The Most Important Thing You Should Know Before You Create A Website

By Bradford Butler

People everywhere want to start a profitable internet business but there are not sure of where to start. You motivations may be to one day quit your day job o you may have an existing offline business that you want to take online. Either way, the internet can be a great starting point and business building tool to achieve your goals.

When you are in the planning stages of staring an internet business, aside from understanding the needs of your market, the first thing you want to take to heart is the way your website is designed. The cookie cutter approach does not work in all instances. You want your site to stand out as unique. This means you will have to learn how to build your own site or farm it out.

Should you turn this over to a professional website developer, be prepared to shell out some big bucks. It can cost anywhere from $1000 for a basic design upwards to $5000 or more. By learning to do it yourself, you can save a lot of money and learn a valuable skill.

I am a big advocate of taking the do-it-yourself approach. There are many advantages. One is that you can design your website exactly as you see it. Sometimes it can be hard communicating what you want to others and very often you will never get back exactly what you envisioned.

Website design skills are in big demand. This means that once you learn the basic skills, not only do you become a marketable asset, but you can design your own sites, make changes in the future, or create new websites that target other markets. It is a valuable skill to have.

The best tip I can give for success is to never create a website that is all about you. Basically, keep in mind that your visitors and their needs are the most important thing and should influence the entire reason for your website's existence. The site you create should be bout their wants, desires, needs and aspirations and how you can help them.

A site that truly benefits your visitors is a site that converts well. This means that you have to clearly communicate in every way what is important to them and not what is important to you. Many times people build websites the have very little visitor value. This is a big mistake.

When a person comes to your website looking for a specific solution, they don't want to hear all about you. They want to know if what you offer can really help them. They may be looking for answers to specific problems or may have a strong desire to accomplish something. Either way, how you positions your website will make all the difference in the world.

The best formula you can use is the same formula that copywriters use when creating sales correspondence. The formula is AIDA which means, attention, interest, desire and action. This simply means your site design and website copy should attraction the attention of visitors, hold their interest, create a desire for you solution and inspire them to take action. Do this and your will success.

About the Author:

See link titled: website creator right here website creator for more information.

A Strong LMS Logo, Key to Successful E-Learning Courseware

By Justin Bradley

Are you preparing your learning content ready for migration to a learning management system? If so, you're probably making an overwhelming number of choices. Beyond all those choices about the content itself--what to include and how to do so--there are decisions regarding navigational, format, and others. And beyond those basic ones there are the finer choices related to design and style. Part of this more subtle element is the brilliant design of your e-learning course logo.

You may wonder, is a logo really necessary for an online course? It's true that in many ways a logo is just a gimmick. When it really comes down to it, it doesn't make much of a difference. Your e-learning course has to be well-developed and unique to thrive and find users. But it's also true that we don't use expressions like "Don't judge a book by its cover" for no reason at all. The reality is that we do judge based on visual cues. We make quick decisions based on these visuals when we decide on everything from cars to education to a romantic interest. Just like an interest-piquing book cover, a logo has the power to intrigue.

So what types of logos work the best? Keep in mind this rule: your logo acts as the visual illustration that represents your e-learning course. Essentially, it will embody your learning content. But it will also, after some time, facilitate viewer recognition of (and trust in) your product.

Your logo can take any form you like. It may be simply an image, in the form of an icon or sign (ideograms) or it could also be a simple word (logotype). Ideograms can be often be recognized alone, like the Nike swish--you know the swish refers to without seeing the word Nike. You may also choose a mix of these two kinds of logos.

Although some courseware developers and companies rely on pre-packaged logos, your own design might be the best solution--not to mention the most fun to come up with. Remember, it's your content and your vision. And in any case, a logo can be very easy to design.

So, how do you come up with a great logo? It won't come to you in your sleep. You have to make your hand do some work. Tirelessly brainstorm your ideas and sketch them out by hand, using up lots of paper. This is the strategy big design companies use. Their graphic designers sketch everything out by hand before even going near a computer. Sketching by hand is the easiest and quickest way to imagine and design your courseware logo.

Once you have your simple and aesthetically pleasing logo design, it's time to play with it. Try many different things. Experiment with different shades and colors. Try different combinations. Put your logo in many situations, adding text in different positions to find out where it looks best. Try out different fonts and sizes.

Throughout it all, keep your users in mind. Create a logo with a bold and unique e-learning course logo design whose integrity and innovation suits that of the learning management system course itself.

About the Author:

Create online learning modules for logo design, Courseware and other topics on Coggno's LMS. Share your expertise now. To create a free account visit http://www.coggno.com/lms3, complete contact form to start the process.

Internet Marketing: Design Your Website From Marketers View Not Artist

By Lance Jepsen

In 1993, when I began designing websites for people, I knew very little about Internet marketing. The websites I created for clients would have a header graphic across the top and links down the sidebars.

I will never forget the business owner who paid me $650 to design a website for him back in the early 90's. His new website I built for him looked wonderful. He liked it. But 3 weeks later he called me and said his sales had dropped by 15%. Both of us were shocked. After all, his new website looked so much better. Why did his sales fall?

I felt bad for the guy, but hey, that was his problem. Of course I could not control visitors buying habits. He came to me to create a better looking website and I had done that and gotten paid for it. Oh heck, I had a conscious. I could not just stiff this guy. I wanted to help him. So I looked at what we had done. The problem was that we made the website much more complicated. Where there was blank space, we had put in links like: Press Releases, Screen-shots, Awards, About Us, Privacy Statement, and so on.

We put the old website back up, the less professional looking website. Sales immediately went back up to their former levels.

The lesson I learned in website design is to keep it super simple. Visitors to the website had too many options presented to them which is another way of saying the website had no focus. There was no clear instruction on what we wanted visitors to do. Back in 1993, I do not think we even knew what we really wanted visitors to do, other than click on the order button. The web logs showed that very few people even visited the new links we added.

I learned that people do not care about your company. People do not care about your press releases or even your awards. All that people want to know is if your product or service will meet their need and how much will it cost. It is as simple as that.

Most businesses who are on the web make the mistake of hiring a web designer to put up their website. The person they should hire is an Internet marketer, not a website designer. If you hire a website designer, you will get what you paid for, a beautiful piece of artwork that fails to close the sale.

My research shows that you have about 5 seconds to grab and hold your visitors attention. If there are 3 or more hyperlinks that confuse your visitor, they will simply click the back button and move on to another website. If your visitor has many options presented to her so that she can not find what she wants in seconds, she will leave your website and move on to the next website listed in the search engine. Do not be dumb and install a prevent the back button script to try and keep someone on your website. This only gets your visitor angry and can result in complaints against your website to Google. Google will delist your website if they catch you doing this. Not only this but it guarantees that this person will never come back to your website. It shows you do not care about your visitors but instead care only about trapping them on your website.

A simple, attention getting headline with well written sales copy, and the single option you want her to take, trumps design when it comes to selling.

You need to focus your website like a laser on the most desired action you want your visitor to take. Avoid complicated navigational menus. Have only the one option you want people to take on a given web page. All your sales copy should be focused on that one option you want people to take. By focusing your web site in this way, it focuses the attention of your visitors on exactly what you want them to be focused on. Complexity is the enemy of sales. Remember KISS (Keep It Super Simple) when it comes to website design.

About the Author:

By Lance Jepsen. To discover more about exploding the profits of your website including a step by step 30 day program to make your website pull in money like a broken ATM machine, visit internet marketing