What are social networking websites?  It’s better if I point out examples rather than explain what they are.  Do you happen to have a LinkedIn account?  How about a MySpace account?  If you don’t have either of those two accounts, what about a Facebook account?  Chances are you probably have at least one of them, and if not, you’re really missing out.

Social networking websites have exploded over the last few years.  Facebook has more than 400 million active users with 50% of them logging in to update their status each day.  Now that’s a lot of people.

So you’re thinking, “You’ve made your point, but how do I market to all of these people?”  You can start looking to solve people’s problems in your area of expertise.  When you solve people’s problems in your area of expertise, you are establishing yourself as an expert in your field.  This may result in referrals or even direct business from the person whose problem you solved.

Second, you could start a fan page on Facebook for your business.  If you have a good product or service, customers or clients will start generating buzz about it.  If you started hearing how good a product or service was, wouldn’t you be more curious to try it out?  I started a fan page for Pies-On Pizza, a pizza restaurant located in Fayetteville, GA and Lovejoy, GA, and the site has been hit with a ton of favorable reviews.

If you already have set up a social networking profile for your business, then kudos to you, but if you haven’t, you better start now.

You’re in business and now you have a website.  Congratulations!  You’ll want to make sure that all of your site’s links are valid.  An easy way to do this is to go to http://validator.w3.org/checklink and type in your company’s website URL.  Doing this will save you lots of time because you won’t have to manually check every link.

When you get your website developed, be sure to include good copy and testimonials. 

What do I mean by good copy?  Your copy should include the keywords that you want to rank for in search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.), and those keywords need to flow naturally.  Your copy should include a call to action for your visitor.  Buy buttons and contact links/information should be easily accessible on the page. 

Testimonials are equally important because most of your visitors won’t know who you are.  You could be the saints of all saints, but your visitors don’t know that, so it helps to reassure your visitors that doing business with you is safe.  If you do include testimonials, use photos of the people who are vouching for your product/service if possible.

I have a personal training website, www.fightaholic.com, which generates a few leads a week.  I focus specifically on my city and surrounding cities.  The website ranks in the top 10 of Google for a few combination of keywords like “Newnan, GA Personal Trainers”, “Newnan, GA Self Defense Lessons”, “Peachtree City Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Lessons”, etc.  It’s also loaded with genuine testimonials/photos of people which include an MTV celebrity, other trainers, and satisfied clients.  There’s also a call to action on the home page and the Lessons section.  I get almost all of my personal training business from the website alone. 

What does it stand for?  It stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.  Have you ever filled out a website contact form and at the very bottom, you’ve seen a generate image of letters and/or numbers that you have to type in?  If you have, then you’ve seen a CAPTCHA widget.  If you’ve been getting a significant amount of spam through your contact form and it’s annoying you, you may want to consider getting a CAPTCHA widget.  Check out www.recaptcha.com for a CAPTCHA widget that you can implement on your site.  Of course, if you’re not web savvy enough to put one in on your site, we can do it for you.

I’m back again with more information.  You probably didn’t think there was so many elements to having a website developed.  Well, here’s the beef!

Design search engine friendly pages - What do I mean by search engine friendly?  I mean going with a tableless layout with a heavy reliance on Cascading Style Sheets(CSS).  The beauty of tableless layouts means there will be less code for the search engines to fish through which could lead to better search engine rankings.  Another benefit of tableless layouts is that when the time comes to give your site a makeover, you or your designer could make a few changes in the CSS file, changes up some images, and all of a sudden you have a fresh looking site.

Make your site cross browser friendly - Most people use Internet Explorer to view the web, but some people use Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari as well.  As a matter of fact, these browsers are growing in popularity.  You want to make sure your site looks the same in all of these browsers, so you don’t miss out on any business. 

Make sure you have information on your product or service -  If your visitors cannot get the information they need about your product, they’re not going to buy.  Many business owners think that just because they have a website, the dollars will start pouring in.  This is not so.  Even if your site is decked out with the fanciest graphics, your visitors are still looking for information.  The graphics on your site should be supplementary to the information you provide about your product or service.

Keep your graphics file sizes to a minimum - Website graphics with large file sizes take longer to load, and if the your visitors have to wait more than a few seconds for your site to pull up, they’re going to leave.  Your visitors want information and they want it fast!

Include a way to get back to the home page of your site - Your visitors may not always be able to hit the back button to get to your website’s home page if they got to one of your website pages through a search engine.  Being able to get back to the home page will allow your visitors to start over and get a fresh new start. 

Only link to sites if you think the sites will provide your visitors value - Don’t just link to a website, so they can link back to yours.   The purpose of your website is to inform and/or sell.  Would you just click on any link if it didn’t have anything to do with what you were looking for?  Better yet, would you click on a link if you didn’t know where it would take you?  I didn’t think so.

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about what to avoid when having your website.  Today, I’m going to add to that and talk about what design guidelines should be followed when having your site developed.  

Leave the color of your links alone - The default color of an unvisited website link is blue.  Let’s say you clicked on the link and then went back to the previous page.  That blue link would now be purple.  The reason why the link is purple now is to let you know that you’ve already clicked on the link.  When having your site designed, leave these colors alone.  If you must tamper with the link colors, be sure to make the visited links a distinctly different color than your unvisited links.  Taking this away can lead to some navigation problems for your visitor.

Keep your design consistent - Your pages on your site should have a similar theme.  Keeping the page design consistent will let your visitors know that they are still on your site.  If your main navigational menu is on the top of the website, keep it there on the rest of the pages.  You don’t want to confuse your visitors with different designs for every page. 

Use heading text on every page - The heading text should be positioned right above the main content on every page.  This will let your visitors know which page they are visiting on your site.

Display your contact information on every page - Your visitors want information fast and if they have problems finding your contact information, you may lose some business as a result of this.  Common places for your contact information would be at the bottom of all of the pages, on the side, or on the top in the header.

 There will be more information to come soon!

Here is a list of things not to do when having your website built.  This can be helpful information for existing website owners as well as people who do not have a website and are interested in getting one.

Avoid using Flash intros - You know what I’m talking about.  The 15-30 second intro before you actually go into a website.  You may think it’s cool, but you’re visitors won’t.  Even if your visitors do like the intro, they’re only going to watch it once before they click on the Skip Intro link.  Your visitors are on your site to get information as quickly as possible.  How many times have you watched another website’s Flash intro?  I rest my case.

Avoid using background music - You may love the background music on your site, but don’t be so sure that your visitors will have your same tastes.  Also, you want to be courteous to the cubicle workers.  If you really want to have background music on your website (which I wouldn’t recommend), I suggest not having it play automatically.  If you are going to have background music on your site, you should also provide your visitor with a way to turn the background music off. 

Avoid using page counters - We don’t recommend this although we do have websites in portfolio which do have counters on them.  Some of our clients were so adamant about putting a counter on their site that we did so just to keep the peace.  Do you really want to let everybody know how many people are visiting your site?  Install an analytics package on your site, so you can get detailed statistics on your site.  That’s better than any counter.

Avoid using pop-up windows - More than likely your visitors won’t see them anyway due to the fact that most browsers have built in pop-up blockers, and those pop-up windows are just downright annoying.

Avoid using any flashing text or images - People who have seizures may not react to well when they see all of that flashing.  Be courteous to your visitors.

Avoid going against conventional navigation - When you look at television sets, where is the power button?  It’s at the bottom of the television.  Well, for websites, people are used to seeing the navigation menu either at the top of the screen or on the far left.  Sometimes you may see the navigation menu on the far right.  Don’t confuse your visitors by trying to set a trend.

Next week, we’ll talk about some rules which should be followed when having your site designed.

We’re here to wrap it up with our final installment of our Choosing a Domain Name series.  As always, we like to get into the meat of the subject rather quickly.  So, here are more tips!

Stick with .com for businesses and .org for non-profit organizations - Usually people will type in the .com extension, so don’t go getting a .net extension if you don’t have the .com extension.  For example, if your website is widgets.net, and you tell your friends or possible customers the name of your site, chance are that they will go to widgets.com.  If the owners of widgets.com happen to be your competitor, you’ve just lost some business.  Non-profits are synonomous with having a .org extension.  You might ask, “But what if I have a personal website?”  Then go with the .com extension.

Get a unique, fun, and easy to spell name - Think about YouTube.com, Vimeo.com, and Google.com.  These names are easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and easy to remember.  What’s in a name?  Everything.

Register your domain name for multiple years - Doing this will tell the search engines that you mean business and you’re not just a fly by night company who spams folks.  You’re in it for the long haul, aren’t you?

Avoid trademark issues - You don’t want to come up with just the perfect domain name only to find out that you have to give it up because somebody has already trademarked their company name.  Before making the purchase,  you can do a search to see if anybody has trademarked your name here.

We’re back to provide more helpful hints on choosing a domain name for your website.  Enough formalities, let’s cut to the chase:

Check for availability - You don’t want to do all of your business planning around a domain name that isn’t available.  If the domain name is available, register it now!!!  We say this because we’ve had instances where a client decided to procrastinate on registering the domain name, and when they finally decided to give us the green light to purchase it, it was gone!  Domain names get snatched up every second.  Check out www.ajaxwhois.com and www.domjax.com to check for the availability of your domain name.  If it is available, you’ll want to register the domain name.

Avoid zero’s (000) - People will confuse 000’s with Ooo’s.  Do you know which one is which?

Purchase both the plural and singular versions - This is almost like the misspelling tip in Part 1 of this series.  One of our clients owns the domain name, www.reddawnpill.com, and we recently saw the plural version of the name, www.reddawnpills.com, was available and purchased it.  Make sense?  We thought so.

If you sell products, get a domain name (or three) for each of your products - To further increase brand awareness, you’ll want to purchase a domain name that matches each of your products’ names.  For example, Tylenol^® has it’s own domain name (www.tylenol.com).  In addition to registering a domain name that matches your product, you’ll want to register a domain name which contains keywords which describe your product or service as well.  For example, if you carry your own line of pain reliever, you may want to get a domain name like www.thebestpainreliever.com or www.headachemedicine.com and have them forward to the product page which pertains to those keywords.  When registering multiple domain names for your website, be sure to have them forward to different parts of your website and not just the home page.  Too many domain names being forwarded to the home page can hurt your website’s ranking in the search engines.

Make sure you get the spelling right - We know in Part 1 of this series we said to register common misspellings of your domain name, but don’t forget to actually get the right spelling of your domain name as well.  Double or triple check the spelling before you register your domain name.

Contact us if you’d like us to assist you in choosing the right domain name.  Stay tuned for next week for more tips on choosing a domain name.

You’ve decided you want a website and now you have the challenging task of choosing a domain name.  For those of you who don’t know what a domain name is, it is your website address (www.mrtechnique.com is this website’s address).  Picking a domain name could be a challenging task.  This week and over the next few weeks, I’ll be giving you some tips which could make the process a little easier for you.  Here are a few tips to start you off:

Short vs. long - Whichever option you choose, be sure the domain name is easy to spell and remember for most people. For example, you would probably be more likely to remember AreYouHotOrNot.com as opposed to AYHON.com.  Shorter domains have a smaller chance of being misspelled than longer ones. They’re also easier to fit on a business card.  On the flip side, you can squeeze in more relevant keywords (e.g. highqualitywidgets.com) to your industry in longer domain names. You could also fit an easy and catchy phrase (e.g. icantbelieveitsnotbutter.com) into a longer domain name. So, whether you choose a long or short domain name, be sure it is easy to spell and remember.

Look into purchasing alternative spellings or common misspellings - Nobody’s perfect and everybody’s bound to make a typing mistake every once in a while.  It would be a shame if you miss out on traffic and possible sales because some people frequently misspell your domain name.  Sit down with a few friends and get them to type in the name of your website on their browser twenty times.  Whichever misspellings you see the most, you should purchase.  In addition to common misspellings, you may want to purchase alternative spellings of a word or a name which appears in your domain name.  For example, one of my clients, Neal Smith Designs, has the name www.nealsmithdesigns.com.  If we were to verbally tell someone to go to the website, they may spell the name Neal in different ways (Neal or Neil).  So, we to avoid any confusion, the domain name www.neilsmithdesigns.com was purchased as well.  You don’t want to miss out on traffic because a visitor wasn’t exactly sure about spelling a name.

Hyphens - If you’re going to use them for your domain name, I’d recommend purchasing both versions of the domain name (with and without hyphens) if possible.  Let’s say someone finds your site, www.the-best-widgets-around.com, through a Google search and they liked what they saw and decided to tell a friend about it on the phone.  That person probably won’t mention the hyphens in your domain name.  Instead, they’ll probably tell their friend to go to www.thebestwidgetsaround.com.  Instead of you getting that traffic and possible business, the lucky owner of the unhyphenated domain name will be the recipient.  On the flip side, the hyphens do separate the words/names in the domain name, making it more aesthetically pleasing to the eye.  Also, hyphenated domain names may rank better in search engines because the words/names are separated by hyphens.

Contact us if you’d like us to assist you in choosing the right domain name.  Stay tuned for next week for more tips on choosing a domain name.  Stay tuned for Part 2 of Choosing a Domain Name next week.