So as a web designer, the idea is to make the visitor WANT to stay around for a bit. The trend here is towards an oversized logo on an even MORE oversized header. Why do you want a header that might take up the entire page? There are a few reasons, but the biggest one by far is mouse clicks, or rather a lack of mouse clicks.

Over time, web surfers have developed a fear of clicking on things. It requires an action that they maybe don’t really want to do. Take away that fear and all they need to do is scroll down the page, read the content and decide at the end if they want to see more.

This type of web front makes for a great first impression that is not soon forgotten. They feel less pressured and pushed to click. That click, to the visitor anyway, means they are committing to something prematurely. The web designer’s job is take away that feeling and make them feel like a participant, not a rider.

The physiology behind great web design is that you want the design of the web site to be interactive; not user reactive, as in a mouse click. The way the site is laid out should make the visitors feel welcome and free to stay or go at their discretion. THAT is the job of effective web design.

Now when I say that the header takes up most of the page, that means the portion of the page above the bottom of the screen. The old newspaper term “above the fold” comes to mind. Once the visitor scrolls down a bit, the threshold is broken and the feeling that they are STILL in control remains. Everything above the bottom of the screen, or "above the fold", is what is seen first, making the almighty first impression.

This can be done easily by using elements like slab typefaces, large images or creative typography. Remember the old Uncle Sam Wants YOU signs from the late 70s and early 80s? That is a classic use of typography combined with large headers. That campaign drew more than a few young men into the military, so it was effective and productive.

The same methodology is at your disposal. The text you select can make or break the entire page. So if you want to grab the reader and shake ‘em up and keep their attention, use interesting types and fonts that fit your site’s motif.

Just as important are the images you place on the page. Be sure you make them memorable and impressionistic. Your visitors will remember the entire experience combining the fonts, typefaces and images.

The mobile internet revolution is here to stay. With the advent of tablets and smart phones, and their increasing popularity, it’s a no-brainer to have a mobile version of your website. Web designers are now becoming much better at integrating mobile versions of the website, or creating a whole new site for mobile users.

There are two trains of thought when web designers plan a project. Do they make the website mobile-friendly, or provide a completely different site especially for mobile users? Both trains of thought have merit, but which is most suitable?

It’s important to first think about motivation. The average mobile internet user is on a fixed bandwidth tariff, and will be surfing for a different purpose that if they were sitting at a desktop.

Desktop surfers have the opportunity to enjoy rich content, to take their time and download larger pages. Mobile users are generally accessing the internet for a reason. To find directions, to check a price, to find something out. So the motivation often differs between the two mediums.

So the next question is about the specific site in question. Will it have something mobile users are likely to need while on the move?

For some sites, simply removing images, and value-add content is enough to make it mobile friendly. Making it scalable to screen size, lighter on bandwidth and adding prominent features first are just some of the things a good mobile website will utilize.

For example, a mobile user visiting a particular site is probably going to want to see a search function, or contact details up front. This is especially true if the website is a more local, or business-oriented one. So it makes sense to put this up front so it’s immediately visible.

Then you can provide the option to surf further if they want to. This is important. We can predict what most mobile users are going to want, but not all of them. The point of any web design is to make the site a nice place to be, and to keep the visitor there as long as possible. This remains true on a mobile site, doubly so if it’s ecommerce.

There is also a case for building a completely different website design for mobile. If you think the needs of the mobile audience will be so different to that of other users, a new design may offer the best for the client. That enables you to remove irrelevant content, graphics, styling and bandwidth heavy page elements.

It also allows you to order the elements into the likely demands of the mobile audience. Such as, putting those contact details or search barfirst, simplifying navigation, and using a mobile specific URL.

The main thing to remember when designing a mobile-centric website, is to allow the user to access the standard site if they want to. Excluding them from the standard website doesn’t go down too well. The mobile internet is about choice, so make sure your design offers it.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a marketing technique which allows you to exercise greater instincts on the product you are marketing.

If you own a website that contains your products and related content then it is important for you to optimize it for major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Your online business will approach higher limits of success if your website gets higher ranking among the search engines.

Pay-Per-Click is a marketing technique that can raise your page ranking in the shortest amount of time. All you need to do is carry out bidding for several keywords through advertising. These keywords should be related to your products and the audience you are targeting. The success of your PPC campaign depends upon your bidding and the keywords that you would be bidding for. The higher you bid for your selected keywords, the higher the chances of your website getting higher page ranking in the SERPs.

Here are three useful tips for handling your PPC management if you want to receive a positive outcome from your campaign. These tips are inclusive of search engine optimization.

i. Ad testing and web page optimization are necessary if you want to handle your PPC management service effectively. In order to bid low while getting higher rankings, you need to choose multiple ads for a single directional keyword. This will more so be necessary when getting to know what your target audience is interested in. Budgeting for your ads will be very easy if you know what makes them successful. With this you will not place high bids for ads that will never get high placement or clicks.

ii. Ad design is crucial. Selecting the right keywords and niche phrases will ensure that your target audience reach spot and click on your ads in order to buy your products. Irrelevant keywords that do not connect with your websites or products will simply scatter your clients. Create your ads on keywords that are interesting and persuading.

iii. Create and stick to a realistic marketing budget. Be sure to know how much you are willing to bid for a key phrase every time you create an ad. Optimizing and monitoring your PPC results will save you from a lot of losses.

These days, it is imperative that you know how to promote your business with twitter if you want to succeed online. Perhaps you already know that one of the chief ways of getting the best out of twitter is by learning to be a good listener and know what is being talked about at any given time. At the same time, you need to be very proactive if you want to benefit from the phenomenal popularity of this social networking platform.

While some people tweet just for the sake of catching up with family and friends for leisure purposes, others are on twitter to find business links and leads. Yes, you can not tweet more than 140 characters per post but you can be able to add a link to your tweets and this is where link building with twitter comes into being. Never forget that the volumes of backlinks required to boost your website’s search engine ranking can effectively be achieved through tweeting.

If you are an online entrepreneur with some good level of focus then you should never ignore link building with twitter because regular tweeting and adding a link to your website will give you the much needed backlinks to your WebPages over a period of time as helping you to realize a higher search engine ranking with consistency. The way and manner in which sites are linked back in tweets makes such links even more valuable since search engines will be crawling through the links while regularly looking through such sites.

So how do you tweet your website to a high search engine ranking?

You should approach link building on twitter with a lot of caution because while your followers may believe in your posts and regularly click on the links to your website, it is important that you do not use your tweets entirely for personal promotional purposes. While you can effectively post links to your webpage in your tweets for the needed backlinks, you can also get heavy-tweeters to help you out. To do this, you need to form an alliance with people who have tens of thousands of followers with some trust in their post. Have such people adding your links to their tweets from time to time. However, be sure that their tweets are related to your business. With this approach, you can be sure of generating targeted traffic to your site through smart tweeting.

Do not start your link building on twitter by asking other people to re-tweet your posts. Start gradually and become familiar with people before getting to this. You may even consider re-tweeting some interesting posts from the people you want such favors from. Before long, your tweets with links to your site will be accessible to thousands of potential customers all over the internet.

It is a fact that watching consumers speak praises about a particular product is very persuading. Same information is more inspiring when presented through a video than when presented through written text. Not only is it more believable but also very convenient as it doesn’t require the audience to know how to read to be able to get it.

With a camera and a computer with internet connection, here are five steps to creating a video testimonial that will help you boost your sales and generate more revenue to your business.

i. Open a You Tube account

You are going to need a place to post your testimonial videos after creating them. This is where YouTube comes in. YouTube is a very reliable and easy to use viral video website that is completely free! Upon posting your videos, anyone and everyone will be able to access it online.

ii. Create a good testimonial

Bring your video camera along when promoting your products or delivering a project to a customer. Once your discussion is drawing to a close, find a good point to ask your customer for a short testimonial about your product. Assure your customer that their identity will remain confidential and that all you need is a couple of statements about their experience with your product which you will share with your future clients. With their consent, take out your camera and record their testimonial.

iii. Transfer your footage to a computer

With a good testimonial video in your camera, transfer your footage to a computer. Ensure that your format is in a format supported by YouTube such as WebM, MPEG4, 3GPP, MOV, AVI, VMW, MPEGPS and FLV.

iv. Editing

Get video editing software and use it to make your video more interesting by adding nice background music. You can also use Windows Movie Maker to edit your video.

v. Upload your testimonial to YouTube

Click on the “upload” link at the top of the screen beside the search bar. Follow the instructions and get your video on the World Wide Web. You need to come up with a good title with useful descriptive tags and relevant keywords in order to increase the chances of search engines locating your video.

There are tons of things which you can do to make your video interesting in order for it to go viral and attract more views while generating more traffic to your site. All you have to do is being creative and open minded.

Pay-Per-Click marketing is one f the fastest ways of generating instant traffic to your website. However, it can cause you to loose money if you are not using the right techniques to create ads that will attract more ads and sales. This specifically true when you are using Google AdWords as your advertising platform. AdWords PPC is the most competitive advertising platform used by most internet marketers to generate traffic and sales. However, most of them fail badly.

Here are five common PPC mistakes that you should know and endeavor to avoid if you want to succeed with your campaign.

i. Setting your initial bids very high

Most online marketers begin bidding too high in their quest for top position before they can identify their profitable keywords. While bidding at $0.50 or $1.00 per keyword may get you to the top of the search results, it will cost you if those clicks fail to convert into sales. Begin by testing your PPC ads with a range of targeted keywords with lower bid price and monitor them to identify profitable keywords. You can then abandon keywords that fail to convert clicks into sales while focusing on keywords that are bringing good returns

ii. Enabling ads on content network

Most marketers fail to turn off the content ads when they begin a new campaign. Before confirming that your new campaign is effective enough to make profits, you need to turn off the content network and focus only on the search. Enabling your PPC campaign on content network will cause your ads to appear at relevant sites with AdSense ads, and this will increase your ads impression while reducing your CTR causing the quality score of your ads to decline hence you will need to bid higher to activate your keywords.

iii. Wrong and untargeted keywords

If you are selling mobile phone applications, targeting keyword “mobile phones” will bring you a lot of clicks. However, the clickers may not buy from you as they may just want to get a new phone, mobile phone wall papers or ringtones. Using wrong keywords may bring a lot of traffic but with no sales.

iv. Poor ad construction

You may use the right keywords, gets a reasonable bid prices with your keyword rich ads appearing on search results yet you still end up with low CTR. This may be because your ad is not delivering the correct message or is failing to give the searchers what they are looking for. Poorly constructed and non attractive ads will neither attract clicks nor generate traffic and thus bring no money.

v. Bad landing page

No matter how great your ads are and how targeted your keywords are or the amount of traffic you generate to a landing page, all these will be a waste if your landing page is poor. Directing traffic to a poor landing page will cause low conversions and you may never make enough profit to cover your marketing cost.

Sound online marketing strategy is one of the most important elements for any internet marketer. You need a proper strategy to make your blog or website successful in terms of traffic and revenue. Potential customers can visit your blog or site via the search engines and social media site like twitter and facebook. This makes traffic generation to your site very important and it gives you an opportunity to promote your site t a global audience in order to achieve a faster return on your investment while making profits.

How PPC marketing works

Pay per click advertising is getting increasingly popular as most online entrepreneurs are turning to this strategy because they understand how it can promote their products and services. PPC marketing can boost your online visibility by generating targeted traffic to your site. You only get to pay the host when your ad is clicked on. With PPC marketing, you can highlight your products as the best choice for web user looking for similar items. Better still; most PPC advertising programs like Google AdWords come with synchronized content development, keyword research as well ROI tracking tool built into their system.

You need to run your PPC ads with a comprehensive analysis in order to determine the most effective campaign that brings maximum returns on investment. Have a proper selection of keywords that appropriately connects your ads with your audience. While doing all these, you should predetermine both your marketing goals and budget definitions.

Having a properly balanced online marketing strategy and advertisement will certainly increase your sales and profits while helping you realize your ROI faster.

Pay per click marketing can be simple and straight forward if you do it right. All you need to do is a little research to find the most sought after niche while performing essential keyword analysis to find the least competitive yet relevant key phrases.

Having done your keyword research, your next step should be to write all essential contents that you consider necessary and useful to read. Never overlook the supremacy of the content. After days have passed by, start analyzing the quality and quantity of traffic that your PPC ads are generating to your site.

There are numerous keyword tools out there that you can use to get the most relevant key phrases. With these tools, you can analyze and research keywords in your niche in order to minimize competition while optimizing your PPC ads’ content for higher click through rate (CTR).

When planning your marketing strategy on facebook, you need to keep in mind your overall goals in terms of increased exposure. While a successful campaign will no doubt increase your sales and revenue, exposure is really what facebook will do well at providing to you. For instance, one of your facebook marketing strategies can include offering people who become your fans freebies in form of samples, entries in a gateways or coupons. When people become your fans, they will have access to your updates while learning more about your business.

Even though you get popular appearance, facebook marketing campaign is not quite something that will go wild over night. Since facebook is developed around making connections, you will need to direct your focus on establishing meaningful relationships. If you just start sending people friend requests while posting tons of marketing related content, you will realize that your “friends” are quickly developing cold feet towards you. People do not sign up on facebook to access your ads, instead they do so to make connections with their families and loved ones.

As you approach the end, you should consider spending sometime of facebook providing useful information in your niche area. Consider joining related groups and provide useful advice and information. If you do this, people will begin trusting you while building a strong relationship with you. By spending some time providing valuable information, you will form a good relationship with people who will eventually develop an interest in hearing from you while learning about your products.

When creating your facebook marketing plan, your last step should involve advertising directly to people. Let this come only after developing a good relationship with your fans. Creating an account and immediately starting posting your ads will cause your friends to disappear quite quickly. Worse still, you can find yourself banned from facebook for spamming people. This will certainly be the opposite of what you want with your facebook marketing campaign.

When using facebook as part of your marketing campaign, always know that it will not yield immediate results. Focus on increasing your business’ exposure while getting potential customers to trust you. Post relevant and helpful content on your page and on pages related to your niche area. You will have to commit time and effort in building relationships on facebook. Once you have established a connection, it will be profitable both to you and your network.

Is search engine optimization really worth your precious time and hard earned money? If it does, which stage of your website creation should you implement it?

To get started, it is important that you understand the full meaning of search engine optimization. This is the process of preparing and promoting a site on a cautiously selected set of keywords in popular search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

The primary objective of this process is to get your web page a high ranking in the search results pages and have it right at the top. Being placed high in the rankings increases the number of potential customers that you can reach. Good optimization of your site helps your customers find and buy your products. You need to take this action under some serious considerations when you decide to take your business online. Choosing the right keywords that you will be optimizing your page for should be your top priority. Creating your content and designing your page based on such specified keywords will make it easier for search engines to rank your pages high on top. This will make you visible to more internet users and possibly translate into more sales.

Many factors determine your website’s position in the search engine results. Intelligent web page design is one of them. Committing your time on this can result into a page compliant with the standards hence increasing your chances of ranking high. Standards here refer to a clear page structure, a tidy source code and its cooperation with the search wizards. Page loading time is another very important factor. Have your pages loading on the visitors screen as fast as possible by optimizing on the code and investing in a fast and reliable web host.

More than 90 percent of internet surfers use the internet to find information on their products of interest. SEO is no doubt the cheapest and most effective way of tapping in to this incredible source of potential clients. Most SEO service companies calculate the price per individual customer. Depending on the popularity of the keywords you are working on ranking, you may have to part with anything from as little as $20 all the way to the big four and five figure sums.

Your custom web design should be effective, user-friendly and attractive.

Like in every other forum, an image is worth a thousand words. You should seriously consider having images of yourself, your employees, your products and other relevant topics issues expressed in your website. Instead of having a huge image gallery, you can consider having one image that is regularly updated.

You can also spice up your website with other kinds of media, your videos, podcasts as well as an online webcam through which your visitors can interact with you. Community building is one of the most amazing things about the future of the internet. Guess what will happen if you create a great website about yourself with your principle interest set to email marketing?

If you get it right with the design of your website, positioning it correctly in the search engines and providing valuable content, in a couple of months, you will have built a global email marketing community. You will be able to talk about email marketing strategies, how email marketing works, how you can benefit from it and a huge list of topics that you never imagined other people developing an interest in. It is common getting each person having one or two areas of main interest and a creative web design is the way to go if you want success from your campaign.

Your first step in keeping your website interesting is by updating it regularly. Your website requires a lot of maintenance work. Updating your website involves adding new content to it while making it interesting. Suppose you visited a website today, then went back the next day and there goes the same content, weeks later, you still find the same content! Chances are you will not visit that website anymore.

Stick this in your mind. Updating your website is key to your success online. There are other set of features that will help your business website to be interesting. Provide some kind of interaction between you and your visitors as well as amongst your visitors. Start by having a visitors’ book where your visitors will post their comments. You can select some comments which will be seen by your visitors as well as those that will only be visible to you.

Do all you can to build a loyal community. Consider adding links to your community members in order to make it stronger. You can also ask your community members to add links to your site.

Like with every good thing, there are certain things that you need to be aware of. Your business website is serious business and so should you treat it. You will be providing information about your products to the whole world. Ensure that the information you give accurate and useful.

Developing a creative website for your business is a process that you should endeavor to pursue if you want to have a strong online presence. Make it fun and interesting