Last week, we discussed effective website design and the basics behind it.  In this cyberworld, finding the most effective route for internet marketing can be a challenge.  Especially when you are new to the concept of running a website catered to your business, it can be helpful to have a full stock of resources to turn to.  Whether these resources should pertain to content, design, or otherwise — chances are there is something out there to help you.  We have compiled a list of some useful website development and management tools found via the internet to help aid in your website’s future success.

Colour Lovers

Although seemingly simple and trivial, a good color palette is an important part of a website.  Colour Lovers is a fun, easy resource that can be vital in the look and feel realm of website creation.  Users can create color palettes that are easily generated into hex codes, as well as browse the color palette creations of others.

W3 Schools

W3 Schools is a resource for the components of webdesign that are more complex than a color palette and font choice — that is, the coding.  A large library of tutorials can be found for common coding languages such as HTML 5, CSS 3, XHTML, and Javascript.

Ning

Ning has the potential to be a great resource to add a unique touch for any business looking to market online.  Ning is a tool that allows users to build a social network platform.  Essentially, you would be creating your own Facebook, though on a much smaller scale.  With Ning’s ability to integrate with already established social networks, and the increasing potential of effective internet marketing by way of social media, it is a great resource to consider.

Google Site Submit

Not sure how to get noticed on the internet?  A good start is to simply submit your website’s URL to Google Site Submit, as well as to any other search engines.  Remember that the more often your website is updated, the more often Google Crawler tools will come across your site, and the more likely your Google page rank is to increase.

Web Designer Forum

As is true with most ideas, two heads are better than one.  Or potentially, hundreds of heads when you consider the number of members on a popular internet forum.  Web Designer Forum is one of quite a few discussion forums that exist for the sole purpose of allowing designers to exchange questions, feedback, and brain waves pertaining to website development.  Since web design, especially in the realm of coding, can be a very exact art (or science, whichever way you look at it!), having a place to go for troubleshooting and advice is rather important.

SourceForge

One of the most useful things about the world wide web today is the availability of quality open source software.  Countless numbers of programs have been created for everything from code writing to graphics design, and so much more.  SourceForge is a great resource to seek out an open source tool for virtually anything.

We hope this list either makes helps get your website off to a good start, or helps to inspire and aid in new ideas for your website!

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In case you missed it, we recently discussed Google Maps APIs and how they can helpful for a Denver online marketing company like us.

Today, we’re going to give you a few ideas to get those creative juices flowing — some cool features that the Google Earth API can add to your website.

The basic idea of the Google Earth API is that a big computerized globe sits all comfy on your page — pretty fun, right?  And from there, it only gets more interesting…

Pinpointing & Marking Locations Around the Globe

When you insert a Google Earth API globe into a webpage, one really useful feature is being able to track down and mark any location (and multiple location) around the world.  You can create your own “icons” to mark places (these can also be made to be dynamic, as in they can change on highlight or rollover with the mouse).  This place mark icon is created by pinpointing the latitude and longitude of the location of your choice; the place mark can be tagged with any assortment of descriptions or captioning of your choice.

Creating a Tour

It’s a tricky bit of coding, but if you take some time and have some patience, it is possible to create a tour with Google Earth APIs.  This way, a user viewing your page can be taken to a series of locations of your choice, marked with (as previously discussed) place marks with corresponding descriptions.

Layering

If you want to get fancy, Google Earth APIs have quite a few layering options for mapping out the globe.  For example, a border layer can be applied to allow the viewer to see divisions between cities, states, countries, etc.  Roads and road names can also be displayed in their own layer; trees and terrain can be viewed in a three dimensional orientation.

To sum it all up, Google Earth APIs allow you to design an interface in which users can explore the globe, guided by you.  If you’re interested in checking out some cool examples, visit the Google Earth API Demo Gallery.

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Photograph courtesy of ToastyKen, released under a CC by 2.0 license.

One of the most celebrated battles in history occurred in central China in 208 AD: the Battle of Red Cliff. It was later recounted in the classic Chinese novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and retold in the 2008 movie Red Cliff. The warlord Cao Cao built an army to crush his two southern rivals, Liu Bei and Sun Quan. Liu Bei and Sun Quan allied together to fend off Cao Cao’s invasion. Desperately outnumbered, the Allies couldn’t rely on sheer manpower to repel the warlord’s forces — they instead had to rely on the skills and talents of the people on their team.

So who were some of the people on their team? There was their commander Zhou Yu, who trained their armies and led them through the battles. There was the brilliant military strategist Zhuge Liang, who devised ingenious military tactics to use against the enemy. There was the princess Sun Shangxiang, who infiltrated the enemy camp disguised as an enemy soldier and sent spy reports back to the Allies. There were the generals Zhang Fei and Guan Yu, able to face off by themselves against a battalion of enemy soldiers and emerge victorious — they provided much of the brute muscle. Zhou Yu and the Zhuge Liang made a plan to attack the enemy’s navy with fire in order to counterbalance the enemy’s numerical advantage. But in order for their fire attack to be successful, they needed to wait for a change in the wind — otherwise they would end up burning their own navy instead of the enemy. Zhuge Liang, through his understanding of nature, was able to predict the exact hour when the wind would change.  But they were running out of time — the enemy was planning to attack before the wind changes.  So Zhou Yu’s wife Xiao Qiao traveled to the enemy camp to distract their commander through feigning surrender and preparing an elaborate tea ceremony for him, delaying the enemy’s invasion until the winds changed and the Allies were able to successfully mount their attack.

Through the successful combination of the different roles of the people on their team — the Commander (Zhou Yu), the Mastermind (Zhuge Liang), the Spy (Sun Shangxiang), the Muscle (Zhang Fei and Guan Yu), and the Femme Fatale (Xiao Qiao) — the southern Allies emerged victorious and defeated the warlord Cao Cao.

So, what does all this have to do with us today? What can a modern, cutting-edge online marketing agency learn from the dusty old tomes of ancient Chinese history?  Quite simply, we can learn that teamwork is key. One person alone cannot hope to have all the skills and specialties needed to bring marketing success to their clients.  Instead you need a team of people with distinct yet complimentary skills and abilities. Here are some of the people you need:

• The Commander: This is the person who works with the client, determines the current state of their marketing, and makes a plan for them to achieve their marketing goals. Then, like Zhou Yu in the battle of Red Cliff, the Commander leads the team in executing that plan to achieve those goals and bring success to the client.
• The Engineer: This person is the nuts-and-bolts, ones-and-zeros programmer who gets excited about obscure terminology like MySQL and Document Object Model. The Internet runs on technologies like these, so if you don’t have someone on your team who understands it, then your online strategies will never get beyond the digital equivalent of the kiddie pool.
• The Artist: If your website looks like it was built in 1997 by your 15-year old nephew, your target audience will go running in the opposite direction. When your website looks like the work of an amateur, your company will too. You need a graphic design mastermind to design and deliver a sharp, eye-catching, high-end website that displays professional credibility and that people can’t help but be drawn to.
• The Scribe: If your website doesn’t have anything interesting to say, then nobody is going to read it, and consequently, nobody is going to buy from you. The Scribe produces the web pages, blog articles, e-books and other content that captures the attention of your site visitors and leads them to wonder how they ever managed to live without your company and your products or services before.
• The Optimizer: Let’s face it — if your website isn’t being found, then it might as well not exist. The Optimizer is a mastermind in the workings of the gatekeepers of the internet: the search engines. Optimizers spend their days poring over keyword lists, search traffic reports, and back-link spreadsheets. They follow all the latest updates in the behaviors and algorithms of the search engines. They use only ethical, “white-hat” SEO methodologies and avoid spammy, unethical, “black-hat” methodologies. A good Optimizer on your team is invaluable.
• The Communicator: Whether it’s Facebook comment threads, Twitter streams, YouTube channels or other online mediums, this person lives and breathes social media. They want to find the conversations people are having online and jump into them. For many companies, this person will be the public face of the company in most of their interactions with their clients and prospects, so it’s crucial that they get the right person for the job.
• The Entertainer: Sometimes you just need showmanship. If your marketing content is about as interesting as a presentation on the Dewey Decimal System, don’t expect people to stick around to learn why they need you. The Entertainer draws a crowd, makes your company exciting, and keeps people talking about you for days.
• The Analyst: Time to bust out the spreadsheets, folks. The Analyst sifts through the mountains of traffic analytics, conversion statistics and other data to find out what’s working in your marketing and what’s not. These are the people who find out how you’re getting a return on your marketing dollar, and work with the Commander to plan out how to increase that return in future marketing efforts.

Over the course of our work, these are the skillsets we have found to be indispensable for any online marketing effort. Of course, every team looks different, and it’s quite common for some people to have several of these skills, or for several different people to overlap in these skillsets. That is totally fine — what matters is that your team has “all the bases covered,” so to speak. If your online marketing team is missing some of these talents and skills, be forewarned — there’s some chinks in your armor that will likely end up hurting you. But if your team has all of these skillsets covered, then fear not — like the alliance of Sun Quan and Liu Bei at the Battle of Red Cliff, you’re ready to hit the ground running and achieve success.

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“Three Brothers” and “Sun Quan” images in this post are public domain and courtesy of Wikipedia.
“Lessons from History” image © 2011 Chris Strom, LLC.

We got quoted in an online article about business tips for web designers: Big Dreams for a Small Business — Web Designer.

Being a good designer or programmer isn’t good enough by itself. When running your own company, you also need to be a salesman, finding prospects and landing contracts. It’s basically a commission-only sales job: If you can’t land clients, you won’t earn any money.

— Chris Strom, cstrom.com

You can read the full article here: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/small-business-web-designer-advice-0671.

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We’re in the third part of our series on the fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — that is, the craft of building and populating your website in order to increase the likelihood of appearing prominently in the search results for search keywords that your target audience oftentimes uses in their searches.  In our first article, we looked at common SEO myths.  In our second article, we looked at the main criteria that search engine evaluate when ranking your website pages in their indexes.  Now this month, we’ll learn about some of the most important parts of your website pages’ content.

Not all parts of your web page are created equal

When search engines scan the content of your website, they actually assign different levels of importance to the different pieces of content.  For instance, headline text is given more weight than the text in your last paragraph of body text at the bottom of the page.  Now while the exact ranking algorithms that the search engines use to scan your site are secret (and constantly changing), there is general agreement that the following pieces of a web page are given high importance by the search engines:

1. The page title
2. The page URL
3. The page’s main headline

The page title

The next time you’re looking at a web page, look at the top left of your web browser window (above the website address box, and in the same bar as the minimize/maximize/close buttons).  You’ll notice that it contains a very short description of the web page that you’re on.  This is the page title.  A well-optimized web page will contain 2-3 well-chosen keyword phrases in this area.

The page URL

The word “URL” is really just a fancy term for the page’s address on the internet.  It will typically look something like http://www.yourdomain.com/webpage.  Like the page title, it is best to have a few keywords in this area as well.  For instance, if you run a real estate company, make sure your page URLs don’t look like this — http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?id=273 — but rather, look more like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/denver-real-estate.

The page’s main headline

Headlines on your web page work very similar to headlines in newspapers: there’s typically one main headline — which is usually the biggest — followed by a few smaller sub-headlines interspersed with your paragraphs of text.  Your main headline, quite understandably, carries more weight than your smaller headlines, which in turn carry more weight than your regular paragraphs of text.  So make sure your headline text contains one or two well-chosen keyword phrases, just like your page title.

Trying to work on your entire website to improve your chances of ranking well in your targeted search terms can seem like an overwhelming task.  But by focusing on the three parts of your web pages discussed here — page titles, page URLs, and on-page headlines — you can ensure that you’re working on some of the parts of your website’s pages that will have the most effectiveness in improving your site’s optimization.

We’ll be back next month with another article on search engine optimization.  In the meantime, if you have any additional questions about this subject, or any other web design topic, feel free to contact us.

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