Author: BurntCork Media

10 May

Posted at 18:50h in Business, Websites
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Accessibility is a concept that is intertwined with the concept of usability. It refers to creating the website content available to all people. The Internet has transformed the lives of people during the past decade. People have been able to do things that they were not able to do before, this includes the people with disabilities. People who are impaired do not have as much opportunities compared to people who are well and able. The Internet has provided them avenues for communication, information gathering, social interaction, engaging in cultural activities and it provides them with employment opportunities. However, statistics have shown that the potential of the Internet to provide these certain opportunities is still not maximised because the people with disabilities are hindered by usability issues from using it to the fullest. The benefits of improving accessibility of websites will not only benefit the people who have impairments but will affect the whole web community. Businesses, services, information campaigners, everyone will benefit. Some features include: provision of inter-operability of applications; access for the disabled; localisation and customisation. Recommendations for Improving Website Accessibility Listed below are some of the key recommendations from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines which was developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative of W3C on how to improve the accessibility of the contents of a website. 1. Provide alternatives to audio-visual content Not all people will be able to use different kinds of content. These people may be disabled or may have a lower version of Internet browsers. Movies, sound clips, animations and other contents should be translated into text alternatives so as to provide information to the broadest range of viewers. 2. Developers should not rely on colour alone Many people are impaired in colour differentiation. Developers should not rely too much on the use of colours to relay information in the websites. Charts that are colour-coded should be modified and the background and foreground colours of the websites should have enough contrast to enable people with colour differentiation impairment to easily navigate the site. 3. Clarification of the use of natural language Content developers usually mark up the changes in natural language in their websites. They should be able to identify the dominant language that is used in the site so as to avoid confusion. 4. Control of content changes that are time-sensitive This issue particularly involves people who have visual or cognitive impairments and those who are not able to read texts that are moving quickly. Movement is seen as an over-all enhancer to the look of the site, but it may pose some problems to people with cognitive impairments. 5. Accessibility of user interfaces that are embedded Objects that have their own interfaces should be made accessible, and alternative solutions must be provided if this is not possible. 6. Provision of orientation and context information The provision of information on how the objects are organised is important to provide people with guidance on how to access information. There are other ways of improving a website’s over-all accessibility to make it more usable. Developers should take into consideration the different people who are going to view their websites and make them focal points in the designing process....

22 Feb

Posted at 12:00h in Business
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Blogging is a powerful communication tool for business owners. There are many reasons why articles are valuable to your Blog. It keeps your website fresh and relevant, it boosts your SEO and is useful for directing visitors with a resources box at the end of the article. It is like a classified ad that holds critical information about you, your website and what you have to offer them after they have read your article. This is a great way to give visitors something of value, which is the information within the article, and a great way to get them to take action by way of getting them to click on one of the links within your resource box. Writing product reviews is a great way to profit from your Blog simply because they allow you to soft sell your potential customer by way of giving them your personal opinion on the product you are recommending and then providing them with a link if they wish to look into it further, instead of throwing a sales pitch at them. Nobody likes to be sold, but, offering them your insight on your product and/or service that could help solve the problem they are dealing with is yet another great way to profit from your Blog and make you look like a Hero. This is why blogging is good for your business: 1. Blogging is straightforward The most simple way to tell people about your product or service on the Internet is through blogging. It is like having a virtual piece of paper to express your company's experiences, new products and services to entice your readers to try for themselves. 2. Blogging is authentic In this day and age where advertising saturate our lives, we question the credibility of marketing claims. However, in blogs, real people share their real-life experiences. Reading blogs about first-hand product use is like talking to people about their first-hand experience. You definitely want to buy a tried and tested product. 3. Blogging builds credibility As you provide more and more articles on a particular product or industry, your readers will soon come to realise that they can depend on your posts for their own information needs. As such, you become an expert on it; as a consequence, more readers visit your site and more bloggers link to your site. 5. Blogging builds your market There are a number of ways to build your market through blogging: -By using your e-mail. Today, blogging is overcoming the emailís popularity in quickly and effectively reaching and expanding a market. In this age of speed and quick access, logging in and downloading e-mail is simply taking longer than clicking into a blog site. Let them explore your site by using a short e-mail message as teaser to your blog site. If your e-mail is on an entirely different subject, use your e-mail signature to give a link to the site. -By using subscription. An easy way to get your readers e-mail is to give them an opportunity to subscribe to your site. Keep some exclusive information for your subscribers to entice readers to subscribe and give their e-mail address. Just be responsible in using their e-mail address, as the last thing you want is a comment on your blog that you are a spammer. -By understanding your readers. Conduct a simple survey for your readers to understand their profile and advertising preferences. Ask consumers to give you feedback on a post, an ad link, or a trial that you shared. In this way, it is like interviewing your readers without the commitment and intrusion of a face-to-face interview. -By joining a blog network. A network of blogs maybe a collection of blog sites that share the same industry, interest, readership base, payment mode, etc. Consumers find credibility and convenience in clicking one link to several real bloggers about a single subject. Clearly, more bloggers are better than one. -By using RSS. RSS is the fastest growing technology on the Internet today. As such, having RSS feeds to your blog is definitely another means of generating awareness for your readership base. Having a variety of feeds can add interest to your blog site. Give your business a boost by effectively using blogging as an Internet marketing tool. Photo: liquene...

26 Jan

Posted at 13:11h in Business, Marketing, Websites
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Understanding the type of people who visit your site is a very important factor because you can use that information to enhance your site to suit them. By knowing your target market, you will gain more loyal returning visitors that come back again and again for more. What is the age level and what kind of knowledge does your audience have? A layman might linger around a general site on DIY, but a professional builder might turn his nose at the very same site. Similarly, a regular person will leave a site filled with technical information about a particular subject of interest but a well-educated individual will find that website interesting. Take your audience's emotional state into consideration when building your site. If a very irritated visitor searches for a solution and comes across your site, you will want to make sure you offer the solution right up front and sell or promote your product to him second. In this way, the visitor will put his trust in you for offering the solution to his problems and is more likely to buy your product when you offer it to him after that. When you consider the design the layout for your site, you have to take into account the characteristics of your target market. Are they old or young people? Are they looking for trends or are they just looking for information served without any icing on the cake? For example, introducing a new, exciting game with a simple, straightforward black text against white background page will definitely turn prospects away. Make sure your design suits your site's general theme. Try to sprinkle colloquial language in your sites sparingly where you see fit and you will create a sense that your target market is on common ground with you. This in turn builds a trusting relationship between you and your target market, which will come in useful should you want to market a product to your audience....

23 Oct

Posted at 13:25h in Business, Websites
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Should You Redesign Your Website? If you run a website, chances are you often wonder whether it is the right time to do a total redesign of the layout of your website. Here are some points to consider: Are you thinking of a redesign just for the sake of it? If you answered yes to that question, it is not yet the right time to do a redesign. Remember, a design serves a specific purpose. If you are not sure whether to do an overhaul of your site, keep in mind that your current design might have a specific purpose that you might not know about. You will lose that function if you do a redesign. On the other hand, if your website has had the same website design since the early ‘90s, perhaps it is high time to do a redesign. The last thing you would ever want to happen to your site is when visitors leave your site without taking a look at your content just because the design is dated. If this is your case, here are some points to ponder before doing a redesign. Redesigning your website means that it loses its current identity (for the better or worse) and your regular visitors might not recognise your new design at first glance. You risk losing them just because they thought they landed on the wrong page. Hence, it is very important that you retain a characteristic feature from your old layout. Perhaps it is the logo of your site; perhaps it is the same text style for the title for your site. To play it safe, put a poll on your site to let your visitors do the talking. If they think it is necessary for the website to have a fresh look, give it to them...

08 Sep

Posted at 06:16h in Business, Websites
0 Likes

You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimise their rankings in websites and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites. Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need. Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimisation. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in. But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimisation. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday. So just what is search engine optimisation and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimisation to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating. With search engine optimisation you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let us just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all. Search engine optimisation is utilising tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site’s existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business. Search engine optimisation requires a lot of work to be fully realised. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimisation. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme. You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site’s content applicable and conducive to search engine optimisation. You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites. Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimisation are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimise your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding. If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimisation. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality. Act now and see the benefits garner with search engine optimisation. All of these will result to better traffic and more business for your site and company....

26 Apr

Posted at 14:37h in Business, Websites
0 Likes

No matter how brilliant your website design is, if it is hard to reach the content of your site then your website is no good to anyone. When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally. Do Not Use Splash Pages Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page. Have A Simple And Clear Navigation You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site. Have A Clear Indication Of Where The User Is When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Do not confuse your visitors because confusion means they will eventually leave your website. Website Typography The first thing to consider is to make sure that the typography of your content is suitable. If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily. Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text. Categorise Your Articles Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site. If you have many articles on your website and a visitor wants to find one single article of interest from your website blog, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Provide an index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can use your site with ease. Website Speed Ensure that your site loads fast if you do not want to lose visitors. Most internet users will leave a website if it does not load completely within 10 seconds, so make sure your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention. Do Not Use Excessive Banner Advertisements Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy. Avoid using audio on your site If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they are not annoyed by some audio looping on and on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it - volume or muting controls would work fine. Links Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links....

26 Feb

Posted at 19:08h in Business, Websites
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The Internet is home to various artists, web artists, and designers both professional and amateur. It can afford to provide individuals with opportunities to freely explore their artistic capabilities and publish content to a borderless audience. However, unluckily, alongside this freedom of expression afforded to everyone is the capacity to offend sensibilities. Some website provide great utility and aesthetic pleasures, others are bound to get annoying. There are ways and means in order to avoid getting annoying, and its best to start by knowing when web design of a website does get annoying. Using colours that just do not work Colours in good and sensible does are a good means in order to attract attention and communicate ideas and emotions to an audience. They can help add interest to a dull site full of text, and even introduce and maintain a certain mood such as websites using black as a background. However, there is a fine line between too much and just about right. What gets annoying when it comes to colours is when readability is compromised, and combinations are too loud for comfort. When readability is compromised, it can pose great discomfort to the site’s visitors when they try to decipher the text that they want to have access to. Using too many colours and colours that do not complement each other tend to make the website look goofy and awkward, and can make the website lose whatever credibility it can possibly gain. Too many clicks to get to the destination At the end of the day, people who visit websites do so in order to access information and content in a website. Some websites tend to re-route visitors through too many clicks before they get to the content they want to get to assuming that the content is indeed somewhere in the multiple pages they are made to access. Obviously, that gets annoying. Rule of thumb says that a maximum of three clicks, but preferably less, should be enough in order for someone surfing a site to get to the information they want to get to. Excessive graphics that take too long to load Graphics and pictures, when relevant and are the primary content meant for the website, are a welcome part of a website. However, when they just serve the purpose of aesthetic enhancement, graphics and pictures that take too long to load and inevitably, slow the process of accessing primary content become a major reason for discontent and displeasure among visitors. It is also helpful to note that not all visitors of the website are equipped with optimal download or Internet surfing speeds; excessive graphics that are too large and thus, take too long to load are not only unwelcome but also a great inconvenience to a great number of people. Navigation that is over-the-top and difficult to follow Overcomplicating the navigation of the website can greatly hamper the efficacy of the website to communicate its content, and can hurt the accessibility of many pages to its visitors. At any point during their visit to a site, it is important to assure that the visitors have some way in order to trace back their steps and return to content they previously accessed, as well as carry on with accessing other content. For simplicity’s sake, many websites solve this problem by having a constant button present on all pages for visitors to return to their main menu page, or their cover page. Fonts that simply do not work Depending on the browser and fonts installed by the users on their computers, extremely decorative and highly uncommon fonts may not be displayed the way the web designer intended them to appear and may oftentimes even compromise the readability of the text per se. In order to avoid annoying web design, many web designers opt to stay within the bounds of major font families (Helvetica, verdana, and the like). That way, they are assured that most (if not all) of their visitors will be viewing the site as designed, and thus have greater control of the way the page will be displayed in the end. There is never a perfect template for design as it is open to the subjectivity and artistic limitations of designers. However, understanding the behaviour of site visitors can only help make shape design innovation and utility move towards greater heights....

26 Feb

Posted at 18:28h in Business, Websites
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Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web's population is still running on good old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you are designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website. Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site. You should also go to a greater length and optimise every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. Use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance. If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the "quality" of the JPEG image -- normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image's file size. On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format -- the image editing software clips away all the colour information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely....

26 Feb

Posted at 18:20h in Business, Websites
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There is one hard and fast rule in generating income for your website: A steady flow of website traffic. If no one goes to your site, it hardly bares a chance of generating an income. Many sites have tried and failed in doing so, and these results to the sites demise. It takes money to maintain an income generating site; it also takes money to make money. However, it does not take a whole lot of cash to generate website traffic for your site. Ever wonder how does big hit sites drive traffic top their site? Most of them are spending tons of money to drive the traffic to their sites, investing in many advertising campaigns and different forms of marketing schemes and gimmicks. This is all worthwhile because they are what they are now, high earning, big hitting websites. You cannot do this if you do not have their resources. There are many ways to generate low cost website traffic without having to spend what you do not have or cannot afford. Many people have banked on high cost methods and have ended up losing their business over it. Here are ways to generate low cost website traffic that could help you Exchange Links This is a sure and proven method to generate low cost website traffic. Rarely would you see a site where there is no link to another site. Many webmasters are willing to exchange links with one another so that they could produce more public awareness about their sites. You will soon see and feel the sudden upsurge of the traffic coming in to your site from other sites. A major prerequisite in exchanging links with other sites is having the same niche or content as the other site. They should share a common subject so that there is continuity in the providing of service and information to what interests your target traffic. Exchanging links also boosts your chances of getting a high ranking in search engine results. It is common knowledge that search engines ranks high sites that have inbound and outbound theme-related links. With a good ranking position in the search engines, you will generate more traffic in your website without the high costs. Write and Submit Articles There are many e-zines and online encyclopaedias in the internet which provides free space for articles to be submitted. If you want to save costs, you can do the articles yourself. There are many freelance writers who are willing to write for you for a small fee, but to save money, it is wise to do those articles yourself. Write articles that are themed along with the niche of your site. Write something that you have expertise on so that when they read it, they can feel your knowledge about the subject and will be eager to go to your site. Write articles that produce tips and guidelines to the subject or niche your site has. Include a resource box at the end of your article that can link them to your site. Write a little about yourself and your site. If you provide a light, information-laden and interesting article, they will go to your site for more. Make a Newsletter This may sound like hard work because of all the articles you may need to use to build a newsletter but on the contrary, this is not so. There are many writers and sites that are willing to provide free articles as long as they can get their name in on your newsletter. This will also provide free advertising for them as well. As your newsletter gets pass around, you can widen your public awareness and build an opt-in list that can regularly visit your site. Join Online Communities and Forums This only requires your time and nothing else. You can share your knowledge and expertise with many online communities as well as your website. You can get free advertising when you go to forums that have the same subject or niche with your site. Share your opinion and let them see how knowledgeable you are with the subject. As you build your reputation, you also build the reputation of your site, making it a reputable and honest business that could be frequented and trusted by many people....

26 Feb

Posted at 18:03h in Business, Websites
0 Likes

A mailing list is the lifeblood of your online business. The old adage "the money is in the list" cannot be true enough - if you had a targeted list of prospects to contact each time you have a new product, you will be able to save a lot of effort by marketing it to your existing list of targeted prospects. You can actually build up a targeted list of prospects that are interested in your products by offering a relevant download on your website. Let us take a look at a very good example - apple.com. When you download the free iTunes and Quicktime software from their site, they will ask you to fill in an optional name and email form so that they can send you offers on songs that you can purchase via - guess where - iTunes! In reality, you do not need to offer such a "heavyweight" download such as a full feature software like iTunes. You can attract prospects equally well with some quality freebies such as a simple report, a free wallpaper, and so on. The important thing is that your download offers enough value for the prospect to be willing to give away his/her own email address to get it. However, slapping together a simple download and putting a link on your website will not be enough to attract qualified prospects. You will have to do some homework in order for your lead-generating mechanism to work well for you. First of all, you must place your download form prominently on your website. Preferably, dedicate a page to it and link to that page from every other page of your website. That way, there is no way your visitors cannot find the download page, and when they do, you'll get some of them converted into your prospects! Also, you have to put a little effort into promoting your download. Explain and elaborate on the values of the download, and why your visitors should download it. You might think why would anyone want to pass on a freebie, but most of your visitors would be too lazy to take the effort to download it because most of their downloads just sit on the hard disk collecting virtual dust. It is hence important to show your visitors why they should download your freebie....