Many people have a website. Fewer understand if their website is actually effective. Having it assessed to answer that question is an excellent idea. It is important to be prepared for the assessment with intuitive and effective questions.

Every website is a little different than the next one. They are all unique because the objective for each one is slightly different. The quality of the website must be as high as possible in order to win over the competition. With the volume being so great, yours really must stand out and be remembered by others so that they return to you over and over again. If you don’t achieve that, you won’t be able to generate the traffic that you need in order to bring more leads, customers and business. It is never enough merely to have your website built. Once it exists, you must be meticulous and consistent about having it maintained so that the quality constantly lives up to your standards.

Before you have your website assessed, there are a number of different features that will be looked at. The questions that you begin to ask should bring you valuable and accurate information so that the assessment is most effective.

• Is it easy to navigate your website?
• Is your website aesthetically pleasing to others?
• Is your website useful to other people?
• Do you have top-quality content on  your website?
• Do your web pages load very quickly?
• Is your content appropriate for your target audience?
• Can your visitors contact the administrators of your website if they wish to do so?
• Do all areas of your website function properly and effectively?
• Will  your website hold up against competition online?
• Does your website show up in the top of the search engine results page (SERP)?
• Does your website adhere to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines?
• What is the conversion rate for your website?
• Which code is being used when building the website?

You need to think about your website as a business tool. When you are building your strategy, It is just as important to massage, cultivate, and grow your website as it is to cultivate the rest of your strategy. Always remember what a tremendous asset it is and will be for your business. It is a critical part of what you are trying to accomplish professionally.

Conclusion

If any of the answers that were given to any of the questions above were not satisfactory, there is work to be done on your website. The first step is your assessment, which should be done by a person who performs website assessments for a living. The assessment should turn up problem areas before any recommendations can be made. Several tools will probably be used to make the assessment. The tools should include Google Analytics (or some other analytics tool) as well as other online assessment tools. The more effective the assessment, the stronger your website. The stronger your website, the better your chances of increasing your business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let's have coffee.

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1. Establishing Your Web Presence Without a Website
2. Should You Design Your Website or Hire a Professional?
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You are just launching a brand new business. Nowadays, a web presence is not just about a website. While a website is a component of a web presence, significant results can be achieved by other means.

Editorial Note: After reading this article, some of our readers were confused regarding the definition of a web presence and the difference between a web presence and a website. To clairfy this confusion, please read the article What is an Online Presence before continuing to read this article.

You may think that you are in a pickle if you don’t have a website for your business but you would be wrong. You can do many other things online that will help you to build a robust online presence without actually have a website. If you are able to have both, all the better. However, it is not black and white. There are several shades of gray when it comes to our online world.

Online social media profiles

The first thing that you should do is to set up profiles (which won’t cost you any money) on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Remember that it is important for you to completely fill in all of the details in your profiles (including a photo) so that other people will be able to connect with you on a human level.

Business cards

You will need new business cards for your new business. There are several services that will allow you to create online business cards for free. Some of these services are businesscardland.com, and businesscardstar.com.

Launching a blog

Having a blog is an incredibly lucrative and effective tool to increase your online exposure and reputation. Many blog services are free, such as WordPress.com and Blogger.com (which is owned by Google). You can use their generic template or you can purchase a fancier template at minimal cost. If you feel that it important to establish the aesthetics of your brand from the very beginning, you may want to consider investing in the decorative template.

What it means to have a web presence

For businesses nowadays, having a web presence is conceptually similar to being listed in the phone book in the past. People who are searching have an expectation that they will learn basic information about whichever companies they come across. Whenever a person gets a referral to a business, their natural reaction is to look up that business online. Everyone needs to have an online presence.

Facebook is another excellent social media channel that will help you to effectively build your online presence. The misconception that Facebook is only for reporting what you ate for breakfast, which movie you saw last night with your boyfriend, and about connecting with a friend who was in your high school and with whom you haven’t spoken in 25 years is much less present than it was.

Facebook is an extremely effective social media tool for business. You can set up a Facebook fan page for your business and you can start to build relationships with people who you can help professionally and who can help you professionally. Of course, always remember that you need to keep it completely professional. You can use the Facebook page for the personal side. You will definitely want to keep your business contacts separate from you persona contacts.

Word-of-mouth and online presence

As a business owner, your business will become more and more successful because you offer high-quality products and services and your clients tell their friends who tell their friends who tell their friends. You don’t need a website for “word-of-mouth” marketing. However, you do need to furnish people with a way to reach you (maybe even more than one way).

The importance of a website

Undoubtedly, website’s are an important part of any business but they are certainly not the be all and end all of businesses today. They work very effectively side by side with other types of online presences. One of the big differences between a website and online presence is the existence of fresh content vs static content. The content on websites is not changing on a regular basis. In fact, it only changes when a professional intentionally changes it. Other elements of an online presence, on the other hand, is constantly changing and evolving.

Conclusion

In this day and age of advanced technology, there are so many ways for a business to become successful online. It is important not to discount one approach for the sake of another. There is certainly enough room for several approaches to successfully work together to enable businesses to achieve tremendous success. Make sure that you take full advantage of all that is offered.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

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1. Establishing Your Social Media Personality
2. What Is an Online Presence?
3. Having a Web Presence With Personality

As a business person, you must have a web presence that attracts other people to your business offerings and to your branding. If they aren’t attracted, they won’t go further to find out anything about you and you won’t succeed.

The first statement that you need to make (whether it is verbal or nonverbal) is that you are human, just like your prospective clients, and that you relate to them on a human level. It is a well-established fact that business success is all about building and maintaining relationships. If people can’t relate to you on a human level, there will be no relationship between you. One of the main attributes that will make you stand out among all of your competitors is that you care about your prospects’ wants and needs and that you consider it your responsibility to solve their problems.

The challenge of adding personality to your web presence

It doesn’t actually take a great deal of effort to add personality to your web presence. Your personality must come through in order for people to connect with you, on any level. You need to give others the opportunity to get to know you. If they don’t know you, there will be nothing driving them to choose you over someone else when it comes time to buying what you are selling. When you try to connect with people, you need to try to get them to give you some information that will establish the relationship between you. That has to work both ways. You must also give them something to relate to from you.

At times, it is difficult to come up with the perfect icebreaker to get the ball rolling. If your business is small, it will probably be easier than if you have a large company. However, it is certainly not impossible. A great way to break the ice is to get the other person to smile or laugh. You can use humor or perhaps, a heartfelt story that showcases your sensitivity as a person and as an organization. You can also break the ice through creative and interesting content that you share with other people.

Whatever you choose to share, make sure that it is unique and interesting. Others will remember your personality and will want to hear more about what you are doing. People are very interested to know that you are very good at what you do but at the same time, they also want to feel comfortable about doing business with you. Expressing to others that you are passionate about what you do and that you genuinely care about other people and want to give them what they need will be a tremendous attraction when it comes to deciding about whether or not to buy what you are selling. Your strong, positive feelings about what you are offering must come through in your communications with your visitors. Remember that if you can convince them to buy your products and/or services, you will be opening a door to many more selling opportunities.

The effect of having a personality in your web presence

When people are researching you and your business, they tend to find out about you and your company and what you stand for before they look into your products and/or services. A big mistake that many business owners make is that they don’t make the “About Us” page different than their products’ page. The “About Us” section must really grab the visitor and make them want to delve more deeply into what the person and his/her business is all about.

It is very important for you to share important aspects of who you are with your visitors. Adding personality to what you share with your visitors does not have a great deal of risk involved but the payoff may be huge. It will immediately make you stand out from your competition. In your “About Us” section, you should have information that is above and beyond your products and/or services. If you don’t feel comfortable about sharing personal information, you need to come up with other pieces of information that will draw them to you, such as your expressing your happiness when your customers are excited about what they have bought from you. Another good enticement is if you describe your level of service to your customers.

Conclusion

Personality in your web presence should be the equivalent of personality in your bricks and mortar store, if you had one of those. In other words, the second a client (or potential client) connects with you, they need to have a positive reaction to what you are telling them. If that doesn’t happen, they won’t stay. You need to entice them enough to really want to stay.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team and don’t forget to “like” our Facebook page.

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With so many people blogging nowadays, a large percentage of those people are using WordPress to do that. When it comes to WordPress, you see Posts and Pages and it is important to understand how to use each one.

A WordPress Post is the feature in WordPress that you use to engage your readers. Posts are shared by Twitter followers and Facebook Fans.

• Sharing: There are numerous plugins in WordPress that allow your readers to share content easily and rapidly. The majority of the plugins allow you the option to turn off the sharing capability on WordPress Pages.
   
• Comments: WordPress Pages and Posts both have features for commenting. However, it is recommended that you turn off the comments capability on Pages. You don’t want to discourage your readers from commenting on your posts.

WordPress Pages are static within your blog. They are more or less the equivalent of the “About Us” page in a website.

Posts

• Are always published in reverse chronological order on your blog index page. This feature allows your visitors to see your most recent posts first and if they are interested, they can search for related posts in your archives after that.
• Are usually short and sweet amounts of content whose objective is to entice the reader over time. This increases your traffic and hold them, which can (and often does) eventually turn those readers into loyal business connections.
• Allow visitors to choose where they want to go by choosing specific tags and categories.
• Are good for dynamic content that you want to use over and over again.
• Allow you to specify tags and categories.

Pages

• Are not published with any schedule in mind. Because of this, they are not syndicated through real simple search (RSS) feeds or Email blog broadcast services.
• Allows you  to create a structure of levels within your site.
• Are good for static content that you only intend to write once.
• Can easily be added to WordPress’s menu system.
• Do not allow you to specify tags and categories.
• You can use different page templates with them.
• Can have subpages within the pages.

Conclusion

In WordPress, both Pages and Posts have a great deal of value. You just need to be clear on how you want to use your content and that will guide you when it comes to which one of the two is most effective for you. They do share features in common, such as their both having an easy, up-to-date editor that allows you to format your content in a similar manner using any word processing software. Both Pages and Posts will let you save drafts of your work before you hit the “Publish” button. Additionally, it will keep a copy of the drafts that you have worked on so that you can return to any one of those at a later date. WordPress is an excellent tool and you should try to leverage it as much as you can for your blog and your business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let's have coffee.

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You get a very large volume of traffic to your business’s website. Your website is exciting and interesting. People are compelled to visit. However, how do you get them to stick and to keep returning over and over?

There are many different ways to go about enticing your website visitors to stick on your website for a prolonged time period as well as to consistently return to your website over and over again.

• Every page is a landing page: Any one of your website pages can be a landing page. Not everyone who visits your “About” page arrived there from inside of your website. You should build each page with the idea that it is the first one that your website visitors will see.
   
• Content that really pops: Having dynamic content on your website that entices and excites your readers is the reason that they will keep returning over and over again. The more strongly your content touches your visitors, the more inclined they will be to continue to visit your website. 
   
• Use the truth more than link bait: There are numerous people who use link bait (information to entice people into visiting their website) to draw people. However, if your content doesn’t match the link bait, your website visitors won’t be happy. There are some websites that have lost visitors because there were too many articles that contain link bait. If you are going to use it, be careful and very discriminating. Make a point of being as sincere as possible with your visitors.
   
• Never tease your visitors: You must always take the relationships that you have with your online connections seriously. It is acceptable to pique their interest early on, however, you must deliver the real thing as quickly as possible after that. Social media is made for human interactions. Always make your visitors understand that you have the ability to solve their problems.
   
• Keep your promises: If you promised your online connections something, such as a “how to” article on a topic of their interest, any sort of publication or any other piece of useful information, you have a responsibility to give it to them. That means give and not sell. If you don’t do what you have promised you will do, people will never trust you again. Remember, your social media and website interactions are all about relationships and trust.
   
• Emphasize the WIIFM statement: An extremely important part of the content on your website is theWIIFM (What's In It For Me?) statement. This focuses on the customer and you are communicating how you are going to help them to solve their problems. It is never about you as a business owner. It is about satisfying their needs and wants.
   
• Leverage your family and friends: Before you reach out to any of your website visitors, test your online communications on your family and friends. You need to use language that is not overly sophisticated and that is sincere. Your family and friends will give you an honest evaluation of your communications. If they don’t understand something that you have written, you should consider simplifying the language and making sure that your meaning is clear.
   
• Treat your visitors as people: There is nothing more disheartening on the receiving end than excitedly visiting a website only to be treated like a number. As the business owner, you need to regard each of your website visitors as individual people with hearts and minds of their own. Returning to the basic principle of building meaningful and trusting relationships, if you treat your website visitors as a collective lump, you will never be able to build relationships with anyone.

Conclusion

The advice and tips that have been discussed here are all important and they are all simple. You need to use them on a consistent basis. One of your top priorities should be to continue to build relationships with your visitors and to get them to return to your website over and over again. The more they get to know you and what you can do for them, the greater your chance of eventually converting them from friends to clients.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team and don’t forget to “like” our Facebook page.

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You may not be eBay or Amazon.com, but if you have a website, you’re in the business of selling online. Most companies rely on their web presence to build awareness of their products and services. In some ways, their sites function as brochures. But unlike a brochure, a website offers opportunities to share exciting news quickly and inexpensively. You may not accept orders and process credit card payments, but your website should be an effective sales and marketing tool.

Take a look at your site – does it reflect the value of your products and services in today’s economic environment? Consider the point of view of your target audiences. Targets typically include current customers, prospects, job seekers, and the press. Depending on your business, other targets may include suppliers, partners, former employees, and regulatory agencies.

Current customers – what have you done lately?

Is your website up to date and compelling? Existing custom­ers will lose interest in a static website, and you will lose a marketing opportunity. Websites must change to rein­force the value of the business relationship.

• A newsletter can direct customers to the site for excit­ing news on product launches or industry awards. Make your company newsletter accessible online or start an Email subscription list. Chances are your hosting company offers affordable, easy-to-use tools for maintaining a list and sending Email updates.
   
• The changing seasons (tax time, holidays) are reliable sources of new content. The business calendar and mar­ket conditions provide relevant fodder for B2B-oriented firms.
   
• Create a Q&A area where your company’s experts tackle issues of concern in your industry.
   
• Check out your competitors’ sites. How can you top their content?

Your employees may be the best source of new ideas. Encourage them to brainstorm ways to reach and engage existing customers.

Prospects – what is so great about you?

To differentiate your business, you must communicate the unique value of your products and services. Recog­nize that the value changes over time, depending on the economy and competitors’ moves, among other factors.

• Descriptions of products and services are marketing messages, not sacred scriptures, and should be updat­ed regularly.
   
• Create new case studies and testimonials. Touting last year’s achievements is dangerous if the technologies or methods used have become common or obsolete.

The Press – only recent news is fit to print

No news is bad news. If the “What’s New” section reads like last winter’s calendar, you project inertia. If you can’t commit to regular updates, you may be better off removing the news entirely.

View your website from your targets’ perspective, and you will discover new ideas for making your website an effective marketing tool that showcases a vibrant organization.

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Everyone is always speaking about their blog. It is a well-established fact that blogs are an effective and fresh way to share content with others as a vehicle to build relationships. But, what about your blog’s sidebar?

A blog sidebar is a section on the side of the blog that contains widgets. A widget is a small application that often takes the form of on-screen tools (clocks, event countdowns, auction-tickers, stock market tickers, flight arrival information, daily weather etc.). You can populate your blog sidebar with whichever widgets you feel will be valuable in your blog.

There are several interesting and important elements that can help your business if you place them on the sidebar of your blog. Remember that it is very important to be discriminating and choose which elements you want for your sidebar so that you get the maximum benefit from those elements. If you have any elements in your sidebar that don’t help your business, you should delete them and fill the space with meaningful elements. The following are some suggestions about what you might want to use:

• A list of categories: The category list is also called “categories” or “topics.” The list makes it easy for your readers to find the content that they are interested in reading. The majority of blogging platforms automatically generate this list for the categories that you designate when you configure each of your blog posts. If possible, you should not assign more than three categories to each of your blog posts. Any more than that and you will be detracting from the value of categorizing your content.
   
• An option to subscribe to your blog: Your readers will want to keep returning to you to read subsequent blog posts. You may as well make it as simple as possible for them to do just that. You should add a “subscribe” button to your blog that links to your RSS feed URL. A simple way to do this is to use Google Feedburner to create this URL from your initial RSS feed URL. Remember to include an Email form field so that your readers can subscribe through Email. Your posts will then go straight to their inbox. Additionally, make sure that you include a Privacy Policy notice on your blog.
   
• Most popular blog posts: Your sidebar is a great place to display some of your blog posts that did especially well with your readers. If you do this, you will be making it very simple for your readers to go immediately to the blog posts that they want to read most. It may also get your readers to want to find out why those particular blog posts were so popular.
   
• Recent blog posts: If you include links to your most popular blog posts on your sidebar, you will be helping your readers to get exposure to more of your content even if they entered your website through a single blog posting. This is an excellent method for compelling your readers to remain on your website and look around at all that you and your business have to offer.
   
• Social media options for connecting: There are many different ways nowadays for your readers to connect with you. One very effective way to help your readers is by including links to your various social media profiles.
   
• Search box: You should have a search box that will enable your readers to find content that is of interest to them by typing in keywords or key phrases. You can put this on your sidebar and your readers will see it easily and be able to take advantage of it.
   
• Calls-to-Action: You now have all of this wonderful stuff on your blog’s sidebar. Another very important thing to put on your blog’s sidebar is the call-to-action so that you can give your readers a way to connect with your website

Conclusion

It is very clear that having a blog in addition to having a website is critical to the success of your business. Now you are taking it one step further by adding important and valuable elements to your blog. You can think of the blog as the empty house that you just purchased and into which you just moved. The elements on your sidebar are the decorations in the house.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team and don’t forget to “like” our Facebook page.

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You have a beautiful website with all of the features that it should have and content that is interesting and enticing. So, why don't you get website traffic? There could be many reasons, which will be explored here.

Websites that have static pages that are exactly the same over time (in some cases for many years) cease to be interesting to other people very quickly. Your ultimate goal as a business owner is to eventually get people to buy what you are selling. In order to do that, no matter what your products and/or services may be, you need to interact with the people who reach out to you and to build solid relationships with them. You also need to satisfy their needs. Your approach should always be WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?). In other words, what can you do to solve their problems?

One of the first rules of marketing is that it takes more than one contact to close a sale. The more costly the good or service, the more interaction you will need with the potential customer. With that in mind, you need to make sure that when you are designing your marketing plan, you allow for a series of action steps. If you incorporate those steps from the beginning into your marketing plan, you will start to see a good return on investment (ROI) from the time and effort that you devote to your online marketing.

There are several steps that you should follow so that your website starts to bring you business, which will, in turn, lead to sales. The acronym “AIDA” will help you to stay on track with this. It stands for attention, interest, desire and action.

• Attention: Once a visitor to your website has arrived, you have 3 seconds to grab his or her attention. After that, the visitor will get bored and move on to someone else’s website. The content on your landing page should state some sort of offer or promise, which is clearly visible immediately. You don’t want to overwhelm the visitor with too many graphics because that will distract them from reading what you want them to know about you and your business. Additionally, graphics cause the page to load more slowly.
   
• Interest: Now that you have the visitor’s attention, you need to find a way to keep him or her interested. Your immediate goal is to offer him or her information that will prevent him or her from clicking away from your website. An excellent approach is to present some problems (one of which will hopefully apply to your visitor) and offer solutions to those problems. Another possibility is to suggest an opportunity for the visitor; perhaps one that has never occurred to him or her before.
   
• Desire: You have captured his interest and now it is time to create desire. You will be enticing and motivating him to take action of some kind.
   
• Action: The first action is for the visitor to identify himself or herself, which includes some sort of contact information so that you can begin to have interactions and start to build a relationship. Your objective should be to get the visitor interested in something that you are offering free of charge.

This is your way into making money for your business through your website. To reiterate, your website must have some very important objectives: to acquire the visitor’s attention, to stir up interest, to create a desire and to get the visitor to take some action. Having the marketing aspect in mind before building the website is vitally important.

The action that the visitor will take will not cost any money. You just need a way to communicate with him and an Email address is usually the most effective an easiest way to do that.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of the visitor. If you were visiting a website, what would you want to see there? What would fulfill your needs?

Remember that if your visitor visits your website and he doesn’t leave you with any way to contact him, your website has not been successful. If you want your visitor to connect with you, tell him or her. Let your visitor know in clear and simple terms how much you want to interact with him or her and make it easy to reach out to you. There are many ways in which to successfully use your website. You just need to put those ways to work and you will start to enjoy more and more success for your business.

Conclusion

When you are about to design your business website, it is important to bear in mind how important the look and feel of it is. At the same time, it is critical that you do everything possible to make sure that it is effective at enticing visitors, once they are on your site, to want to delve more deeply and to reach out to you, which will eventually lead to their becoming your customers. Your website must be more than just an attractive online brochure. It must also be a tool that causes positive results for your business. You want to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to navigate around your website and to get a clear understanding of your offerings. You want them to want what you are offering.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

You might also like:

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There are many web design platforms available nowadays that allow you to design your own website easily. Apparently, all you need is creativity and a web hosting company. It seems simple but is that really enough?

The popular expression: “You get what you pay for” truly applies in this instance. As a business owner (no matter which type of business you have) you must have the most professional and most appropriate image online for your business. Your image, which represents your branding and reputation, must not only deliver a clear message about who you are and what you offer but it must also be search-engine friendly and easy for others to navigate once they arrive at your website.

For a while now, the concept of the static website has been obsolete. Websites must constantly be offering content that is fresh and is on innovative topics. The content must be informative and interesting as well as educational. It must also offer some sort of solution to the problems of the people who have searched and landed on your website. It must answer the question: “What’s In It For Me?” (WIIFM), in other words, it doesn’t matter how wonderful you and your business offerings are. The only thing that matters is how you are able to help the other person.

The technology behind those concepts is very sophisticated and the work that goes into developing the website is just as sophisticated and should not be left to amateurs. If the website is not designed correctly and does not include all of the elements that will guarantee the advancement of the business, whatever the investment is that you put into it will be worthless. It is never a smart idea to be penny wise and pound foolish.

In order to be able to build a website properly, you need a good understanding of information architecture, the aesthetics of web design, search engine optimization (SEO), the ability to develop web forms and a great deal of other technical abilities. Attempting to do it yourself (DIY) is good in theory, however, considering that web design is most likely not your area of expertise, the only way that you will be able to really accomplish the task correctly is if you take a great deal of time to study and sharpen your web-designing skills, which will take a great deal of time. In all likelihood, you don’t have the time for that in your life.

Creative control

If you start to build your own website, you are given choices regarding font styles, colors, backgrounds, etc. Your next thought, of course, would be that this is a breeze and as long as you are able to make decisions regarding your website, you will be able to create an effective and pretty website for the entire world to see. That is, unfortunately, not necessarily the case. One thing that many people who go the DIY route forget about is company branding. You need to ask yourself if your website conveys a professional and familiar brand that differentiates you from your competition. Does it clearly convey WIIFM and make your unique selling proposition (USP) obvious.

People who scour the Internet can usually tell quite easily if your website was designed by a professional or by an amateur. That determination will drive their decision to look more deeply at your website or to move onto another website that appears professional to them. People will be much more inclined to deem a website that has been designed by a professional web designer as credible and trustworthy than the non-professional one.

HTML skills

Basic HTML is not difficult to learn, especially if you have a great deal of time on your hands and the energy available that you will need to devote to your study of HTML. If you learn only the basic codes, what do you think your website will look like to others? The chances are great that your website will still look amateurish compared with websites that have been designed by professional web designers. Your objective is to have your website seen by as many people and for it to leave a lasting impression that is professional.

There are many reasons to hire a professional web designer, including the avoidance of security loopholes in your HTML code, the assurance that users on all platforms will be able to view your site with any and all browsers that they use and the probability that the search engines will be able to read your code and index your website.

Time and money savings

If you decide to buy a DIY web design kit, it will seem, at initial evaluation, that you are saving a great deal of time and money. One of the important questions that you need to ask yourself is: how much is your time worth? If you happen to have a great deal of extra time on your hands, you may be ok with the DIY route. However, if you are not sure about how much available free time you have you may want to go the professional route. What happens if you get halfway into the project and find that it is taking a lot more out of you than you had anticipated? You will then be left with a web design project that is halfway done and won’t do you and your business any good at all. In that case, you will probably end up hiring a professional to complete the web design. So, in the end, you will have spent a lot of money and wasted a lot of time.

Conclusion

The comparison of DIY vs professional web site design is very important. Your money and time should always be spent as wisely as possible. It is very interesting that things often do not appear as they seem. That is definitely the case with web design. It is a known fact that the DIY approach of web design takes several hours to several weeks to build. Many people who build their own websites contact professional web designers 12 to 14 months after they have built the original website because they are not achieving the search engine rankings that they want and business is just not increasing. They begin to realize after that that their website is just not effective and people are not paying any attention to them. It is vitally important that you get a return on investment that satisfies you and helps you and your business to become more and more successful over time.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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Testimonials are an extremely important part of the success of your business. On your relationship-building journey, which is lined with credibility and expertise, testimonials from loyal customers are a critical part of the presence of your business.

What is a testimonial?

Testimonials are written or recorded statements that support your credibility and level of expertise. They also strengthen your reputation by expressing the trust that other people have in you and your business offerings. They are a wonderful tool that helps you to attract a deeper interest from perspective clients and existing clients and will ultimately make you and your business increasingly more successful.

Why are testimonials so important?

When it comes to all businesses (large and small), the success of the business depends heavily on word of mouth. Testimonials are formal forms of expression that support that concept. They are extremely powerful tools when it comes to strengthening your branding. Testimonials strengthen the credibility of you and your business and as you know, people will not do business with you if they don’t trust you and find you to be credible. You will be surprised at how many valuable testimonials you will be able to collect, not just by asking your business connections for them directly but also through discussions that have been generated from your blog postings and other online discussions that have occurred as a result of your online presence.

How to use testimonials most effectively

• Which ones to use: Any time you have a positive interaction with a business associate and they express an interest in any of your business offerings, it is a good opportunity to ask them for a testimonial. If you have given them a free Ebook, ask them for their opinion on the book and if it is positive, subsequently ask them for a testimonial. If you have gone above and beyond for one of your potential customers or existing customers, ask them for a testimonial afterwards. Testimonials are not only about selling your products and/or services. They are also about your successful, positive interactions with other people. They are the embodiment of the relationship that you share with those people.
   
• Verifying if they are sincere: If at all possible, try to verify that the testimonial that you have received from your business associate was actually written by him or her. You should be able to tell fairly easily if the testimonial did not come from that person.
   
• Where to place them: There are many opportune places where you can put your testimonials. You can put them on your blog, website, brochures, sales pages, press releases, direct mail letters, etc. You should make full use of your social media channels to spread the word regarding your testimonials. As soon as you receive a new testimonial, make sure to share it with as many people as possible in as many places as possible. That will serve a double purpose. First of all, it will strengthen your reputation and presence online and second of all, it will serve as a thank you to the person who was nice enough to take the time to write the testimonial for you.
   
• Written and video: It is great if you are able to obtain both written and video testimonials. Both media are effective and work in different ways. Video touches people visually and emotionally and written testimonials touch people emotionally and mentally. It is also good from a convenience perspective. There are many people who prefer written or video testimonials, depending on how busy they are and how important convenience is to them.
   
• Who should write testimonials: It doesn’t need to come from a customer of yours necessarily. Testimonials can come from several different people. As stated earlier, they are not necessarily connected to selling. They are absolutely connected to your relationships with your business connections and your positive interactions with them.

Conclusion

Credibility is essential to the success of your business. Strategic and intelligent use of testimonials can go a long way in promoting your business. The more online visibility and stronger reputation you have and continue to maintain, the stronger your business will become.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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