Every businessman does his best to widen his or her business sales on the one hand and cut the marketing costs on the other. In today’s market place it is necessary to watch out for every penny being spent on the marketing strategy. What methods could be used to cut your expenditures? Let’s examine for example your website; this is one area that you can easily start with. One of the ways is to perform a really fast saving is for you to keep or move updating in-house. But if you do not know how to do it properly you will need the help of a professional team. Let us talk about the advantages and disadvantages of the in- house tasks in question.
We all appreciate that it is a necessary thing to update your website. It is the face and reputation of your company as well as your online presentation platform for your goods and services.
Regular updating provides clients with fresh information and news. Thus shows that you are working well and your company is prospering, as is now often used as an indicator of your work. Remember the more frequently you update your website the better the impression you have on your visitors. What parts of your website should be updated? Put simply the answer is as much as possible. Thus, all sections of your website must be updatable if at all possible using a Content Management System. This includes menus, pages, banners, products, catalogues, news, special offers, discounts, events etc. In other words, keep your website always hot. For example, if you want to add a new element or product, advertisement or text. You normally need to contact a programmer or designer for help. You can do it on your own in-house system if you have a Content Management System or CMS which allows you to perform updating actions like these, without having any great knowledge in programming or design. If you are too busy to devote yourself to updates, then you can pass the responsibility to one of your workers. Again it is rather good if he knows something about HTML or at least has some knowledge and experience in working with Content Management System.
They must be however patience and be scrupulous and accurate in what they do. This is so you can be certain that all the changes will be done at the required level and standard. If you do not have any of the above abilities or a CMS then you can give your updating to a web design company or perhaps ask them to build you a CMS. It may well cost you some money in the short term but the long term pay back will be rich in saving time and energy.
Finally it is a must to update your website regularly, whether you do it on your own or with the help of other people. If you have any questions and want to hire a professional staff for your online business, contact any centre of web design company in Birmingham.
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How do you create your personal Joomla template using Photoshop from scratch?
Posted by admin in January 30th 2010
Hi,
I need to know this thing because I have to apply it at work…
How can I create my personal Joomla template from scratch. Imagine you create a template with photoshop and a bit of flash. Now, you export such template by slicing it and exporting it to an application like dreamweaver (I am talking about a normal html static website at this point).
My question is, how I can create the same template (with Photoshop and Flash) and then using it as a Joomla template?
Please I really need to know how this is done because I am going to start working on this website after this weekend. (The client already has an idea of how the template will look like and that is why I have to create it with photoshop and flash and then using it in Joomla, because they want the site to be content managed).
Thank you in advance.
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How to Use Joomla to Create Simple Website
Posted by admin in January 16th 2010
I started using Joomla a few years ago and I must admit that it is not one of the easiest Content Management System especially for beginners. It does not comes with step by step manual that teaches you how to create a website from scratch. The user manual (even at the time of writing) is based on functional aspect rather than looking from the users’ perspective.
Over the years, I found that it only take 5 steps to create a basic website using Joomla Content Management System. I am sharing these 5 steps below to help you if you still cannot figure it out after looking through the manual. Please note that these steps will only help if you first look at the official user manual provided by the Joomla Developers.
The first step is to draft out your site map (in three levels depth) on a piece of paper. Take a Beauty and Spa website for example, assuming the top level is Home, then it branches to two children each namely services and products. Services will then branch off to another two children namely Massage and Facial. Products will branch off to Toner and Cleanser. After you have three levels of site map, you can now classify Home as Section, services and products as Categories and four of the rest as articles. Articles are also known as web pages in Joomla context.
The second step is to create section(s) in Joomla Content Management System. For this example, you will only have one section – the Home. You can create new sections by going to Content – Section Manager. Next is to create categories under your section. One thing to note is to remember to tag the category under the correct section. You can create and tag the categories by going to the Content – Category Manager.
The third step is to create articles, which is the web pages for your web site. You can do this through Content – Article Manager. Joomla comes with a powerful editor that allows you to create content for the pages easily without knowing the codes.
The fourth step is to create a menu for your link to appear. This step is necessary if you want people to click on a link to view the articles. You can create the menu by using the Menu option. Once in the option, create a new menu and put in links to the menu.
The fifth step is to enable the menu. Many people forget this step and this is precisely the reason why the menu does not show. This is because we have yet to tell Joomla where should the menu appear. Therefore, you should go to Module manager and find the menu name then enable it. The module manager is where you can choose where to position your menu.
To be exact, this is not the last step yet as you can further customize the layout and add on additional extensions. However, these 5 steps should solve most of the people’s confusion when they started Joomla.
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Content Management For Small Business Website Marketing
Posted by admin in January 10th 2010
Marketing of small business websites online is as important as getting it listed at a higher ranking on Search Engine listings. Either you have to design or build your own website or you have to hire professional website designers to do the job. There are different types of marketing service providers available online to market your site, like submitting your site for search engines and providing search engine optimization report by an expert. There is also provision to advertise in the Online Internet Yellow Pages where professionals design and place an advertisement program in these yellow pages like Yahoo!?, Worldpages, Smartpages, and Yellowpages.com.
Then comes the email marketing. As email is the number one popular online activity among internet users, be at home or at work, this creates a prime marketing opportunity, for both large and small businesses. For small businesses it is also one of the most cost-effective ways to market products and services. In fact, you can professionally create and send e-mail newsletters, promotions, and updates to your customers in minutes, thereby increasing the web traffic to your site.
All this requires managing and maintaining your website content to a professional grade. That is where Content Management System (CMS) comes in. CMS is a web application used for creating websites and also managing the web content. It can also be used for storing and publishing documentation such as technical manuals, operators’ manuals, sales guides, etc. It provides many software tools to enhance the look of your site. For example, attractive product display headings are a must for every site. Using CMS you can create customizable Flash Banners and Navigation. It also helps in creating standard visual templates that can be automatically applied to new and existing content, creating one central place and change that look across all content on your site.
They also have plug-ins that can be easily installed to extend your existing site’s functionality. For example, if you wanted to add a product catalog or chat program to a website, one could easily install a module/plug-in to add that functionality rather than hiring a web developer to write code to that new functionality.
They are designed to receive regular updates that include new feature sets and keep the system up to latest web standards. These updates are usually designed for easy installation either on-top of your existing website or modifying it suitably. There are many open-source and paid CMS solutions available.
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Best Joomla Templates
Posted by admin in December 26th 2009
It’s hard to determine what the best Joomla templates are without knowing what type of website you are running. There is a large database of templates available on the market today and narrowing it down to just a few would be impossible to do.
Depending upon your needs, templates come in all styles, varieties, colors, and themes. Templates are available in both the back end and the front end sides to your websites. The back end templates are what will determine the layout and style of what you, the administrator or editor will see whenever you log into your website. They will help you to stay more organized so that you can get your business done with ease. Front end templates are what will determine the layout and style of the website that your visitor will see whenever they stop by your page. This will be the most important because this template will represent you or your company and if your page is boring, the total number of hits could fall.
You want a template that will allow your page to have that “COOL” factor whenever your visitors stop by. You want to keep it organized, fun, inviting and useful for your visitors. You can see now why it is hard to determine the best Joomla templates that are available.
To help you narrow it down, though, here is a few good ideas that you can use when trying to find that template that works best for you.
1. Flash templates. Yes, they tend to be a little more expensive, but they definitely give that eye-catching appeal that you may be looking for. They can be designed to fit your individual needs and can represent your company in the best of light; however, just make sure that your flash template does not overwhelm the visitor with too many things going on, it can become distracting.
2. Business templates. No matter what type of business you are in, there are templates that have already been developed and can suit your needs. Whether you’re in the Real Estate business to the Car Dealership business, templates are available.
3. Theme templates. Yes, there are them templates. If you’re into World of Warcraft of some of the other games that are now available or baseball and so on, templates are available.
Once you have searched templates and have seen the differences between them, you will begin to develop that eye that will let you spot a great template. You will begin to learn what designers you will be able to depend on that can deliver that high quality, professional template that you are looking for. You will also find your favorite sites that you will begin to rely upon whenever you are searching for a new template. You will know that what they have to offer is the best for you or even possibly, the best in the business.
You can now see why determining the best templates are almost impossible to do. There are thousands of templates available on the web today. So what may be best for someone else may not be best for you.
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Very Simple Ways on How to Create Dynamic Web Content
Posted by admin in December 20th 2009
If you believe all the marketing propaganda floating about in the virtual world, then you might think that the only way to create dynamic web content for your online pages is to buy a really expensive software application and let it run its course. Of course, with all things considering, this can be one avenue to take, but there are less high-priced roads that you could follow as well. In fact, there are ways and means on how any novice website manager can create the dynamic content needed for his or her online pages without so much as spending a nickel. Here are a couple of tips on how to do just that.
1. Repurpose some of your earlier web content. Naturally enough, you can not really do this without first posting a couple of articles on your websites. However, once you have done so, repurposing your articles can give your web contents better mileage. Basically, you are taking your earlier articles and “rewriting” them again as new material. There are two ways of doing this. One: You can literally rewrite your old posts using the same thread of thought but making sure that you are not plagiarizing whole sentences or paragraphs in the new article. (You can also ask someone else to rewrite the articles for you, but that will cost you money.) Affix a new title for this page and post it on a separate web page with links to the previous or related posts.
Two: you can make a copy of your previous articles and paste it on Microsoft Word. In the tool bar, click on the auto summarize function. You will immediately see certain parts of the texts highlighted. Remove all the non-highlighted texts and try to build up on the remaining portions of the articles. You can add new details or simply expound on the definitions of some of the words, until you reach a respectable word count of 350 to 500. Affix a new title to the repurposed article, and post it. With these methods, you can create as much dynamic web content from one or two well-written articles.
2. Affixing a different title to the repurposed article is one thing, but then you need to make sure that you also change the meta description and tags of the web page where you have posted the new article. The meta descriptions and tags could be seen in the HTML code of your website. Try to ensure that these are not named exactly like the name you have given your website, that these do not share the same set of descriptions and tags as the other pages, and that these have apt descriptions in relation to the page content. However, the most common mistake that novice web content managers make is simply disregarding meta descriptions and tags all together.
You do have to remember that search engine bots spider or crawl through web page titles, URL addresses and meta information in order to gauge what they think your site’s ranking in their results page ought to be. The simple expedient of renaming some of the meta descriptions is by far one of the easiest ways of creating dynamic web content.
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