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Archive for June 29, 2011

bikram | June 29, 2011
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5 Designing Tips for a Professional Blog

Many of us are active bloggers, but very few of us own good professional looking blog. It’s your blog’s design besides the content, which discriminates a professional blog from an amateur one. Here are few designing tips, implement them and take your blog to a superior level.

Customize the template

There is nothing called 100% original design of template. All are variations of themes. So rather than worrying about owning a new template altogether, you should start customizing the template available to you as per your blog’s content. Start with the top banner first. Top banner draws first attention of the viewer. It should reflect what your blog is all about. Consider your blog’s niche and design the banner accordingly. If it’s a travel related blog, you may consider displaying some travel related images on the banner. Color has to be apt to your blog’s nature.

Make post titles clickable

Make the post titles clickable, so that when viewer clicks on the same reaches exclusive post page. Make sure it has space for comments below, like button and sharing facility at different social networking sites. Clickable posts score higher in SEO, besides reader’s convenience.

Keep an eye on the white space

Don’t forget white space is very important part of every design. Although it is referred as the negative space, but surprisingly this negative space has great contribution in making the surrounding designs much more. White space adds sense of refinement to the entire design. Space out all elements of your blog with the white space so that readers can read with an ease and also enjoy the process of scanning.

Keep it clutter free

Many young bloggers clutter the entire blog by installing widgets like – clocks, calendar, weather forecast, thought of the day etc. They are not only style statement and unnecessary, but also slow down the entire blog and takes long for it to get loaded. Many readers are impatient and won’t wait too long to read. So keep it simple, neat and reader friendly. If some elements have become outdated and are not found relevant anymore, remove them immediately.

Place key information rightly

Important information like – email address, RSS feed subscription link, sharing links and other ‘call to action’ buttons should be kept in a prominent place of the blog; preferably on the top half of your blog or at the bottom of each post.

Follow these useful tips and make a professional blog. Soon your traffic will rise, and popularity will score higher.

Category: Web Design | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | June 28, 2011
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Common E-commerce Site Designing Mistakes

With growing numbers of internet surfers, and busy schedules people prefer to buy things online than physical form of shopping. E-commerce has witnessed major leap all over. But a poorly designed e-commerce site can actually weaken a brand badly, and collapse its entire dream of building –Ecommerce Empire.

Here are some common e-commerce site designing mistakes.

Forced registration

Many websites ask for forced registration. This is highly annoying for the visitor. Undoubtedly sign up is important for the sales team to keep up the database and sales record; but not important more than the sales itself. By asking visitor to register first and then allowing him or her to purchase merchandise is indeed an obstacle towards sales. Many visitors may not have much time or patience to fill up form and sign up before buying and they may prefer to simply quit. Instead allow them to conduct purchase as a guest. You may ask them to save accounts detail for future reference or verify their mail addresses.

Lack of product detail

When one is buying online one is not physically seeing the product, feeling it, touching it, or smelling it. Thus one has to entirely depend on the computer screen and what is visible there through words, images and videos. Many websites have inadequate information, and customer is left wondering about the product, its size, color, weight etc. Many times product images are very small. Products like shirts, handicrafts need minute detail to be displayed, else, people fail to recognize its worth. Pictures should be big, with close zooming facility and 3D viewing for thorough understanding of the product. Make sure it has been clicked using a professional-grade camera.

Hidden contact information

When people are spending online they are skeptical about the company if it’s new or his experience is new with it. They fear financial cheating, credit card information loss. They also want to know whom to find and talk in case of problem. If your site doesn’t provide such contact information, viewer will be certainly doubtful about your credibility and may prefer to visit some other site. Make a ‘Contact Us’ page and put your information. Give a contact number which is working and available 24 hours. Mailing address, postal address, phone number can build credibility.

Limited modes of payment

Many websites offer very few modes of payments, which limit its prospective buyers from buying online. Make all procedures of payment viable – net banking, credit card, debit card, cash on delivery, cheque deposit, etc. If you can offer EMI to credit cards users then it will boost your sales. You can collaborate with credit card companies for such facility.

Make sure you do not commit any of these mistakes while designing an ecommerce site for your products. Missing out on any may result in sluggish performance.

Category: Web Design | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | June 24, 2011
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Mistakes to be Avoided When Designing a Website

Web designing is not only art; it involves logical thinking, knowledge of the medium and analytical mind. But web designers often commit several mistakes while designing a website. Here are some of the fatal mistakes often committed by a designer. Make sure you don’t repeat them.

Confusing website identity

Often a website suffers from its identity crisis; people fail to understand what the website is all about. At a glance, the visitor must know what the website is. If visitor fails to comprehend, may soon leave the website and never come back.

Detailed content

Content should never be jumbled up, long and detailed. Break content into short paragraphs with bullets, charts, images, headers, sub-headers. It should be scannable.

Fancy, complex fonts

Don’t get fascinated with fancy, complex fonts. They may look nice independently, but not suitable for websites. Many of them are not readable. Don’t forget your main objective is to send the message across effectively. If visitors face difficulty in reading, they will quit immediately.

New browser windows

Often some websites are so poorly designed that if you click on a link, a new browser window opens up in front. The logic behind such web design is that the viewer won’t easily leave the website. But forcibly keeping audience with the site is dangerous, it can annoy the viewer and he may think of never coming back to it. Let the viewer control his viewing. If he wants, he can get back by clicking back button. Stay simple.

No white space left

A major disagreement between website programmers and designers lies in space management. Programmers desire more and more information stuffed in a page; whereas designers think eye needs white negative space to breathe freely and move from one point to another. Make a balance between the duo.

Obsession with the center

Many designers think putting everything on the webpage in center is cool. They tend to align text, pictures, headings and everything in center of the page. Centering everything on a page is amateurish act and shows unprofessionalism. Play safe by putting everything on left of the page.

Avoid these common mistakes while designing a website.

Category: Web Design | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | June 19, 2011
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Few Tips for Blogging

For the aspirant and new bloggers here are some useful tips. You may know enough about blogging and stay quite enthusiastic about the same, but unknowingly you may miss out few important points of blogging. While you do blogging keep these few things in mind.

Be regular

Most important of all things in blogging is staying regular. Be regular to your blog and keep posting every day. If it’s an image and video driven blog, make sure you regularly post some new things. If you avidly write in your blog, be regular. Everyday post new write ups with power-packed titles. Blogging is like virtual diary, your readers will expect you to update it regularly. If you do not post quite often, your viewers may soon lose interest and not come back to your blog.

Respond to the comments

With growing popularity and viewership of your blog, more and more people will leave their comments against your post. Reply back to the comments. Commenter expects you to reply to his comment, else he won’t be motivated enough to comment again in future. Comments may not be always be flattering for you, which can be easily handled with heart-felt thanks. Critical comments or thought provoking questions are much difficult to handle. Address them carefully, with patience and good reasoning. You may get many spam messages as well, which can be blocked. There will be fanatic irrelevant abusive languages too, which should be avoided and deleted. Replying back to such messages ensure welcoming further danger. Instead maintain your dignity. Replying to comments will make your blog interactive, fun and updated.

It’s not website

For all the new bloggers, let me tell you blogging is not website content writing. Web content is much formal, whereas blog can be as much informal and casual as your nature. If it’s a personal blog of yours it can be your reflection. If you wish it to be blog of your company, even then you may take a friendly approach to come closer to your customers. So keep language easy, friendly, and interactive; so that you can send across the intended message effectively without entangling the reader in complex vocabulary and style of writing. Don’t be pushy.

Follow these guidelines while blogging.

Category: blogging | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | June 18, 2011
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Things to Remember About Corporate Blogging

Corporate blogging is the latest buzz. Companies have taken this route of blogging to reach out their fans, followers, customers, public in large. It nurtures a brand, helps it to come close to its people and become popular.  Here are few tips for corporate blogging.

Concrete blogging strategy

To see results of blogging you will need to hold your patience for a while. You need to draft a blogging strategy, which should be parallel to your PR strategy, corporate mission, and vision. Since blog is a subtle and indirect expression of customer relation, it has to be related to other modes of communication. Blogging is all about interaction. Unlike other forms of promotion, in blogging you initiate a discussion, draw comments, and nurture ongoing discussion with other bloggers and target audience. While commenting, contradicting, advising, explaining you earn credibility, reliance and admiration. This is called blogger relation. The stronger it’s, easier it will be for you to reach your audience.

Value addiction

A blog is always a value addition device; otherwise, corporate website would have been enough. It’s mode of communication which is updated every day with new posts, new additions. Blog updates not only about the corporate’s new achievements, happenings, offerings; but also about the industry as a whole or its thoughts in large. If a blog doesn’t add any value, it falls flat on face and serves no purpose.

Thoughtful logical analysis

When you are talking about some industry practice, or comparison or some current news make sure you analyze it well along with rock solid reasoning. No one is interested in a mere description of news. Provide some thoughtful analysis that will bring some food for thought to the reader. Personal perspective interlaced with data will help you to fetch credibility and loyal readership. If you prefer not to comment on the topic, you may sum up opinions and perspectives of community in large. You may put links of other related blogs for further knowledge.

Respond to the comments, they are valuable

Responding to blog readers’ comments is very important to build long-term relationship, traffic, and loyalty. It’s one way to make them feel valuable and special. It will help you to dig deeper into a topic, raise debate, and lengthen the thread of interaction. Blogging is all about interaction. So start talking to your customer. From this entire audience is benefited and you learn new things too.

Be open to critics

Don’t expect it to be a joyous ride throughout. There will be criticism, which you have to accept. Handle it with logic. It will earn you respect and credibility. Criticism is certainly constructive. You will also see hike in viewership. When flaws are pointed out, it gives you scope to improve.

Promote

Promote your blog through friends, social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook. You may send some newsletters about your blog to you target audience.

Category: blogging | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | June 17, 2011
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How to Promote a Gift Portal?

Gift portals have taken a toll over our daily lives, making the most of every festival, occasion and special days. Gifting companies have successfully convinced people to bring about a new occasion, new celebration each day with greeting cards, cakes, flowers, chocolates, toys, and millions of gifting ideas. Today, people can’t think of celebrating birthday without gifts. With growing physical distance between family members and busy work schedule people hardly get time to go out and purchase gifts. So more and more people these days are buying gifts online, but not many of them know about good gift portals, ending up with searching in Google and Yahoo instead. Learn the tricks to promote your gift portal effectively and keep the brand name on top of their mind. Here are some promotional ideas for your gift website.

Find a unique proposition for your website

It’s very important to find a niche for your website. You can’t afford to be just another gif portal with no unique selling proposition. Suppose you guarantee delivery of gifts within 24 hours, in case of failure offering money back proposal.  It will definitely help people in finding you credible, responsible, honest and dedicated. You may specialize in an area of a particular gifting idea like – flowers and greeting cards or gifts for children or gifts for women only. Finding niche is very important to stand out in clutter of gift portals.

Enable secure financial transaction

While purchasing on Internet people may not readily settle down for a new portal unless it seems very trustworthy in terms of financial transaction. Since people purchase through online banking, PayPal or credit cards the entire financial transaction process needs to be smooth, hassle-free and displaying secure server of VeriSign certification.

Free shipping

In this age of tight competition if you think you can make some money from delivery or shipping too, you are wrong. Almost every portal offer free shipping, which doesn’t mean they are running business at loss. They manage that cost within the product price itself. But to attract customers display shipping cost as absolutely free.

Special discounts on special days

Birthday, anniversary dates are different for all. But some occasions and festivals are universal like – Mother’s day, Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Christmas when people all across the world buy gifts for their dear ones. On such days, offer special discounts to make the most of these occasions and hike sales.

Remember customers’ special days

When a person registers with your website, ask his birthday and anniversary date. Send gifts to your customer on those special days to make him feel special and loved.  It can be a small token of love from your side – like a bouquet of flowers. Your customer will never go to any other portal.

Try these simple tips and see the difference.

Category: How-To Guides | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | June 17, 2011
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Common Web Designing Mistakes to be Avoided

Many times website designs display serious blunders. Designers may unconsciously commit some mistakes, which they don’t even know how harmful can be for the website. Here are some commonly made mistakes by web designers.

Confusing at a look

An ideal website should grab attention of the viewer and immediately tell him what it is all about.  If at a glance the visitor fails to understand what a site is all about, he may leave immediately and never come back. In few seconds it should send the message across, else the visitor may soon leave and never come back to it. So the site has to bring essence of its content and intention everywhere – in its look and feel.

Long continued paragraphs of text

Often websites look exactly like novels bearing long paragraphs of text without any break. Never do this mistake. On Internet people do not read, they filter and scan. So break the content with bullets, headers, lists, sub headers, tables etc. It will make the content readable and interesting.

Fancy calligraphic fonts

Don’t fall in love with fonts that you readily mess up your website. Calligraphic and fancy fonts may look very nice, but not effective for a website. Font should always be legible, graceful and effective. If the reader is unable to read, will soon leave the website and may never come back.

Tiny fonts

At times, to accommodate more and more text, we end up choosing tiny fonts which are not legible. Make sure readers are comfortable in reading the text and need not zoom.

No new browser window

Often web designers think links landing up in new browser window is a good idea, as the viewer will not easily leave the website as multiple windows of the same site will remain open. But it’s an outdated and wrong practice. Don’t dictate the viewer. It may annoy him. Let him control his viewing pattern as per his own wishes. ‘Back’ button is effective enough to go back to the earlier page.

Unnecessary registration

Don’t force the viewer to register first for full viewing of the website. Many viewers may soon close the tab and never come back. Ask for registration only when needed with mail address.

Annoying music

Many websites play music which is highly annoying.

Overuse of Flash

Over usage of Flash not only look distracting, but also increases loading time. Limit its usage, only when needed use Flash.

Don’t subscribe without consent

Forced subscription of visitor is highly annoying. Don’t annoy him with newsletters when he registers with the site. Ask him if he wants offers and newsletters to be sent or not.

Don’t make these mistakes while designing a website.

Category: Web Design | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | June 12, 2011
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Why It Is Important to Have an E-mail List for a Web Hosting Reseller

List building is something every marketer involved himself with, but that is not the case with webhosting resellers. They simply cannot join the set of dots lying between email lists and the products they offer. They do not see any reason why they should invest in a list building exercise, and hence they prefer other form of marketing over this high-converting marketing tool.

3 main reasons why web hosting resellers should build email list

Customers remains in the loop, without much effort

As a web hosting services provider you often need to inform your customers (both actual and prospective) about all the minor as well as major changes you have made to your servers, security, or even to your offering. An email list will help you keep your customers in loop. To a list, all you need to do is to create a benefit-laid email and fire it up to inform your audience of what change you have made and how it is going to affect them.

Cross selling and up selling will be easy

Selling to people who already have bought from you in the past is rather easier than it is to sell to someone with whom you do not share any relationship. Once you have a list of your customers, you can relatively easily persuade them to buy a higher version of your product (up selling), and you can even push your products to them which they are not consuming (cross selling). For example to a web hosting customers you can push your domain names, security products, and SSL certificates, etc.

Build trust and demonstrating authority

The biggest challenge that a web hosting reseller faces is its ability to distinguish itself from competition. Often time, people fail to realize why you are better than others. You can demonstrate your leadership and build trust by sending educational mails to people in your list.

Helping your customers solve their problems is the best and the safest way to establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

The three reasons cited above are too important to be ignored. How you capitalize on them could be the key difference between making your reseller business grow big and keeping it the way it is now. The ball is in your court, and you have to decide how you want to play with it.

Category: Web Hosting | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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