How Is Your Online Presence?

So you built your website, now what? Often people build a website and it could be the best web design ever but if no one knows how to get there it isn't much good is it? I always say that a website is like an island in the middle of the ocean. It could be the most beautiful island paradise ever created but if you don't know how to get to the island it doesn't do you any good, right?

There are a few ways to help people find your website, offline and online marketing. The first method involves advertising via word of mouth, in print such as magazines and newspapers, or on television. This method could be enough to get word of your site out there so that the general public remembers it or it becomes "top-of-mind." The disadvantage to this type of marketing is it can be very expensive and is generally not highly targeted, i.e. you can only target very general demographics assuming the business has this information.

The second method, online marketing, involves advertising online with the search engines. Many search engines offer paid placements which will allow your ad to come up along side the search engine results. This is a great way to get your website seen as you can choose to have your ad shown when users type in certain keywords. The benefit of this is it's more targeted as you're ad will only be displayed when people are looking for certain products or services. The other benefit of choosing to advertise on a search engine is you have the option to pay only when someone clicks on your ad so you can easily track your results.

A second option for marketing your business online is through through search engine optimization (SEO.) SEO is the process of optimizing your website to improve its rankings in the search engine results. SEO is a long and tedious process however once your site's rankings improve you should begin to see free traffic coming to your site.

Lastly, a fairly new way to get traffic to your website via online methods is through the use of social media. Many business owners are now harnessing the power of social media via sites such as facebook, twitter, youtube, and LinkedIn. By actively engaging and interacting with your customers and potential customers you can easily create traffic to your website for free. Your only investment would be your time.

If you'd like to learn more about online marketing methods Google the name of your city + "online marketing" and see what businesses of the service in your area. If you live in Hawaii and would like to learn more about Hawaii online marketing visit our site for more information.

Free Tools For Web Design

When building your a website there are an unlimited amount of tools available, either free or paid. Most people who don't know where to begin can spend countless hours trying to teach themselves web design. I know I had the same problem when I first got into web design and then I discovered three tools which I now use practically every day.

Dreamweaver- When I attempted to make my first website I asked around and everybody told me that was the best program for building a website so I bought it. I looked at it and had no idea where to begin, I bought a book on the subject but that didn't help either.

Wordpress- Wordpress is a free content management system (CMS) which opened my eyes to web design. This free application made getting a website up and running practically effortless and it was so easy to customize the look of the site I couldn't believe it.

Photoshop- Next I started playing around with Photoshop so I could make custom banners for my Wordpress sites. Just like Dreamweaver it was a little confusing but by using a combination of Google and YouTube I was able to teach myself how to make simple designs.

After all of this progress I still longed to make static html websites so I decided to revisit Dreamweaver. This time I downloaded a video tutorial series from Lynda.com which helped me immensely.

Today I still stick to Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Wordpress for all of my Hawaii web design clients but there's still a ton of other options out there for building websites. My recommendation for anyone wanting to learn web design is to stick with it, spend the time to mess around and make mistakes and before you know it you'll be designing websites like a pro.

Web Design Tips

When making a website it's important to take note of the design. This part of a web page is the very first thing a reader or client sees - and as they say, first impressions last forever. However cool or ground-breaking the information in your web page is, if the reader doesn't like what they see for the first time, if the page causes too much strain in the eyes then chances are, they'll leave without even reading the information in the said web page. So it's necessary to remember some basic principles in web design.

Firstly, when planning the web page, always make sure to use proper colors. It wouldn't do you or the reader any good if he strains his/her eyes and goes down with a migraine because of the bright neon lights of your page. Moreover, they probably would not return to visit your page so make sure that the page they see is easy on the eyes. Use cool colors, and remember to use lighter background colors for a darker text - white background and black text, for example, is very easy on the eyes. Making the font sizes of your text larger and easier to read will make readers return more than having minuscule fonts that need to be magnified.

Another thing to take note of is the importance of navigation. In fact, this might actually be the most important aspect of all - a clear, easy to understand layout where readers won't get lost and confused. Readers of a web page often get easily frustrated when they can't find what exactly they are searching for. Having clear-cut navigation links will help hold the readers' attention and make them explore more of your website.

Loading time is also a major factor in the readers' expectations of a good web page. It's said that the average web reader's waiting time for web pages is only 20 seconds, so make good use of that time by ensuring that your website doesn't load longer than that. Different factors affect a page's loading time, like JavaScripts, images and flash animations, which generally need more amounts of time to load. You can never be sure that your web page will load properly on all kinds and versions of browsers because these JavaScripts and animations are not compatible with everything. It's better stick to less graphics and more text content than get bored readers who can't access your page.

Building a successful website needs careful consideration of the readers' preferences and needs. Format your page in the easiest way for readers to navigate. Keep extra stuff to a minimum and focus more on the content they are looking for . Doing these simple things to your page will enhance the visitors experience.

For more information on web design visit this site which specializes in Hawaii Web Design.