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.