Adobe Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is the web designer’s paradise. This supremely functional application could be the secret behind quite a few of the excellent websites you see online today. The software can be installed on any computer and it allows you to make your website from the begining and upload it with a few simple clicks. The split screen capability allows people to input the relevant HTML code and then the outcome appears in the box underneath, which really helps to make sure you are building it just how you want. You can edit virtually anything in Adobe Dreamweaver, and it is a practical piece of software for the beginner or advanced web designer.

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop works in conjunction with Dreamweaver in quite a few ways. It allows you to generate, edit and design pictures that you can use on your website. Make them in Photoshop and save them to a local server folder (not the desktop) then upload them in Dreamweaver with one button. It couldn’t be any more convenient! Photoshop is a premium tool that web designers throughout the world use for skilled website construction. It is also used by photographers and artists who scan their pictures in and then edit them as they want to in order to try and make them look better. In reality, Adobe Photoshop is seen by many as the must-have design application that each and every computer should have.

Adobe Creative Suite

If you like Adobe then you will love this. This is a comprehensive software bundle for the web user who wants to create, build and manage their website from start to finish. There may be everything here that anyone could need, which is probably why it costs a nice amount too. Of course, if you’re a web design enterprise then you can’t really afford to be without the Adobe Creative Suite package, as it is an essential.

What is the first thing that you think of when you hear Twitter?

Do you think of people sending details of every single minute of their days because they have no one else to talk to? Or, did you think of a bunch of want-to-be celebrities striving for fame? A great variety of different individuals utilize Twitter for a number of differing purposes. Internet marketers are a great example of people that can benefit from using the service to boost sales. Twitter proves to be a terrific means of communicating with prospect clients regarding your services and products.

Your Internet marketing efforts can be enhanced by the use of twitter, and here are just a few of the ways twitter can do that. 

Remember when issuing press releases was the best way to let people know about promotions and new projects? You’d write up a few paragraphs, then send them out to as many sources as you could think of. Some people would actually fax them to their local media outlets. Twitter offers you the same service but you only need to use 140 characters. Your post could hit a million followers within minutes, if you use the right hash marks. Twitter can be used to link back to a better description page or to an old style press release.

Twitter is also a good tool to see who is visiting your site. See exactly what feedback your followers may or may not be leaving you in regards to your merchandise or service, examining it alongside your comments about it, and also that of others blogging as well. With this technique, you can quickly and effectively acquire a TRUE clientele which is GENUINELY interested in your market. With this information, you can tailor your marketing and advertising to the most receptive customer group and increase sales. Not only will your sales increase, but your advertising efforts will dramatically diminish, since you no longer need to waste time “selling” to those who will not buy.

Every once in a while tweet about something that is not related to your business. Send out a funny tweet related to something you saw that day or tweet some meaningful proverbs. You don’t want to do this all the time, either, moderation is the key. This will show your followers that you are interested in entertaining them for free as well as using them to make a buck. If you’re entertaining enough to them, they’ll likely send their friends your way. When you gain more followers you will also gain more potential clients. If you truly want to be rewarded for your work, then you want to invest the time and effort.

Twitter can definitely help you build and promote your business. Whether you are simply trying to bring in visitors to your website or trying to attract buyers to your latest product, you can use Twitter to help you out. You are really missing out if you are not tapping the available market on Twitter. Internet marketers have been talking about its benefits for some time. The service is free and for only a few characters, you can reach a whole new area of the online marketplace. It is just not good business practice to not use all the marketing resources at your disposal. It takes just a minute or two to open a Twitter account and it won’t cost a thing. In less than sixty seconds you could be reaching millions of new buyers.

Additonal Resouces:

Consumer Wealth System

Affiliate Cash Ultimatum

Halloween Super Affiliate

1) Do not use splash pages.

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you show up 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.

2) Do not use extravagant banner advertisements.

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Alternatively, provide more valueable 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.

3) 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.

4) 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 frequent relevant information or navigate to any section of the site comfortably. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”! Consider hiring a virtual assistant if you’d like to get everything up and running, fast!

5) Avoid using audio on your site.

Any virtual assistant will tell you that if your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine. If you need serious support, contact a virtual assistant today!

1. You are able to, for certain, make affiliate marketing income without your own website. The following are several samples of how you can accomplish this.

You can concentrate on creating a mailing list and then sell your goods to individuals on that list. If you buy co-registration leads, then you can grow your list while not using a landing page or any different form of web site.

The co-registration lead company can grow your list automatically by putting the new subscribers directly into your autoresponder. Once this is completed, you are able build relationships with these subscribers by following up frequently.

As you build these relationships, your credibility and reputation will increase. Now it’ll be easier to earn affiliate promotional income as you can direct your subscribers to an affiliate sales page. They are going to be extra likely to buy as you have pre-sold them already by sending them regular e-mail messages via your autoresponder.

Another method to earn affiliate promotional commissions without using an internet site is to use direct techniques for promoting your products. A few samples of this may be using traffic exchanges, purchasing banner ad slots or using Net based classified ads.

Once you determine how much you want to pay to earn a certain amount of commissions, it becomes merely a numbers game. You can currently step up your advertising spending as you’ve got a reasonable idea concerning how much you used to spend to make a certain amount of profit.

Now let us look at a few examples of how you can use your own website to earn affiliate promotional revenue.

When you have your own website, you are in complete control of each one of the components. If you want, you are able build review pages of various affiliate products and promote them like that. In this way, you are able pre sell your guests on a product before you redirect them to the affiliate sales page.

Blogging is an additional approach that folks use to make affiliate promotional revenue with their own website. Lots of individuals who create a blog will attach it to their web host so that the blog posts facilitate the search engine rankings for his or her website. You are able monetize your blog by putting Google Adsense, affiliate links, banner ads and those sorts of things into your blog sidebars.

If you want, you can generate landing pages, position them on your online hosting account and then advertise them to create your opt in list. The bottom line is that having your own web site will offer you some extra flexibility to carry out added things.

Whether you choose to work with a website or not to earn affiliate promotional revenue comes down to your own choice. It essentially depends on what you need to accomplish and what methods of online marketing you are comfortable functioning with.

Learn more on the subject of opening your own Internet business here: Work From Home Business Opportunity

In addition, check out John Baril’s online training blog at: Web Site Promotion Marketing

To make cash right now, go to John Baril’s online survey site at: Make Money Taking Surveys

Do you remember when using a press release service was the best method for introducing your new projects and promotions to the world? You used to write paragraphs and paragraphs about your business and then submit them to as many press release outlets as possible. Probably, you faxed the releases to many different regional and national outlets. Now, with Twitter, you can do the same thing. The difference? You can accomplish this in as little as 140 characters or less. If you have the right tags on your tweets, then you might reach a million or more people in just a few seconds. Twitter also makes a great avenue for posting links to lengthier writings, perhaps even an old school press release.

Is your business having an event? Want to make sure people attend an offline event or online sale that you’re thinking about offering? Use twitter to promote it!

The great thing about Twitter is that once you have tweeted something, if you followers like it they can re-tweet it. In such a way, you are able to interact with additional numbers of people all the while you are increasing your audience. Once you have figured out how to properly use the hash tags, you will find that you add new followers easily and pick up event attendees as well. This is great for your business because all of these people will consider buying what you are offering. You are also able to utilize this service for generating concepts on new products!

Twitter can also be really helpful in building a brand. Twitter allows you the freedom to use your creativity by using your own unique marketing ideas. Branding is important for any business, whether it is an internet marketing business or an offline business. It is not easy to get the word out about your online business.

Twitter assists in decreasing the resources needed to develop an internet brand presence. Because Twitter users share information and re-tweet things as often as they do, spreading the word about you and your services and building your brand is almost an automated process.

Your endeavor and your brand identify can certainly benefit from Twitter Twitter can help you whether you are just trying to increase traffic to your site or if you want to showcase your newest product to your followers. Quite frankly, with all the positive benefits Twitter has proven to produce in recent months, to not get in on this action is JUST PLAIN FOOLISH! There is no reason to ignore the ability to speak to a broad audience, at no cost, in a format requiring a mere 140 characters. It is just not good business practice to not use all the marketing resources at your disposal. It’s completely free to join, and you can do it in seconds. It only takes a minute to expand your outreach to countless numbers of new customers. Your bottom line will show you why not.

Besides keeping your web site focused, it is also import to consider accessibility. Some of the people who visit your web site will be suing different monitors that yours or running it at a different resolution. More importantly, however, some users will have poor eyesight or even completely blind. How do you ensure that your web site is user-friendly to people with these limitations?

You might need to make some changes to the way you code your site to sthat you don’t alientat this group of users. It is possible that they may be using a screen reader which reads the words out loud. Some screen readers are more advanced than others but in all cases you should do your part to help your web visitor. Stick to the guidelines given here as well as clean HTML and CSS and your web site should be more accessible.

Navigation

This is one of the most challenging aspects of your web site to your users with disabilities. If you use Flash or JavaScript for your navigation bar, screen readers may ot be able to interpret the links. An easy alternative is to use CSS.

Users may also want to increase font size or remove the display of images (text-only) to make your web pages easier to read. If you use images for your navigation but any text embedded with them will not be able to be read by the screen reader.  The easiest way to fix this is to always use the <alt> tag for every image. For example if you designate a little house icon for your home page or even have the word “home” embedded in the button so it is no longer text, the screen reader can’t “see” it. If, however, the tag for you image is <img alt=”link to home page” …> the screen reader can describe the image to the user with disabilities. Also when images are turned off in the browser the alternate text will be displayed.

Also be careful in using tables in your page design. Screen readers often have difficulty understanding them. Tables can be made accessible by keeping them simple and not using empty cells.

Hyperlinks

You can also provide short cuts to navigate your site by including the accesskey attribute in your links. For example, <a href=http://capproservices.com/ accesskey=”H”> lets the user press Alt or Ctrl plus H to follow the link to your home page. Don’t try to do this for all of your links — just for the main navigation bar. JAWS, the most popular screen reader, can read Accesskeys aloud allowing users to access pages more quickly.

Another attribute to add to links is <title>. This will indicate to the user the destination of the link.

Using the right colors is also important for navigation. There are many people who are color blind. Tools such as http://colorfilter.wickline.org will simulate how your web site pages appear to someone who is color blind.

There are also tools to help you check to be sure your web site adheress to the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI):

• Accessibility check
• Accessibility Tools

Since this articles is about writing, however, and not publishing other’s work, let me remind you to use that word processor on your PC to its fullest extent. All of the really good ones provide tools to check spelling, grammar and punctuation. If you don’t have one of these good ones, I suggest that you check out OpenOffice.org for their free software suite.

Many people find it difficult to read from a screen rather than paper. They also seem to have a much shorter attention span.

There are three ways to choose a color scheme:

1. Pick one of the ones already developed by other Kuler users
2. Create a new one using the color wheel
3. Create a new one based upon an image (one you upload or select from Flickr)

Let’s look at each of these three and how you would use them for your web site.

Using Existing Color Schemes

Using the menu or search box on the left of the screen, select an item or enter in a search term, e.g., blue or water. In the second column from the left select one that you like or go to the bottom of the list and use the navigation icons to view more results. Click on the one that appeals to you in this column and then click on the box that directs you to “Make changes to this theme and view color values” that is over the description of the color scheme you selected in the main center column. You can make adjustments to any of the displayed colors by using the sliders below each color or by draggin its circle on the color wheel. When you have all the colors the way you want them, note the HEX characters displayed below each color swatch. This is what you will enter in your Cascading Style Sheet for various design elements for your web site (more on this later).

Using the Color Wheel

Click the Create link in the first column. Select one of the six “rules” at the top of the color wheel page. In the color wheel, drag the dot with the circle around it to your primary color choice. The other dots will move to new locations based upon your rule and primary color choice. It’s fun to play with all of the possibilities.

Using an image

Click the Create link in the first column of the Kuler home page. Select the “From an image” link in the upper left. Either upload an image using the “Upload” button located below the default image or select the flickr button. Select an image and then use the suggested colors from the photo or move the dots around the photo to pick up the colors you want to use. You can also change the “mood” to get a different set of swatches.

Harvest Orchard color scheme

Color schemes

If you are not an artist, you may need assistance in picking the colors for your site. If you are a complete novice or know that you tend to match stripes with plaids, you are probably better off using a predesigned template. If you do have color sense, you will still need to keep a few “rules” in mind when designing your site. Stick to a few key colors: three to five are best. Complementary color schemes work very well, e.g., blue and orange. Monochromatic or analagous color schemes will also work. See Kuler article for more on picking color schemes.

Font schemes

Did you know that you only have a handful of fonts from which to choose if you want your visitors to see the same as you see on your screen? Most of us have dozens of fonts installed on our personal PCs from various software programs. The trouble is that the visitor must have the exact same font installed on their PC in order for it to be displayed in their browser. For this reason, it is important to stick to the following fonts which I have grouped into two main categories: serif (w3c.org definition:  “Glyphs of serif fonts, as the term is used in CSS, have finishing strokes, flared or tapering ends, or have actual serifed endings [including slab serifs]. Serif fonts are typically proportionately-spaced. They often display a greater variation between thick and thin strokes than fonts from the ‘sans-serif’ generic font family.”) and sans serif (w3c.org definition: “Glyphs in sans-serif fonts, as the term is used in CSS, have stroke endings that are plain — without any flaring, cross stroke, or other ornamentation. Sans-serif fonts are typically proportionately-spaced. They often have little variation between thick and thin strokes, compared to fonts from the ‘serif’ family.”). Cursive (w3c.org definition: “Glyphs in cursive fonts, as the term is used in CSS, generally have either joining strokes or other cursive characteristics beyond those of italic typefaces. The glyphs are partially or completely connected, and the result looks more like handwritten pen or brush writing than printed letterwork.”), fantasy (w3c.org definition: “Fantasy fonts, as used in CSS, are primarily decorative while still containing representations of characters [as opposed to Pi or Picture fonts, which do not represent characters].”) and monospace (w3c.org definition:  “The sole criterion of a monospace font is that all glyphs have the same fixed width. [This can make some scripts, such as Arabic, look most peculiar.] The effect is similar to a manual typewriter, and is often used to set samples of computer code.”) are also supported font types.

Page layout

Another design element which will give your web site a unified look and feel is page layout. Page elements (banners, menu bars, navigation bars, pictures, number of columns, footers, etc.) that are located in the same place on every page will achieve this. Again, predesigned templates can assist you greatly in this task.

Browser compatiblity

There are many browsers in use around the world. Here are the statistics for September 2009 for this web site:

Top 10 Browsers

1. 50.4% – Microsoft Internet Explorer (41.5% of the total are still using version 6)
2. 32.1% – Unknown
3. 6.8% – Opera
4. 6.4% – Mozilla
5. 2.3% – Firefox
6. 1.1% – Safari
7. 0.3% – LibWWW
8. 0.1% – Lynx
9. 0% – Netscape (1 hit)
10. 0% – Wget (1 hit)

Based upon these statistics we need to test on a variety of browser versions because different browsers (and their versions) support different web standards.

Limiting Design

Your web site design should help people find the information they are seeking. This is really two separate categories. First, you will want to make sure that you have a consistent design throughout your site. This can be accomplished through a template or cascading style sheet (more on this in another article). Secondly, you will want to keep your pages short, less than 1,000 words.

Keep vertical scrolling to a minimum — a sales page and blogs seems to be the accepted exceptions. Horizontal scrolling, however, is never acceptable. The “standard” width is currently designed to work on a 1024 x 768 monitor resolution. This amounts to about 960 usable horizontal pixels. Keeping your design narrow is ideal as it is difficult to read across wide columns of information. There’s a reason newspaper columns are so narrow!

Limiting Pages

This doesn’t mean limiting your site to a few pages. Content rich sites make the search engines happy. What this does mean is sticking to your topic and breaking up long pages into several pages. It also means you should combine very short pages that only have a paragraph or two of information. “Perhaps the only thing readers hate more than having to sccan thousands of words onone page is constantly havingto click to a new page, because there are only a few words on each one.” (Martin, 2008)

Limiting Language

Who will be visiting your web site? What language will they use? Do they understand technical terms specific to your topic? You may need to provide a glossary or links to Wikipedia to explain unfamiliar terms. Also be careful not to talk down to your audience.