Business Website Design - Why Build a Custom Business Website?

So you just started a new business. Now you need a great website to help market your goods or services online. Well, you are now faced with a choice. Should you design and build a website yourself or pay to have a website built for you?

Building the website your self would certainly save some money, which is important when launching a new business venture. Wait a minute, you need to ask yourself if saving some money trumps all the benefits of getting a custom designed and professionally optimized site. The short answer is a resounding no!

Most business owners realize that a visually appealing and functional website is an essential marketing tool. If your site isn't built properly the first time (especially the back-end) you are likely to end up having to get it built again once your business grows.

Now, in order to save money you could use a sophisticated 'website-builder' tool. There are many available. However, you are then limited to predefined templates, limited functionality and it is often difficult to perform search engine optimization, which we know is of course essential.

The code that you don't see is as important as the graphics and front-end design work. If your site features a customer support ticketing system, multimedia, ecommerce or other interactive features you need to know these have been well-programmed and will enhance a visitor's website experience.

Furthermore, you want your new business website to be unique. Definitely, not a template or 'cookie-cutter' site. You want your business website to stand out from the crowd. It needs to reflect the professional business image you are working to create both on and offline.

Studies show that people will spend more time and make more purchases on a website that appears professional and visually appealing.

Your new business website is often the first interaction between a potential customer and your business. Lets face it - if your site isn't professional, creative and fully operational........your competitor's probably is!

Inksoft Media is a complete web solutions company with over 10 years of experience. We help get your businesses noticed.

Mike is a consultant for Inksoft Media Inc. web solutions.

Visit Our Site at http://www.inksoftmedia.com

7 Elements of a Profitable Dental Web Page Design

Websites, for dentists and other oral care professionals, have become an important part of any dental business and a necessary tool on the road to success. The difficult part is deciding on a dental web page design that will be profitable. After all, dental professionals specialize in a patient's health rather than in online marketing and the intricacies of online practices. However, they still need some kind of an idea of what they would like to include in their website. If you are a dentist or oral care professional, here are seven elements you may want to consider in your website design.

Online Patient Communication

One of the most important elements of dental web page design is a way for visitors to contact the dentist's office. Because of the large number of people that can be contacting the practice at any one time, this system needs to be as efficient as possible. One of the best ways to do this is with a special contact form that prompts the customer to provide you with all of the information needed to give them the best service possible.

Online Appointment Booking

In today's market, customers want to get results instantly or they will simply move on to the competition. Giving online visitors the option of booking online is an excellent way to combat this problem. These systems can even be designed to notify you instantly while being accessible anywhere in the world to give you security and convenience.

Sharing Good News

Once customers begin to access your services, it is a good idea to maintain that contact with your clients to keep them coming back. Why not incorporate this idea directly into your dental web page design? Offer customers the chance to sign up for newsletters that include advertising, the announcement of new services, discounts, and other promotions.

Be A Show Off

One of the best ways websites for dentists attract new clients is to show pictures of some of the work the professional has done previously. Showing the results of implants, veneers, teeth whitening and other services shows the client your level of expertise. As an added benefit, those in dire need of oral care will not be as embarrassed or reserved about coming in to see you if they know you have seen worse.

Easy To Use Personal Content Management

Websites for dentists can be created specifically with the professional in mind. This allows the staff at the practice to update and change information when they want to rather than having to pay their marketing company to do it. This keeps customers checking in on a regular basis to see what's new and lets the oral care expert tailor the page to his or her specific needs.

Suitable Dental Web Page Design

The graphics and text should reflect your practice adequately while still standing out from the rest. Websites for dentists need to promote a call to action from new clients without appearing pushy. While an expert designer best handles this, you should have an idea of what you would like it to say about your practice.

Give A Tour

Websites for dentists are a great way to give clients an idea of what to expect and what your practice is all about. Use a slide show or small video to show them around. Some things you may want to point out in particular include the level of customer service and the innovative technology your practice uses to provide the best treatments possible.

Dental web page design gives oral care professionals an unlimited number of possibilities to attract and maintain their clientele. Websites for dentists should stand out and entice clients by demonstrating why their practice is superior to any other.

About the Author: Christine O'Kelly writes for the innovative creator of websites for dentists, Officite. They have more than 3,100 oral care professionals enjoying the benefits of their cutting edge dental web page design.

Making a Website That Converts - 5 Must Have Items

So you now have a website and you are driving traffic to it, but the sales just aren't coming in. I know it's frustrating, first thing you should do is stop all advertising, stop spending money. I know people that think "well they will come back and make a purchase" 85% of the people you are sending will never even click on the vendor's pages, let alone go back and buy the product. So Stop all advertising. Now the 5 "Must have items".

1.) Catchy Headline - Make sure that your headline grabs the attention of the visitor, on average you have less then 5 seconds to get the attention of a visitor, after that consider then lost.

2.) Professional graphics - Now I don't mean go spend 1000's having your site redesigned, or all flashy graphics. What I mean is that you must have a good looking webpage so the visitor feels like they can trust you. Gone are the days where you can throw up a headline, some ad copy, and makes sale. Make a good looking website.

3.) Site Layout - This is often forgotten, but if you have a opt-in box, the best place is for it to be in the middle right, or upper right hand part of the screen above the fold. Having your opt in box at the bottom of the screen, or a horrible looking pop hover, or whatever they call it are bad choices.

4.) Testimonials with pictures - everyone needs reassurances when they are buying online, and having testimonials with "real" pictures goes along ways, and to go a step further if you can get a video testimonial that can do wonders for your conversion rates. Here's a tip - don't be fake, it must be sincere and honesty, people will see through fake testimonials.

5.) Clear calls to action - People have to know what to do once they are at your website. If they are unsure, they will just leave, think of it as leading a man to water. He needs to know where to go, and how to get there and it expecting you to help. So make sure your visitor knows what to do when they are at your page.

Those are 5 things you can change today to help your website. And hopefully increase your sales.

Make sure to check out my site at http://www.cash4noobs.com - find out why your not making the kind of money you should be online!

MAC Site Builder - Creating an Attractive and Useful Website

With mac site builder, you can construct an aesthetically appealing web site with numerous functional features without the hassle of learning any programming languages. All the necessary design elements are included with the software, which requires no complicated downloads, and the web sites you build can look great and operate properly on any platform and with any popular browser.

In order to add or modify any design element, all you need to do is to click a single button on the toolbar. Similarly, technical assistance or other help is just a click away. This mac site builder is so very intuitive to use, that even those who are uncomfortable with computers, and have no computer skills or knowledge, with help can develop and deploy their own web site in five minutes or less.

Getting started with this product is a sensible, step-wise process. First, you choose a design for your web site from the template library containing over one thousand templates. Then, name your web site and subscribe to a hosting service. Next, pages are added with the functionality desired, from message boards to photo albums. You can tailor each page to your liking and customize the content via the editor. Finally, view your work, make any final changes, and then publish!

Everything you need to get started with the mac site builder is included in the package. There is an editor with a graphical user interface, a manager for page layout, a shopping cart for e-commerce, a wealth of professionally design templates and much more.

Online support with no set use limit is available for answering your questions and providing technical support. Prompt responses are guaranteed. Also, mac site builder comes with full online documentation, FAQ pages, a fast start manual, and a technical library. Contextually sensitive help and support is available through a button attached to each feature.

Either one of the major operating systems is compatible with Mac Site Builder, and websites that are developed with the help of Mac Site Builder will function smoothly and appear flawless on a majority of the popular browsers in use on PCs everywhere. Modern browsers with integrated JavaScript functionality will also have no trouble reading these pages.

Using mac site builder, you can create a website with an attractive appearance and a great many useful functions without having to learn how to program code. Everything you need to get started with the product is included in the package. There is an editor with a graphical user interface, a manager for page layout, a shopping cart for e-commerce, a wealth of professionally design templates and much more. Starting out with this product is an easy step by step process. To answer your questions and provide technical support, unlimited online support is available with prompt responses guaranteed.

Make it Easy to Purchase From Your Website

This is in large part due to the streamlining the buying process. A decade ago, commercial websites were not interactive and consisted of little more than an electronic version of a magazine ad. Such mail order purchasing is a cumbersome process and that is why internet commerce was minimal in the early days. Today, the way in which people can buy online is much easier. That is why they buy in such volumes. Yet, there are still those who employ a website design module that is ten years out of date. So, let's take a look at the website design methods that are much easier for people to make purchases.

First and foremost, the website designers must make it apparent that the website is a commercial venture. Poor web development, for example, may be loaded with lots of cool graphics and interesting text but the actual items that are for sale are presented in a peripheral manner as opposed to the focus of the site. Needless to say, such website development is very weak and will not facilitate any profits.

Solid website design, however, will clearly identity the products or services that are offered. The description will be clear and properly illustrated. If you are selling boxing gloves, for example, you would need to provide a photo of the gloves; the manufacturer should be identified; the different weights of the various gloves; the different colors the gloves come available in; and, of course, the price of the gloves. In short, the potential customer knows EXACTLY what he is buying. If a person is provided with proper information then the person will be less likely to dismiss the purchase.

Now, here is the absolutely MOST CRITICAL aspect of commercial website design. The website positively must have reliable shopping cart software installed. Without such software the ability to make a purchase is made much more difficult. The first time a customer buys from your site all they will need to do is plug in vital purchasing information such as credit card info, mailing address, etc. This info can then be saved on the cart's memory so the next time a visitor wants to make a purchase they can do so with one click. Such ease of use makes customers much more likely to buy.

Ultimately, that is the goal of streamlining website design for commercial sites. You want to make it as easy as possible for customers to purchase. When the process is easy then the ability to sell more items becomes much easier.

As an affordable designer of award winning Canada Website Design, we offer front page search engine listings and global marketing with every website we create. Based out of Alberta, Canada we are a very reputed, global webmaster and web development company specializing in branding and consumer interaction.

We start your web development with a detailed fact finding discovery session, were we identify your companies online objective, target audiences and your specific branding message. Creating a successful design is about understanding the companies our service represents on a personal level to truly appreciate your business objectives and challenges.

We are more than an website design studio, web developments shop, or programming house, we are GlobalWebsiteCreations.com, dedicated to businesses and consumer interaction.

Creatively yours, Todd Herman
President
Senior Vice President
GlobalWebsiteCreations.com
President
GlobalWebsiteCreating.com

Great Plains Dynamics GP Reseller News: custom eCommerce Integration

Microsoft Dynamics GP or former name Great Plains Dynamics ERP has large number of installations in USA, Canada, Mexico, Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Asia. Modern market forces companies to go online and expose their stock through B2B or B2C e-commerce stores. If you are starting from scratch, then you should pick existing e-commerce add-on for GP, however if you ecommerce web store has long history and works as you need, then you should map custom integration to and from Great Plains. Obviously each case is unique and each company has different criteria and business procedures, in this small publication we will try to give you just general highlights in custom eCommerce programming

1. GP modules, exposed to integration. Likely these are Sales Order Processing module, receiving either customer orders or directly invoices. Also, Inventory Control module, which exposes inventory items, as well as pricelists and pricing schemas. Often you need to expose custom catalogues, depending on the customer class or individual customer. In this case, you need to build this catalog on the fly, based on customer login credentials.

2. Integrating Phases. Assuming that you already have ecommerce up and running, probably without or with minimal integration to Great Plains, the first phase should just send sales documents as they were generated autonomously in ecommerce to Great Plains SOP module. When this first phase is implemented and proved to be stable, then you could try to move the source of your items and pricing to Great Plains Inventory Control module

3. Integration tools. To try the simplest approach, which is not real time integration â€" try to either export your ecommerce orders to text file, or create advanced ODBC integration for GP Integration Manager. In the case of advanced ODBC source, your integration could look back to your ecommerce database and in After Document Commit script you can program ADO connection to your ecommerce database or GP orders integration status tracking table and mark order or invoice as integrated. If you need real time integration, then consider programming integration in eConnect, especially if you have good C# or VB .Net programmer with strong SQL architecture understanding. In certain cases you can create and deploy SQL custom stored procedures, however in this scenario you will be exposed to higher possibility of business logic violating bugs and their fixing

4. GP automatic batch posting. If you need your ecommerce application to post Sales Order Processing invoices all the way through GL directly from ecommerce and without GP operator approval and even involvement, then you will need Alba Spectrum Posting Server

Web Development Versus Web Design - Is There Really a Difference?

Technology pundits have constantly argued that the terms web development and web design are interchangeable with one another. I respectfully disagree and argue that though the terms may have been interchangeable in the past; they have long since become two terms completely separate from one another with different goals, standards, and philosophies behind them. Web development can be quickly defined as "a broad term for any activity related to developing a web site for the World Wide Web or an intranet. This can include e-commerce business development, web design, web content development, client-side/server-side scripting, and web server configuration"; whereas a definition of web design can be summed up as "a process of conceptualization, planning, modeling, and execution of electronic media content delivery via Internet in the form of technologies" (definitions courtesy of Wikipedia). We can take note of a couple of things simply from these simplified definitions. The first is that web design falls under the wing of web development and it is easy to see why many think the two are intertwined much like the concept that a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square. Web design is a part of web development, but not actually an essential part of developing the web.

Web design, more specifically website design, is a process of creatively visualizing and utilizing the tools and applications created by the web development process. Web design takes the development process one step further and often finds itself using these tools for ideas and applications vastly different than what they were intended for. A quick analogy would be that of how the plane engine made for war combat was used as the basis for the car engine we use in our every day lives. Web design has brought us things like the web 2.0 concept of user generated content; some thing that web development tools are capable of, though not intended for it specifically. Content management systems such as the ones talked about earlier provide the framework for social networking websites and blogs. Dynamic web pages which appeal to our aesthetic eye use frameworks set forth by web development tools yet take it one step further by using the tool to create a masterpiece of web design.

With all of America's advances in web development it became easy to separate the two terms from their synonymous relationship; it has become a process of developing technologies and applications for the advancement of the World Wide Web. These technologies of course, can be adapted and used by anything related to the internet (such as websites) but is not merely limited to it. Content management systems (CMS) are one of the many examples of positive strides made in web development. CMS systems allow for easy management of content and data while online and can be used for simple server networking within an office, or as the backbone of an ecommerce website (voting systems in various states use CMS systems to tally and record votes via software). Web development also houses things such as the creation, modification, and innovation of scripting and coding languages. The advent of Actionscript 3.0 and PHP 5.2 can be marked as some of the great achievements of the web; Actionscript 3.0 is part of Adobe Flash CS3; however Adobe created AS 3.0 to make it much more logical for creative web applications. More specifically, web development in NY has been known to constantly utilize the most up to date tools and research to create some of the most innovative web applications.

If web development is the paintbrush, web design is the Mona Lisa.

Fred McCoy is a NY Web Development critic who works for Blue Fountain Media; his articles are on point, descriptive, and insightful.