Verecom Web Design Blog

There are frequent discussions on what are the attributes of a good website design; how should it be to look impressive and win only positive votes. Lets give it a U-turn this time on and turn around the topic. Lets discuss two near fatal web design mistakes in Sydney to implement only if you wish to turn your visitors away from your website.

One could be an occasional website that starts playing loud music as soon as it’s clicked and you find yourself on its home-page. While it could be a good idea for flamboyant themes like fashion, beauty and romance, it is not always an appealing attribute in website development circles in Sydney. Internet surfers like to play their own music on their desktops and laptops.

Number two is even more vital – a web design Sydney developed keeping in mind a particular browser only. Facing the fact that your visitors could be using different browsers would be wiser. After all, you do not want patrons from a specific browser using community only, do you? Be it Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, FireFox or otherwise, no one internet browser can fetch you all the target audience groups. It is a fact.

Take care of these two pointers (amongst others) during website development and Sydney could be raving about your website next thing you know.

Edited By Gary Smith

Businesses based in Sydney acknowledge the importance of good web design in Sydney to stay competitive and up to date. This has naturally bolstered up the pace of growth and development in website development arena in Sydney. Faced with a swarming crowd of web design and development companies in your region may, however, leave you baffled. Here are a few tips on how to choose your vendor wisely.

Great rates should come secondary to good quality. It is a good idea to associate with a website development company in Sydney with innovative or latest tricks for web designing, development and search engine optimisation.

It is also important that the range of web design templates with Sydney based vendor be comprehensive. It should be competent to handle all industry verticals and various degrees of complexities.

The vendor must focus on every aspect of web site development in a balanced manner. The developer’s portfolio may give you reliable clues to this quest. A look at the websites developed by the vendor for different industries and purposes may assist you at understanding vendor’s expertise at designing an overall satisfactory web identity for you.

Associate with the vendor who develops aesthetically appealing websites that are also convenient to browse and equipped with best of search engine optimisation methods.

Edited By Gary Smith

In recent years it is popular to use website as a marketing tool, but how does website operator know exactly the information of website traffic, page views, browsing rate, advertising and other related? This Article will introduce four powerful tools for website-related statistics, so you can quickly analyse your website and generate a professional report.

SeeTheStats

As the name suggests, It can assist the Webmaster to export data from GoogleAnalytics, but only if the webmaster must sign up for a Google Analytics account first in order for SeeTheStats help to automatically generate variety of charts or reports.

In other words, Google Analytics and SeeTheStats have a complementary relationship. SeeTheStats is able to compile the Google Analytics data into clear and easy understand reports and statements.

This tool has very clean and simple user interface, similar to Office software which can produce all kinds of statements. SeeTheStats can help users to quickly establish a clear and beautiful data reports, users can also set up website to show their own analysis of data, as well as a daily automatic update function.

GoingUp

GoingUp would come in handy when you want to improve the sale and visits rate of your website.

GoingUp features a rich AJAX interface which is very easy to use. The interface is clear and user friendly which using a large number of line charts, graphs and pie charts to clearly point out web data, such as visitor tracking, monitoring of sales, browsing rate and also provide web page optimisation tool to improve the search engine strategy. In addition it also provides a detailed analysis of the reports, such as enterprise collaborations and integration solutions etc…

W3Counter

Similar to previous web analytic tools, W3Counter also use a large number of statistical tables and charts to show the web visitors behaviour, such as the where the users come from? What search keywords they use? Which topics is the particular interest? Which web page or links attract most users to click? W3Counter can record these data and provide detailed statistical reports.

In addition, W3Counter has a special function called “Live Visitor Map”. From large area like country to small area such as towns the visitors’ location can be marked, simply open the map function which will tell you which area the visitors come from most, and it updated map information regularly to allow webmaster to fully control the web analytics. W3Counter provides free and paid services. Free user can track up one website only with one account, and can have 30 kinds of real-time dynamic Web site records without time limit. However, there are still restrictions for free user and it can only record up to 5000 data everyday.

mon.itor.us

In the web analytics tools, the user interface of mon.itor.us is more beautiful, clear and simple, makes a very pleasing look. Not too much text description and emphasise that “there are pictures and the truth”. It is almost complete use of variety of statistical tables and charts to provide a detailed description and it is free.

mon.itor.us use software as a service (SaaS) concept and emphasising monitoring as a service (MaaS), in addition to accurately record the visited web pages, advertising page clicks, browsing time, visitor maps, it also provides web-based solutions, easy and efficient maintenance and management tools. For company, mon.itor.us gives your website more enormous commercial potential, such as e-commerce or blogs sale, to adjust marketing strategies in order to achieve significant results, thus creating more profits.

Edited By Henry Lu

Google plan to change the way of web search, and fight back its competitors.

Google will provide computer, iPhone and Android devices the real-time search results page. It also added a new search technology called Google Goggles, which allows users to upload a picture to search, rather than enter a keyword to query.

Google is expected mobile devices will become a transit point for network activity next year, announced by Google engineering vice president, Vic Gundotra, and chief engineer. Amit Singhal. Singhal describes real-time search is “the most exciting thing in my career.”

Marissa Mayer, vice president of Google search products said that this technology is the future of search engine. This new search engine will help users to find the best answer instead bunch of links. Mayer said, the four directions of Google search technology in future: model, media, language and personalization. New search functions such as voice or image search will be the top priority for the search engine advertisement.

Gundotra also shows the Google Mobile Search can accurately identify many language queries, such as English, Chinese and Japanese. Google translator also supports 51 languages, Gundotra said during first quarter of 2010, our real-time translation function will be available for the mobile device. “Our goal is to support all major languages around the world,” he said.

Google is also planning the geographic search for text and voice information services. Google Maps service is available in the Android 1.6 or above It includes “What’s Nearby” which lists closest place for users who look for services. This service will also be available for iPhone and other Android devices.

Google Goggles represents the starting point for Google to enter the computer field. This service is currently only in the Google Labs, and can only identify a few kinds of objects.

Google is able to do facial recognition, but for privacy issues, it decided to defer to promote the service.

Google Instant Search is made from numbers of social network partners. Google recently signed a search cooperation contract with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, and Identi.ca, in order to provide public information in real-time search.

Instant Search is currently unavailable, but is expected to be on-line very soon.

Edited By Henry Lu

Businesses need websites, but to get a good domain name for your site can be more and more difficult, because most of the good names are already taken by others, and how to grab a good name before others, you will need a good tool.

This article will introduce 8 domain name selection tools to help you to choose your preferred domain name which hasn’t been taken, and to make recommendations of other possible domain name.

Domainr
Today, to find a perfect . Com, . Net or . Org name can be very difficult, Domainr is a interesting small tool that can help you find and propose similar well-known Web 2.0 sites, such as last. fm, del.icio.us and so on.

Dot-o-mator
Dot-o-mator is an interesting domain name generator. It can generate a suitable domain name via the prefix and suffix, you can also choose to use category pre-and post-character types to automatically produce merged domain name, and to check whether the domain name is available.

BustAName
BustAName is a domain name naming tool which uses linguistic information to assist users to obtain good domain name. It can also manage and organize the user’s search results, according to the keywords you enter to proposed similar name. The proposed domain name may be listed under a number of conditions, such as readability or length.

Domain Tools
Different from other tools, Domain Tools is a domain name search tool to find hidden information for specific domain name, such as the “Whois” search tool to find out the domain registration information and also provide “Suggestions tool” to find similar domain name, “Domain Search” tool can check whether the specified domain name is available, or on sale, auction and more.

Squurl
Squurl’s function is very simple, with Ajax technology, users type their preferred domain name, Squurl will automatically find and list out available domain name, if your are luck which that your preferred domain name is available. Users can now select favorite online domain registration business suggested by Squurl.

DomainsBot
DomainsBot is a very simple domain name search tool; you can quickly check whether the desired domain name is available. You can set the length of the domain name to reduce the number of the proposed name of your website.

StuckDomains
StuckDomains is a very interesting tool that allows users to search for “expired” domain name, if the original domain owners, forget to renew contract, or no longer used, and sometimes maybe you can pick up a very nice domain name.

Ajax Whois
To put it simply, Ajax Whois tools in the simplest way to help user to quickly find a suitable domain name, and even provides shortcuts to speed up the search efficiency.

Edited By Henry Lu

Through many negotiations, Microsoft and Yahoo announced a number of cooperation in the search engine market. Yahoo will use Microsoft technology for all its search engine assets, while it is also responsible for online ads sales for both side platform. From this 10 years co-operation, Microsoft can exclusively access to Yahoo search engine license, and Microsoft can also integrate yahoo technology with its own.

From Revenue-sharing agreement based on the two sides, Microsoft will pay Yahoo for the traffic generated by Yahoo Website; Yahoo is expected to increase 500 million U.S. dollars annual revenue and cash flow of 275 million U.S. dollars, while saving 200 million capital expenditure.

“The cooperation will benefit our clients and industry greatly” Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said in a statement. “I believe this cooperation laid the foundation for innovation and development of the Internet into a new era” Bartz said.

Microsoft and Yahoo have more than a year to discuss cooperation, at beginning Microsoft plan to buy Yahoo, and this request was refused by Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang. However Jerry Yang was been removed from the board of director and replaced by Bartz, hence triggered this negotiation for cooperation.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer also commended the cooperation between the two sides will benefit Microsoft’s new search engine www. Bing.com and great opportunity to challenge current top 1 search engine giant, Google.

“Through the cooperation with Yahoo, we will be able to develop more innovative search technology to benefit our advertisers, and also to provide more market choose for consumers beside Google.” Ballmer said.

“The success of search engine businesses needs innovations and users scale, our search platform www.Bing.com provides a breakthrough innovation. And the cooperation with yahoo will provide the scale we need for the rapid development on relevance and the availability”

Based on ComScore’s survey, Google currently holds the 65% of search engine market in US, Microsoft only has 8% and Yahoo has 20%.

Edited By Henry Lu

IT industry testing released the report says the growth rate of Microsoft search engine Bing.com already run ahead of rivals since his launch on May this year.

Microsoft new search engine provides many search services. According to data released by Hitwise showed that, the growth rate of Bing.com reached 25 percent in June. But however, its
U.S. market share is still only 5.25 percent.

This new search engine attracts the close attention of media. Microsoft plan to spend 100 million U.S. dollars to promote Bing.com, and intends to take the territory from Google, the current number one search engine company.

However, Google still remains the dominant position of the U.S. market with 74 percent market share. Yahoo still has the second largest market share of 16%. Ask.com has fourth place with 3.2 percent market share.

Analysts said that, the growth rate of Bing.com is faster than the other three well-known search engine companies. And Microsoft hopes Bing.com can grab more market for online ads.

On Thursday’s stock trading, Microsoft shares fell to 22.44 U.S. dollars. And Google rose 2% to 410.39 U.S. dollars.

Edited By Henry Lu

Nowadays there are so many sales consultants in the market; all of them promised that they can help you start the online business. They can help you to choose the business areas, make very precise products and service segmentations, write the brand story even do the media and public relation for you. Actually all these works are very essential. However if you are lack of traffic this key, all the efforts you put at the beginning will just go in vain.

Then how can we gain the traffic? This is really a puzzling question. I am sure that lots of sales consultants themselves can not really answer this question properly. Although I have been in this industry for so long, I am not able to give a 100% right answer either. But I would like to share some experience I gain through all the failures and lessons. I wish at least I can give some general ideas about this issue:

There is no free traffic in the market

To gain traffic without cost is impossible, if there were, Yahoo would not be able to earn so much. How much sales expense online companies need to prepare for gaining traffic? According to many online business owners’ experience, if the main profit of your company is from online sales then you better prepare 10%-20% of your turnover to boost traffic. If your company just starts the online business and you have no previous turnover to estimate the budget, then you can use another calculation way: if your advertising material is good enough, the website is professional enough and can reach your target group successfully then, every dollar you invest may bring 5-6 times profit. Of course, the greater your sales ability is, the higher is your product price and trade –in rate and lower is the percentage of sale cost in your whole turnover, and better is your adverting effect.

There is no company has the same sales strategy. There are many sales tools you can use. Company should make the choice according to their own budget, target customers, inner capability and business channel. Currently the popular sales tools include:

Traditional sales tool:
• Television
• Newspaper
• Magazine
• Public actives

Online sales tools:
• Online banner
• Text link
• Key word
• Blog / forum
• Traffic exchange / cooperate with other industry

Companies should decide the sales tools according to the percentage of their turnover and the future business plan. If 100% of your orders are from internet then definitely most of advertising budget should put into developing online sales tools. If your business runs mainly through entity market but you also want 1/3 of your future sales can be made through the website, then you should spend 1/3 of your sales budget to the web market. Sometime you can also see many e-companies use entity sales tools such as television advertisement and newspaper advertisement to promote their business; however this should be done when the companies grow into certain scales. They also need to build their brand image in the internet as well.

Normally the biggest question for most online companies is which online sales tools are most effective. Here I will analyse each of them one by one:

1. Online banner
This kind of advertisement has the highest click rate; because they give customers direct visual stimulation and arouse customers’ peep desire. However this kind of advertisement is most expensive. For example, if you want to promote something in large scale on Yahoo, you need to prepare around 15 thousands USD for two weeks online banner. If the preparation does well, making long-term banners will help the company grow steadily. But if the preparation is not enough, the activity you promote is not attractive enough, and then your advertisement expense may just go in vain. There are some key points for you to make online banner: good promotion return rate, precise advertisement and there is incentive factor in your website to attract the orders.

2. text links
On Yahoo home page and four corners of each page, you can see many short sentences attract people to click in. This is text links. Normally text link helps to enhance the impression but the average click rate is lower than Banner. If there is someone talented in word in the company, and he is able to use the limited word to precisely attract people’s attention, then the click rate can also reach very high level. Among all kinds of advertising, the cost of text link is still considered as reasonable. To make an effective text link may cost 10 thousands USD per month.

3. Key word
This is one of the hottest sales tools in recent years. But I have some different opinions: if you own an e-market, or you own various products, key word will be a very good sales tool. But if you don’t have that much products or you wish to build up new brand or promote diverse brands, then the effect of keyword may disappoint you. If you provide unified services such as selling boxes, moving, fixing computers and so on, keyword will be the cheapest sales tools for you.

If these 3 sale tools don’t fit your budget or business types, you can use some hard but very cheap way to do sales.

1. Blog: Set up a blog and reveal your professional areas in your Blog. At the same time you can post your ideas on others Blogs or communicate with others through Blogs to build up your reputation graduately.

2. Forum: Be a frequent visitor to forum. Discuss the issues in your fields, and let yourself be the topic people discuss about.

3. Cooperate with other industry: Exchange the banner with other websites which have similar traffics or exchange the printed ventures to give to each other’s customers. It also includes provide other small sites or Blogs your banner for them to help boost your traffic. If the deal is done, then you can pay them certain amount of hire charge. It is not difficult to set the system, but the biggest difficulties may be finding the partners to cooperate.

These 3 sale tools are much cheaper than the former tools, but they consume lots of time and efforts. If you have lots of time, it can also be a good way to challenge yourself.

Edited By Vicky Yin

Now blog has become more and more important in online sales. Many companies and online business owners have achieved great success through using the blog well. There are uncountable examples you can hear about that.

Then, what are the good things blog can bring to sales? Actually blog can fulfill all the following purposes AT ONCE.

1. Improve search engine ranking
If you use the key words, hyperlinks skillfully, and update the articles regularly, then surely you can increase the media exposure on some main search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, and ultimately improve your ranking.

2. Save sales cost
You can reduce your expense on traditional sales methods, like making advertisement, finding sponsors.

3. More closer to the potential clients
One of the most essential things for the future growing of the company is to locate the potential customers who are not easy to access. However, a dynamic, opened, and rich blog can reach the potential clients using the method, which is irreplaceable for the other tools, easily.

4. Be the evidence for company to use in making sales decision
Blog can receive customers’ responses and market information at the first moment and help the company to make the right business decision based on highly accurate information.

5. Grow brand loyalty among your customers
Blog can help the clients and business mates to know the company movements; this is the best way to allow the clients to keep their motivation to communicate with the company.

6. Grow your volunteer promoters
Every reader visit your blog are doing this by his own will. They are willing to interact with your business and grain more information from your blog. This powerful method of communication can grow a group of people who are willing to promote your company and your products.

7. More effective marketing survey and product testing tools:
One of the reasons why blog became more and more popular in online business is that it can change marketing survey and products testing tools into one-to-one interacted communication.

On your blog, you can not only post the articles introduce your products and business, but also your reflections, the stories of the company, the sharing of your administration experience, even the reviews of the movie you like.

You don’t need to worry about that your blog is not “commercial” enough, the benefit it will bring to you can be more than the “practical reasons” we mentioned before: it helps you to expand your society circle, let you have chance to learn from your seniors and even built your company image and create the company culture…

When blog truly enter into your life, when no matter you open the computer, firstly you will check blog traffic and new comments then we can say an important seed of online sales has truly been put into your heart, and this small seed may grow into a big tree with great fruit in the future.

Edited By Vicky Yin