ready for plugin.

Step#0 : Obviously you would require selecting a RIGHT web agency to help you plan these stages.

- the project stalls when you ask for the web copy from your client?
- the client gives you copy that run on like the Dead Sea Scrolls?
- the copy you receive doesn’t focus on the target market or talk about key benefits?

I understand your frustration. And I would be glad to help.

My specialty is in developing targeted, benefit-oriented, search engine optimizedweb copy that is streamlined, scannable, and sparkling with life. I have developed copy for a wide variety of businesses – from technology firms to leadership training companies.

When I partner with you in the web design and development process, you are assured that:

- your project proceeds swiftly from initial design to final launch.
- your client’s company, products, and services are showcased to their best advantage through benefit-oriented copy.
- your client’s market is addressed directly through targeted language and content.
- your client’s web copy strategically incorporates keywords and phrases for search engine optimization.

For more information and sample websites from my portfolio, I invite you to contact me directly at info@therustypixel.com.

I look forward to working with you!

More and more today we are seeing a shift in the way people find businesses and services. Today it is more and more likely that your potential customers will get online and Google a service rather than use the phone book. This increasing move to the Internet creates a situation where your business website is the first interaction your potential clients may have with you. Thus, your website is more than just a website, it is your company image.
Once we shift to this mode of thinking, the business website becomes an ever more important tool for not only growing your business but also keeping your business. In the realm of growth, if your company website is up to date, attractive and informative, you will have a much higher chance of gaining more clients. It is also fair to say that if your website provides relevant information on topics and products that are key in your industry, it will not only draw more attention from new users but keep the attention of old users. Getting people to come back once they have been there is just as important as getting them there in the first place.

The importance of Statistics for your website

Website statistics are an often overlooked and majorly important part of having a successful website. I mean successful as in “your website is doing exactly what you intend for it to do”. How do you know whether or not your online presence is really that effective or not? Has your money paid itself off yet in new customers? How many visitors do you have per day and what do they do? All of these questions can be answered or intelligently guessed at using website analytics. And the best part folks, analytics are free through Google Analytics or Get Clicky Analytics. All it takes is a little adding of some code to your website and you are ready to start collecting information.
Using statistics you can find information not only on the people that are visiting but where they are visiting from, down to the city, how often you have repeat visitors, what the most popular pages are, customer bandwidth and browser usage and much more. From the info you gather you can then make inferences based on the behaviors over time and really get a great view of how effective your website is and what needs to be improved upon to increase it’s effectiveness.

Web-Marketing

Web-marketing…what does that bring to mind? Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Monster, Careerbuilder, Pay per click? All of these websites / communities / services offer the same core service, the ability to reach a lot of people with your message. Each one (except twitter) also offers multiple ways of marketing through ads or just getting on there making friends and spreading the word about your services or products. This is the core of web-marketing and the important thing is doing it effectively.
If you are a business owner and you aren’t on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin, you are missing out on the opportunity to connect and potentially do business with a large amount of people and businesses at no charge to you. Through forming groups, pages and the using the other tools these websites provide, you have the opportunity to quickly market your product and services and spread your brand.
I hope these words help to guide you when wondering what to do with your website, if it is effective or how to reach more people. Please let me know if you need help in this area and we will be happy to assist you.

Before rushing into making your pages or whistling up some fancy graphics, or dreaming of vast hordes of eager visitors enthusiastically surfing your site, stop and think. Think about what you really want to do and why you want to do it. Think about who your site is intended for and how you are going to put it all together.

A little thought can go a very long way towards a successful web site; and this is equally true if you plan to do all the work yourself or if you are going to hire someone else to do it for you. A little planning can save you money, time and frustration. Let’s face it, would you go and buy a car without having some idea of what kind of car you want, which features are important to you and how much you want to spend? The same thing applies to the web.

Companies can and do devote a great deal of time and money to their advertising, their brochures and their corporate image. Award-winning globally successful advertising campaigns don’t just happen: the company that advertises well has spent time either in-house or with their advertising and PR agencies, planning researching and devising the campaign.

So how do you get to grips with a project like a web site? Planning relies on good information. The more information you give yourself before you start the easier it will be. But very often when we try to quantify our ideas, we find them slipping away from us, leaving only a foggy impression of a great idea. The following sections are here to help you to get through the fog.

The Goals:
What are you trying to achieve? Do you have a clear idea of what you expect your web site to do? If you don’t have a strong sense of what your site is for it will be confused and weak. If you can’t see the target how can you take aim? Understanding exactly what you want from your site is your foundation.

The Audience:
As important as knowing your goals, understanding your target audience is the second step in the planning process. With knowledge of your audience you can tailor your content and presentation to suit their needs and keep them coming back for more.

Brainstorming:
Using brainstorming to generate ideas is fun and can produce some surprising results.

Structure:
When you’ve got your results you’ll start to assemble a structure using your goals and target audience as a yardstick to measure those ideas against.

The Flowchart:
Organising the emerging content into a flowchart will help you to see the overall structure of your site. Writing up a content list will give you a chance to assess the amount of work involved and the material you need to complete the project. At this point you might find that it’s going to take six months and cost a small fortune!

The Storyboard:
A visual map that will give you and other members of your team an outline of the site on a page by page basis. It may change quite radically as your ideas for the look and layout of your site develop, but in its final version the storyboard is your blueprint from which you construct the site.

Style:
Once you’ve followed all these processes through you should have a lot more information about your site. This can often mean you want to re-think the look and feel of your site now that you’ve got a clearer and more focused idea of what you want to do.

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I think the most important part of this scenario are based on the business needs and purpose of your website. It is imperative that the designer can grasp the actual need for the website.

That being said, there are several questions you should ask yourself BEFORE you go looking for a designer or architect. Once you have the answers to these questions it will be time to go and find the right people: and by then you’ll also have a pretty good idea what questions to ask of them.

Far far too many people [and businesses] step into the web arena inadequately prepared for what lies ahead. Not least, because they aren’t ready able or willing to drive the development process and, instead, allow their chosen designer/architect to drive it for them; a method which rarely delivers what you want, let alone what you need. This is probably the single commonest mistake businesses make when creating a new web site.

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When looking for a Web Designer (and not Web Developer) you should have in mind the following things:

1. Creativity and imagination – ask him how he can transform something ugly from your office into a beautiful thing

2. Personality – Based on the answer to 1 tell him that you are not very impressed (even if you are) and that he / she should come with a total different idea. Here you can see how he’ll react when clients will not like his work and he’ll have to do it from the beginning.

3. Attention to small details

4. Passion in what he’s doing

As you can see when you look for a web designer you don’t have to give him precise questions. It’s enough to “play” a game and to see his past work.

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1. OPTIMIZATION with JPG, GIF or PNG

Designers often overlook file size optimisation and will often simply publish images in a single format like JPG. We encourage more consideration in this area – JPG for photos and gradients, GIF for limited color sets. We are increasingly using PNG over GIF format as it provides opacity support.

2. 100% WIDTH DESIGN

Design with larger screen resolutions in mind. A well designed layout will always fill the screen. The main content of the design always considers the minimal resolution (i.e. usually 1024×768), and background images/colors, 100% header banners are usually used to fill larger resolutions.

3. SLIDING DOORS, ROLLOVER IMAGES and CSS

When using image hovers, designers should be familiar with the sliding door techniques used with CSS. This means images must contain both their normal and hover state, and CSS is used like masking to display the correct state. The traditional technique of replacing images when you rollover is generally considered outdated by top developers.

4. FORMS, VALIDATION, ERRORS and CONFIRMATION

When designing forms for a layout, designers should ensure validation errors and confirmation displays should be factored into the design.

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