There are many methods used to create websites and upload your content to the internet, however, there are many other steps you should consider in order to be successful with your online goals. An important consideration is how you approach these challenges; you should treat your website designs as "products" and not projects. This forces you to remember "why" you are creating new content. Your goals are to sell something and ultimately profit from those sales. Just like your company's other products, you must make money from them in order to remain viable; we believe by treating your websites as products you are one step closer to reaching your target.
Your first step towards making your website work is to design it. The design phase involves many decisions that will affect your overall success.
The more prepared you are by asking yourself or your website designer some questions, the more time and money you will eventually save. It is not just about these savings though. You may be organized and ready to go but have you considered how your pages will "link together" and how you will use page navigation to move your visitors through your website pages the way you want? It is often useful to create a flow chart on paper to map out how your pages will be displayed and how visitors can be expected to interact with them. If you are creating the website yourself, you have a little more room to maneuver, however, if you are hiring a website designer, this particular part of the overall process can cause expensive delays.
Part of the design-it process is working on your "screen real estate" for various screen resolutions. We can safely recommend that you design your website pages to work with a 1024 x 768 pixel screen resolution as this is most commonly used. This being said, Windows 7 operating systems are becoming more and more widespread with more modern version of Internet Explorer that support higher resolutions. If you design your website so that your "above the fold" strategies are working with 1024 x 768 pixel resolutions, then any higher resolutions will only make your website look even better. You can safely ignore working your designs to support 800 x 600 pixel resolutions as these are just not that common anymore. Also, most mobile web devices are being upgraded with amazing new HD (high definition) displays like on the iPhone 4G. Amazing!
During the design-it process, remember that you should be using some basic website design best practices, including using strong on-page SEO strategies (i.e. - use strong page TITLE tags unique to each page on your site, include META description tags using keywords or keyword phrases limited to a maximum of 150 characters, use a H1 tag only once on your pages, etc.) Above all else, remember to include "quality content" on your website pages. After all, this is what your website visitors are looking for and have come to expect. if you fall short you can expect your "bounce rate" to increase significantly.
The next steps to follow are: build-it, check-it, share-it and track-it. We can help, right here and right now!