TomCworld Blog

From what I have learnt in my E-Business and Web Design Course last term, a website is the impression you create to your visitors or potential customers. The way it’s laid out and the functions it provides can carry over to possible deals and clients. Always consider both administer as well as a user prospective. It’s is important to gather feedback. This way you know what your visitors are thinking, thus can help you in creating the most optimal site. There are five steps that I always consider when either creating or updating my sites.

1. Be simple. visitors should not have any trouble determining the line of business or message your website is presenting. Suffering the web is an active approach thus many visitors that often don’t have patience can and will defer your site if it doesn’t make an impression on them with in a minute if not seconds. Keeping your site updated regularly is a great way to create stickiness among your visitors.
2. Organized. If possible use a grid to portray structure. You want to ensure smooth transition from level-1 to level-2 and so on. Keep navigational tools clear and consistent. Provide portability, ensuring your website is viewable in multiple formats, browsers, and screen sizes. Prioritize, try to place your most important or viewed information towards the top. Watch your placement of graphics, beware of passive white spacing. The use of site maps or a search tool may also become necessary on sites that may be extensive of quite large in size.
3. Bandwidth. Consider your audience and the connection they may have when accessing your site. Flash and multimedia websites are awesome but they are not suitable for all business. Using memory intensive tools may prolong load times, thus can have negative effects on first time or returning visitors. Consider the the size of your graphic files and if possible slim them down to achieve short loads. If your site caters to a large audience of diverse bandwidth connections then you may consider creating two sites that cater to the high and low end needs, of course this is very time intensive and costly.
4. Color Coordinate. Use colors that are stress-free to the eyes. Print is different from a monitor screen. The human eye can only endure so much. Chose fonts and sizes in colors that are easily readable. If your in a business off-line already you may consider using your existing color scheme to create a brand experience that is consistent. Example UPS (United Parcel Services) houses brown and gold on their trucks and uniforms, thus they should use brown and gold on their web presence to create a brand recognizable feel for it visitors.
5. Get Help. When you are unsure of what to do don’t be afraid to ask for help. Trust me its better that you get it done the right way first rather then having to fix it later. There are a host of sites that provide free scripts which you can used as well as network solutions that offer all in one web packages. Most business personals that build there own site forget that they are not in the business of building websites, if it presents difficulties it may be more cost efficient to out source. This way you can concentrate more on your primary business functions.

Other sites that offer website creation or updating tips:

E-Tips From Entrepreneur

SiteCarver

eBiz Webpages

Instructional Design Center at Seattle University

PHP Web Tips by SKDesigns

Here’s something we can all learn from Apple!I found this Atricle by Hock Ng and thought it was interesting and worth sharing

Apple Computer just announced that their earnings from the last quarter more than quadrupled mainly due to robust holiday sales of the iPod digital music player. More than 10 million iPods have been sold since it was introduced in 2001.

There are some important marketing lessons to be learned from all this. First of all, Apple has created a product for a hungry market that has the financial means to purchase it even with the relatively high price point. If you find a hot and hungry market, create a product for it and you are almost guaranteed to succeed.

Lesson #1: Find a hot and hungry market

Ever since the introduction of the MP3 file format, we have seen the popularity of converting songs from a CD so that they can be stored on the computer. Even the Napster episode showed us that there is a huge market for a device like the iPod.

Here’s the summary of the first lesson - don’t sell shovels to fishermen and fishing poles to gold miners. Rather, sell the shovels to gold miners and the fishing poles to fishermen. Create a product that already has an existing market.

Lesson #2: Create different versions

Now Apple just announced the introduction of the iPod Nano - a lower-priced version of the iPod with flash memory instead of hard drive storage.

This strategy is called versioning.

First create a product that sells. Then create another version of the product for a different market segment. In this case, Apple first came up with a more expensive product and followed it up with a cheaper product.

Lesson #3: Create the halo effect

The halo effect is essentially this: increasing sales of one popular product will generate more sales for your other existing products. In this case, the tremendous popularity of the iPod has created enough buzz that more people are buying Macs.

In the past, Macs have made inroads only to a small segment of the market. But now, we’re likely to see Apple increase its market share of personal computers in the months to come.

So whatever you are selling, there are definitely some general marketing lessons to be learned from the success of the iPod. Think about it the next time you use your iPod.