Over the past few years, from the early days of the internet, businesses have slowly began to adopt the internet as a secure way of gaining more exposure and business. For the most part, the simplest and most effective way of doing that is by creating a website. Suddenly, everyone who had a basic knowledge of computers and the internet became website designers, offering their services to individuals and businesses alike. With the advent of FREE content management systems (ex. WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, Joomla), the need for businesses to hire overpriced (and often under-qualified) web designers to build complete sites from scratch became obsolete. Business nowadays can save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, if they hire a develop (or develop themselves) a website based out of a popular content management system. Here’s why:

Saves time in Developing – A content management system works the like the framework of a automobile. The structure, wheels and overall layout is built for you, you simply take that structure and turn it into a full blown website. All the time that it would take a developer to write code that will pretty much mimic the functionality of what’s already created is saved. Developers who specialize in specific content management systems, spend the majority of their time working on the design (look) and extra functionality that your site needs, rather than the basics. This saves the developer time, and therefore money for you.

Easier to find another developer – If, for any unfortunate reason, you find yourself having to look for another developer, it’s usually much easier to find a qualified candidate if you’re working with a specific CMS. Since more management systems are open-source, this means their frameworks are generally well known to people. This way, a new developer is already familiar with the basic functionality of your site, and can therefore get in there much quicker. For websites using proprietary systems, it may take hours and hours for a developer to fully understand what he or she is dealing with, which can cost you lots of money before any actual work is done.

You can update it yourself – The main benefit of using an content management system is your ability to easily modify content on the website to fit your needs. Similar to a word processor, the ability to go into a page, and change an image, or a block of Text, or even add new pages is very simple to do. As a result, you don’t need to be bugging your web developer any time you need to make a minor change, and therefore not have to pay them on an hourly basis to make these changes.

Content Management Systems are a revolution in web design opportunities for businesses. While you may still need to higher a developer to design the site for you, they can save you so much time and money they’re worth looking into.

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A good way of thinking about your website is to consider it like it’s your own home, or better yet, a home you’re trying to sell. In many ways the two are very similar. Just like your physical home, your website has an address to let people know where it is ( www.yourdomain.com ), you can design it just about any way you’d like, sell it, expand it, and store as much information (or stuff) to suit your needs. While creating and running a website can be seen as technologically dauinting, by relating it to many aspects of home ownership, you can get a better grasp of how and why you do certain things.

Imagine your website is a home you’re trying to sell to prospective customers. Here are a few factors to consider for your website (or your ‘virtual home’):

Make it Presentable – Regardless of your personal preferences, it’s usually highly advised to make your home presentable to guests (or in this case, potential buyers) so that you improve the chances of people accepting the home. Designing the look of the home is dependent on the type of buyers/visitors you have coming to your site. Looking at other homes (or sites) tailored to your specific demograpic can you give an idea of the colors, wallpapers, and imagery you should use throughout your site.

In addition, follow best practices for usability. Have a clear navigation, easy to read text, and complimentary colors in order to not scare away new visitors.

Design each room accordingly – Just like a home, it makes sense to have each room designed in a way that’s expected by a vistor/buyer. The living room should likely have a sitting area, while the bedroom should have a bed and a Kitchen a sink. When it comes to a website, make sure each page has relevant information expected from that category. The contact page should have easily to follow contact information and directions (if you have a physical address). The services page should clearly outline your services and provide information to contact you if more questions are needed. By providing people with what they expect, you increase the chances of them taking that next step.

Make the Floor Plan Easy to Navigate – Good homes have a logical floor plan that is easy to understand. For example, it’s not very common to have a bedroom right between the kitchen and foyer, so don’t design your website like that. By having a clear navigation, that contains appropriate sub-pages in each category, people feel comfortable navigating and finding the information they’re looking for.

When needed, hire an Expert – If you’re wanting to make your home presentable and ready for visitors, it’s sometimes wise to hire an expert to help with renovations. Most people aren’t advised to attempt to add an extra room to their house on their own, or add a deck, or work on plumbing. The same thing applies to some aspects of websites. For higher level development that may involve redesigning your whole website, structure, or layout, or for more advanced implementations like search engine marketing, it’s advisable to look for outside help. While it’s perfectly possible to do it on your own, the time and expertise required to do the job right is usually worth the cost. As with most home work, finding a suitable contractor is very important.

So the next time you look at your website, think to yourself “would I be happy to show my visitors around my home, or is it time to clean it up a bit?”

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With the recent passing of Steve Jobs, the world has lost one of the most innovative visionaries and entrepreneurs of our time. Jobs was passionate and stopped at nothing to pursue his dreams, helping shape and change the technological and business world to what it is today. So what can we learn from Steve Jobs’ legacy?

1. If you fall, get back up. After Apple’s board of directors ousted Steve Jobs in 1985, he didn’t give up and throw in the towel. Instead, Jobs went on to start another company called NeXT, another computer company, which was later bought out by Apple 11 years later. Years later, he went on to become CEO of Apple, successfully turning it from an irrelevant company to a present-day powerhouse.
2. Never stop improving. Just because you have the best product today doesn’t mean it’ll be the best product tomorrow. Just look at the first Apple iPod, one of the most revolutionary gadgets of its time and sold like hotcakes. But Steve Jobs didn’t stop there…he made it better and better with succeeding generations with the iPod Mini, iPod Shuffle, and iPod Nano.
3. Never stop innovating. Today, Apple has an enormous array of successful products that include Macbooks, iPhones, iPads, and more. What made them special were their cutting edge technologies that were years ahead of competitors. By the time another company would catch up with Apple, Steve Jobs already had something else up his sleeve.
4. Work with the best. Steve Jobs couldn’t do it by himself, so he surrounded himself with smart people who could help drive his vision. Working with the top people in the technology and business helped Apple climb to the top.
5. Don’t settle for less than perfect. Every time you pick up an Apple device, there’s usually a feeling of awesomeness. Just look inside any Apple store and you can find dozens of people engaging with the newest gadgets. Steve Jobs was a perfectionist and products or employees who didn’t meet his standards usually ended up gone.

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For some businesses, it may be necessary to have a global online presence, meaning they want their website being found on search engines around the globe. Even for small businesses in the United States, the necessity to reach Mexican, Canadian, or British audiences is a necessity. With different languages, cultures, and even technological barriers to overcome, this can be a pretty daunting tasks. Here are a few tips, taken from SearchEngineLand’s very helpful guide, on how to better optimize your SEO campaign to reach global audiences.

1. It’s not All about Just Translation -Localization, the process of turning your website or product accessible to a certain country/language, stems deeper than simply changing the language. While there are many automated systems out there (ex. Google Translate), the results are usually very poor and can hurt your marketing strategy. Straight translation can often cause confusing content in other languages, not to mention the variety of different cultural influences that go into languages. Spanish websites directed towards south americans may have completely different meanings, sayings, and even grammar, versus those directed towards the Spain.

2. Social Media still Works Overseas – Don’t just restrict your social media usage to your main country, Europeans and Asians have been shown to be very interactive when it comes to social media. In addition, by interacting with consumers in different countries, you’re engaging in highly valuable market research. The feedback your social media team can get out of these interactions can allows you to customize each localized campaign in order to improve your business globally.

3. Use TLDs - Buying up specific TLDs for your country, like .co.uk, .es, and .fr allows you to better protect your brand and presence in that country. As soon as you break into a different market and gain some sort of traction, you can be almost guaranteed that someone else will buy your domain name and use it to their advantage. Buy them before they can. If you plan to use the domains separately and hosted individually on servers, make sure to assign geo-targetting via Google webmaster tools in order to tell Google where the site is intended to be seen in the google ‘universe’.

4. Research Website Layouts for Each Culture – Make sure to research the browsing tendencies of each country before designing landing pages and websites for them. For example, it’s been shown that the Japanese market actually enjoys reading more information before engaging in a service or website. This is in contrast to American browsing habits, where bullet points, headlines and small paragraphs are shown to convert better.

5. Use Specific Country Folder and Redirect Accordingly – It may be too expensive for some businesses to have multiple domains and websites hosted across multiple servers around the world, so a good option to fix duplicate content and multiple localized sites is to create sub-folders on your domain for each country (ex. /uk, /espana) and have your localized TLDs remap to those sub-folders. Within the domain, you may be able to use canonical tags for any duplicate content you’re using across same language countries. It will also allow you to share the appropriate link juice across your domain and country sites, helping you rank better.

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Flash Websites (http://www.macromedia.com) were (and still are) a popular choice for website developers due to their ability to provide cool-looking and flashy (hah!) web sites. A flash website can be as interactive as you’d like, allowing you to add animated menus, clever interfaces and videos throughout your site.

However, over the past few years, the use of flash has decreased due to several problems related to performance, difficulty to maintain and update, and Search Engine Optimization issues.

Flash has been around for quite some time, and while it has been implemented by several applications, small and large, its support has dwindled a bit over the years. Flash is harder to work with than general HTML and CSS web authoring, and it also requires users to download plugins to use and use up more memory when navigating the site. As a result, users with slower, less updated computers may have trouble using website in Flash. As a result, media giants such as Apple, have dropped their support for Flash and gone with newer, faster programming languages such as HTML5. As a result, Flash websites are not supported or visible on mobile products such as iPads, iPhones and older mobile devices.

Flash websites are different from traditional websites in that Flash is like one big animation file that runs on your web server. It ‘reacts’ to certain actions done by users and animates accordingly. Therefore, in order to modify any content on a traditional flash website, a developer needs to open up the animation file, and re-arrange/compile the information in order to add new content. This makes it harder for non-developers to add content, which can be a huge program for SEO. Traditional websites based on a Content Management System such as Drupal or WordPress make adding content as easy as possible.

One of the most concerning problems associated with Flash is the fact that search engine spiders have a really hard time navigating the sites. This should be a huge warning sign for anyone wanting to rank high in Google. Since Flash is one big animation file (rather than a collection of web-pages linked together in HTML) Google only sees one big file. While Google’s current algorithm let it ‘peek’ into a flash website and determine what it’s about, it will likely miss a lot of the context of your website and therefore not rank your individual pages accordingly. For example, Google will likely not know that you have a ‘services’ page on your website, and an ‘about’ page, all it sees is one big animation file on your homepage. If Google doesn’t see new content, and can’t read what the content is about, your site will never rank.

Flash is a great tool for interactive websites that require no rankings and is ok with some older computers and mobile products (iPhones, iPads, iPods and older smart phones) not being able to access it. However, for those wanting to get online exposure, which is 99% of businesses out there, it would be best to stick to a traditional HTML/CSS website or look into HTML5 development.

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