Web Marketing Toolkit
To market effectively online there are a few things that you need. Save yourself much time and energy by learning now about the basic components of your Web marketing toolkit and why they are necessary. In this section we’ll look at the following:

Marketing Site Creation & HTML Editors
Email Clients For Web Marketing
Marketing With Signature Files
A Marketer’s Personal Data File
Marketing With Autoresponders
Choosing your Autoresponder

Marketing Site Creation & HTML Editors
When it comes to creating a Web site, all the tech gurus will tell you to forget about WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editors and learn to code HTML in a simple text editor. I bet you dread the thought … and rightly so!

Ignore these people, their advice is wrong for you.

Your primary goal is to build up your Web marketing business – quickly. It’s pointless to put your income on hold whilst you study the intricacies of HTML. Even once you’ve learnt it, writing every line of code by hand is time consuming.

With a decent HTML editor you can create fairly good web pages “out of the box”. You will learn about HTML as you go along… it’s almost inevitable.

You’ll find there are many different programs available, some free. As with most things in life, generally speaking… you get what you pay for. At the lower end of the scale you’ll find functionality limited and support for plug-ins, CSS, DHTML, XML, Java and Javascript often lacking. These editors also tend to add a certain amount of spurious code to your pages (but then MS Frontpage adds loads, and it ain’t even cheap!).

But… if you are planning a simple site layout or are creating mini sales sites, then one of these will do the job just fine.

Top of the range editors include all the bells and whistles, check your source code for errors, and offer greater speed and flexibility. They enable not only the creation, but also the management of complex web sites.

I recommend Adobe GoLive or Macromedia Dreamweaver. In my opinion GoLive has the best interface and is the easier of the two to learn, whilst Dreamweaver has the edge on technical sophistication and cleaner code.

However, though extremely good, both these programs are expensive. Think about your particular needs and priorities before dropping a significant chunk of change into one of them. Would that cash be better spent on marketing and promotion?

Take a look at this excellent beginners guide to HTML and quickly creating your first site

Using A Designer
If you don’t want to get into all this HTML stuff at all, there are a couple of other options open to you.

One is to employ a good designer or design firm, preferably one that can also assist you in promoting your new site. If you can afford this option, don’t short change yourself by ending up with the wrong people just to shave a few bucks off the price.

Good potential candidates should meet the following criteria:

They…

Listen to your ideas

Answer your questions in detail

Display enthusiasm for the job

Ask you plenty of questions about your project

Are able to show past projects as examples of their work

Don’t talk about the latest fancy tricks

Understand you need a marketing Web site that sells, not a pretty billboard

10 Important Web Design Tips: SEO Friendly Website

A website should firstly be searched out by visitors before talking about attracting or retaining those visitors. Nowadays, a “well designed website” does not only relate to a web site’s visual attractiveness but more importantly, how friendly it is with search engines.

Below are 10 SEO friendly website designing tips where web designers should pay attention to during the early stage of their web designing process.

1. Avoid creating menu on the left-hand side of a website . If unavoidable, an alternative way is to put some text with rich keywords at the top or above the left-hand menu so that this text will be the first thing to be read by search engines.

2. Headlines are rated more important than the rest of the web page by search engines . To take advantage of this, you should have your keywords in the page headline. Since the header tag (h1) is quite large, you should format it to make it smaller.

3. Every page should contain the “title” and “description” tags with good keywords to describe the page content. The number of words for the title should not exceed 9 and that for the description should not be more than 20 words in order to keep within the limits of most search engines.

4. Try not to use Flash when possible . Flash cannot be read by the search engines to date and will cause slow page loading time and make people run away. If you really have a reason to use flash, try to make it smaller (e.g. as a flash header) and leave other area of your website for keyword-rich content.

5. Think twice on how to use graphics . Make them relevant to your content and use an alt tag with relevant keywords for search engines to read as they cannot read graphics and also for your visitors so that they can have something to read when waiting for the graphics to load.

6. Do not only use images to link out . You should always use text links to link out to important content on your web site. Spiders can follow image links, but like text links more though.

7. Avoid using frames . Some search engines cannot spider web pages with frames at all. For the other search engines that can, they can have problems spidering it and sometimes they too cannot index the web page.

8. Avoid using too complex tables when laying out your page but to keep them simple for the spiders. There are some engines which find it difficult to navigate through to the other pages on your website if the navigation bar is too complicated.

9. Use external Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script files to reduce page size and make the download time much faster . It will allow the spider to index your web page faster and can help your ranking.

10. Use standard HTML . Software such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver or a WYSIWYG editor will often add unnecessary scripting codes that will make the page larger than is needed and make it harder to crawl. It will sometimes add codes that cannot be read by search engines, causing the spider not to index the page or even the whole website. If to use, you should use those web page creator software wisely with a good understanding of html so that you may manually avoid or even delete those unnecessary scripting codes.

Why Using CSS is a Must

CSS is a new option for website designers that have been using HTML and tables for most of their web designing careers. Of course, it is a huge change and requires learning a new language and skill, however most people are saying CSS is worth it and it will give you more control, options, and is easier to edit. Consider the following 7 reasons why using CSS is a must and see if it convinces you to change your method of web design.

It Presents Data Logically
When you use CSS in the layout of your website you can present your data in a logical way and CSS can then manage how the information appears. This is significantly easier than other methods and is one reason why CSS is a must.
You Have More Options
With CSS you have more options for changing the location of information on your screen. This is important for a variety of reasons, especially if you anticipate the need to change columns or links at some time.

It Complements HTML
Another reason CSS is a must is because it complements HTML. HTML and CSS alone both have weaknesses, but when used together your website design will be significantly stronger.

Easy Editing
You can edit your website design if you need to for whatever reason without that much hassle if you are using CSS. All you do is go in and edit the definition. This is a lot easer than searching and replacing of years past.

It’s Faster
When you use CSS your pages not only load faster but they also can be scrolled quicker than ever before. This is a huge deal to most web surfers as well as webmasters because speed is a huge implication in whether someone stays on your page or moves on. CSS increases speed, and as a result is a tool you must learn how to use.

Easy To Print
When you use CSS you can also include a printer friendly version of the website that makes it easier to print and can eliminate color, images, and other things that do not print easily.

You Have More Control
If you have been working with tables for layouts you are probably tired of the guessing that goes on. However, with CSS you have more control and can issues commands and know exactly where the result will appear, rather than guessing. This is in itself makes CSS a must have.

5 Ways to Keep Visitors Coming Back

A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!