Web design has many advantages for start-ups, whereas bypassing it has many disadvantages. One of the most important benefits includes getting indexed in search engines, which is like free advertising. The internet, unlike the phone book, can quickly help you find what you’re looking for just by searching for a very specific category. If a consumer is searching for a niche item like a DVD on how to build a water heater, using the phone book might mean calling ten different book stores or even companies that design water heaters. A search engine, though, is more likely to lead to a useful link in a matter of seconds.

Yes, the internet is very important these days because it has become the clearinghouse where you can find anything, including your new business. You may still want to be in the phone book, but it’s going to take time for that listing to appear. In the meantime, creating a website will ensure that your business exists online, where people are already searching for products and services. While the common small business can only afford to pay for so many different listings in the phone book, the use of keywords online allows you to list your business in a wider spectrum of categories for free.

Keywords are the foundation of Google, which indexes your site based on how you title your web pages and the keywords you choose to define your site. Experienced web content developers keep this in mind, knowing that the information on your web pages must match your most important keywords. This rule of thumb is an essential part of “search engine optimization,” more commonly known as SEO. With well-planned SEO techniques, your site may be ranked high in search results, provided your business offers a niche that isn’t flooded with competition.

The key to web design is useful content. Although many businesses expect their sites to look as nice as possible, too much emphasis on design instead of meaningful content can lead to diminishing returns. It’s better to make product information the priority on a website, without sacrificing appearance. In other words, the site doesn’t have to be all text, but search engines will favor content-rich sites over graphic-intensive sites. Not all web designers understand this basic principle, however, so it’s smart to shop around.

A website is powerful if you keep it basic with easy navigation to useful content that can be summarized with a site map. If you notice, Google, isn’t very complex looking and still manages to be one of the most popular sites in the world. It’s basically a search box with a few links and a logo. This doesn’t mean all sites should be that plain and simple. The reason Google succeeds with such a simple design is that it is an incredibly useful resource. The message Google sends is still important for all sites, which is to have an important purpose other than to be fancy.

Another benefit to a start-up company developing a website is that it opens the door to earning revenue right away. If the new business is selling digital products that can be downloaded instantly, the website with an ecommerce solution becomes a global storefront. If the store is selling tangible products, the website can still be where people around the world place purchase orders. Even if the business doesn’t plan to sell anything online, the website can be an effective brochure of the company. The site can offer information downloads and videos that showcase the business.

A valuable consideration when creating a website is that it should include contact informaiton and a way for users to provide feedback. Email gives your business a direct connection with customers and gives them a sense that the business is interactive and has credibility. While popular sites may try to cut down on emails, new businesses can benefit from email by building marketing lists.

Before you approach a web designer, you should learn the difference between examples of high and low traffic websites. Many people who are new to the web miss the point about what makes websites powerful. A common tendency of unschooled newbies is to make the site as graphic intensive as possible, which can be a major mistake that limits search engine rankings, loading speed and usefulness for users. That’s important to decide if you need a website designed for heavy traffic or a niche site for a limited following.

Once you pinpoint the objectives of your site, you can then explore the online community in search engines using simple key phrases related to web design. You may also want to ask knowledgeable friends who they recommend. But never just settle for the first web designer you find just to get a project rolling. As you shop around, ask questions about tools, experience and processes. A great web design company is closer to an all in one solution than a company that only focuses on certain aspects of design.

Web design is a mix of art and science. You want your site to look as nice as possible but nice appearance alone isn’t going to bring you much traffic. Your first priority should be finding a designer who understands your checklist of objectives. In other words, if you want the company to handle all of your design and you need a high end site with its own e-commerce solution, you will want a firm with seasoned engineers, not just HTML writers.

Ask if the company is up to date with HTML 5 and uses cascading style sheets (CSS) as well as database programming. Find out if their pros use hand coding or a web editing software program such as Dreamweaver. If they only do one or the other keep searching until you find talent that can do both. A firm that does not use CSS is going to make your site very difficult and more expensive to update in the future should you design to make mass changes to the appearance of your web pages.

Many web design firms with tight budgets, especially start-up companies, hire designers with limited coding skills. If you are only doing a small five page site with basic functionality you may conclude that experience and knowledge are not as important as to whether or not someone can quickly and inexpensively build your site. But if your site is meant to have a lot of interactivity with users, especially involving mobile platforms, you will want the most seasoned experts as possible for your budget.

You may have heard many times that “content is king” online. Content, meaning useful information, is certainly what drives eyeballs to the web. Chances are, no matter what web design company you choose, the bulk of your content will either come from your own company or you will subcontract the work to writers who specialize in your field. Web design companies at best may be able to proof, edit and spice up your content, but it is rare to find a full service internet company that can just start writing your content for you without doing a lot of research, which takes time and costs more money.

A multimedia site that streams audio and video or offers digital downloads for sale will likely be a bigger, more complex and expensive project. Be clear about the time frame involved at developing a multimedia site. Find out if the company outsources its labor or if the designers are in-house. Try to avoid companies that do a lot of outsourcing for more complex sites. For the sake of consistency, you will likely want the same designers who become familiar with your site over time.

As for graphics, you do not necessarily need the graphic artist to be an in-house employee of the web design firm you use. All the web design company really needs are files emailed to them from your graphic artist. The same is true with video or audio, since credible web design companies understand internet standards for presenting various media. Ask the firm to make sure they test your site on all popular browsers (IE, Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari), since a site can potentially look different on each browser. If the response isn’t something like “sure, no problem,” then keep searching.

Finally, search engine optimization (SEO) has become a major component of web development. Unfortunately, this is an issue where expertise becomes questionable with a lot of firms. The science of SEO is constantly evolving, as Google frequently changes its system for indexing websites. Many tricks for getting high placement in search rankings become outdated, especially if it involves some form of spam. One thing that hasn’t changed is search engines seek quality content that points users to useful information.

Finding an all in one service that builds your site, as well as hosts your site and provides web statistics is ideal for someone trying to keep a complex project sensible. For those who need just simple websites, there are many low cost solutions that let you create your own web pages in a matter of minutes.

Written by: James Weir, Founder of Xpirt Design

A few things about web design

The internet is really the most accessible as well as the most important medium of communication as well as information dissemination in these modern times. That’s the reason why a number of companies as well as agencies seek the services of web designers as well as web developers to enable them to get connected around the globe in a split second.

In their eagerness to catch the “world”, quite a few companies commit the mistake of hiring website designer who doesn’t address their needs. Low experience as well as intimate knowledge in web designing more often than not leads to the following failures:

Treating SEO as a different project from the website – search engine optimization (SEO) ought to be at the core of the website. Make sure your designer provides you with an optimized website and to take care of everything to include keyword search, duplicate content, multiple domains, Google local listing, semantic mark-up, search engine friendly navigation as well as structure, and html and CSS coding.

Ignoring user interaction and also focusing on design perspective only – the success of a website greatly is dependent upon its guests. a not-so-great user experience will likely be a direct result improper design. Some designers neglect to look into user interaction. A professional web designer gives you understanding of the web as well as how users interact with it. He or she understands user interfaces and design techniques, including color theory and everything in relation. Design will include functionality and not mere appeal.

Neglecting to measure website performance – you’ll not realize the importance of something unless of course it’s measured. Assess the impact of your website with the use of metrics. Check out charts and reports to keep an eye on number of visitors, page views, traffic sources, keyword report, and content distribution. Measuring your website’s success is very important in case you want to make an impact online. By simply knowing how frequently people visit your web site, you would know how your site is faring on the internet and in case your site has actually reached its audience.

Neglecting to check former jobs or projects – check out what other individuals say about the designer or design company. Ask for recommendations from people you know having existing websites. Look into their weaknesses and strengths and learn from their experience. It’s also beneficial to ask for samples of previous work or company portfolio of the web designer you’re preparing to hire.

You’re shelling out significant amount to have a website designed for your company. Take good care of your resources; it is of great importance to find and also hire a reliable and professional designer.

Building a web site is one thing. Web design is another.

Websites are becoming increasingly well designed. There are some tremendous visual designs out there on the internet, some of which will have been designed by top class professional designers at huge costs, some by just clever skilled individuals with a tremendous flair for design. Some however will have been built by people who really should have stuck to what they really know!

Visual design is one thing, but the complete structure of the site being well designed is another. Building the site well is an important factor… just building it as a series of pages and links with bad navigation and clunky images and content, is not a good idea at all. This loses you customers.

So what am i trying to say? Lets start with…

Visual web design and structural layout design:

To formulate the best web site you need to be able to convey to your audience exactly where you are coming from and how you can help them. A lot of that will be in the content and copy writing but I will leave that for now. However the instant visual imagery and immediate answer to their wishes must be conveyed within a few seconds of the visitor uncovering your page. It is most important that it does a lot of this visually. That’s where good graphic design comes in. the correct colors, images and overall feel makes all the difference in keeping or losing your visitor.

Once you have grabbed the eye of your visitor, they will want to learn more and this is your chance to tell them all about it and steer them to that all important contact page or email form. If your site is clunky, difficult to navigate and the visitor has to spend most of their time wandering about looking for those all important links… they will go somewhere else and you will have lost them… forever!

It used to be no more than three “clicks” to get to what you want, otherwise forget it. I think it should be no more than two “clicks” or even none at all… it just lands in their lap! Ideal of course but not always the most practical. Mind you if the visitor is directed straight to a landing page… well that would be perfect. It captures them and gets their contact details and you are set to follow up a potential customer!

Building the Website:

Just building the site is not enough. Time needs to be taken to formulate the whole process and put together a structural map on paper. Work out where the information will be displayed and make it easy to find. I have struggled with big web sites, like local government sites. They are probably “organic”, stuck together by various people in different departments and because of this no one thinks out how the unsuspecting public may easily find that snippet of information or downloadable form etc. So you call them up and take up everyone’s time and complain too! (Have you ever noticed that the bigger the company gets, the less obvious their direct contact info is until it drops off somewhere to be lost forever? it’s all down to “knowledge bases” and “tickets”).

Some savvy people create the working structuring of the site in “wireframe” so you get the whole thing in front of the client to test, check and see if the client is happy before you go to all that trouble of loading in the content. A website wireframe is the only way to keep everything clear and in perspective whilst you are developing (building) a web site. The client knows exactly where he/she stands and what to expect. It is rather like doing a pencil sketch before the ruler and ink comes out. It will utilize basic boxes and simple lines to define the layout, image positions, navigation and text areas, before the actual content has been created at all.

Ok friends! fire up your design software and let’s get started.

Xpirt Design is an Orange County web design company servicing clients globally and locally with many web services ranging from custom web development, Magento web design, SEO, and more.

While developing and designing a recent Magento website, we were given the challenge to create both a retail customer site, and a wholesale site. However, instead of creating two separate websites, like most web design companies would done, we wanted to somehow consolidate the two ideas to work with one website, and one e-commerce software. We want to be able to provide our clients a turn-key wholesale and retail solution, so that the client can expand their online services easy and efficiently. We chose to use Magento to accomplish our goal. Though Magento does not come standard with wholesale features, it is the most advanced, feature rich, reliable, secure, and flexible e-commerce software available today.

To accomplish our goal, we needed to do a customize a few features, based on the nature of the client’s business.

1) Create an approval system for wholesale customers
2) Only wholesale customers can view special wholesale prices
3) Retail customers can only see retail prices
4) Manage both types of customers in 1 Magento back end

Most of the solutions we found ended up in ‘Creating two Magento websites/stores’, which is not what we wanted to do. We were looking for a single website solution. So we tried playing with the Magento customer grouping features, within the Magento customer manager area in the admin panel:

1. We created a new tax class for Wholesale by Sales ? Tax ? Customer Tax Classes

2. We created customer groups (Retail and Wholesale).
Customers ? Customer groups ? AddNew Customer.
3. And selected the wholesale tax class for wholesale customer group.

An extension is required; Netzarbeiter_GroupsCatalog, to hide or show categories and products from specified types of customer groups (wholesale or retail in our case).

When adding a product an additional option ‘Hide from customer groups’ will be there. This enables us to select the customer groups to whom the product can be made hidden. For instance, a product meant only for wholesale customers will only display to customers who are in the wholesale customer group. The wholesale customer will logon to their account (approval for a wholesale account is required). Once they have logged on, they will only see the wholesale products available. Retail customers will only see the retail products. When adding a product, you will be able to select which customer group you want to show the product to. You can also choose to show the product to both types of customers.

Here’s the link to access this custom plugin Magento Plugin

Though Magento does not differentiate wholesale from retail out of the box, Xpirt Design has done the research and the programming to provide our clients these features within the Magento E-Commerce software. This enables our clients to automate wholesale and retail as much as possible. You can also use these features to manage drop shipping, and other services you might want to offer. Let us know if there is a special need for your e-commerce website. Xpirt Design can help.

If you need Magento Design, please call us or use the “Request a Quote” form.

Xpirt Design is a professional and affordable Web Design Company based in Orange County California.

Remember, it’s important to choose a web design and SEO company who is local to you. I can’t tell you how many horror stories I’ve heard from clients because they chose a web design company out of state, or even out of the country. The fact of the matter is, legitimate web design companies who are local to you stand a better chance in providing you with the best customer service, and the best communication. It’s very hard to communicate ideas, graphics, and procedures to someone who lives in a different time zone. Plus, you want the accountability of a web design company who is located near you. This decreases the chances of you getting ripped off.

So anyways, now that we’re servicing Los Angeles with our web design and SEO services, please feel free to ask about our free consultations. We’ll drive as far as south Orange County and as far as Northridge.

E-Commerce w/ SEO Package

Purchase a custom designed E-Commerce website from us and we’ll throw in free search engine optimization!

Once your website is complete, getting customers to find you online should be your next goal. Web Design, paired up with search engine optimization ensures that your website will be found by customers using the various search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Bing. Our search engine optimization services are second-to-none. This special only applies to customers located in Orange County, CA and only applies to brand new e-commerce web design. Call us today to take advantage of this great deal!

Orange County Web Design

by: James Weir, Orange County Web Design

Top 11 Web Design / Development Forums

To kick of the new year of 2010, we decided to put together a list of the top web design forums that we feel could be a useful resource to those of you looking to join a community of designers and developers. As the web design industry continues to grow, the need for such communities grow. These forums were hand picked based on the quality of information available, level of community support by it’s members, and finally, the popularity of the forum. If you have any recommendations for other forums, please feel free to let us know in the comments.

by: James Weir, Web Design Orange County

Photo Retoucher

We at Xpirt Design would like to welcome RA Retouching as a new client for our SEO services. RA Retouching is owned and operated by Raichle Watt, who was a former model and currently is a photo retouching expert. RA Retouching bring years of photo retouching experience, as well as over 15 years of modeling experience. Raichle knows how to bring the photo’s potential to reality. She has worked with many high profile clients but keeps the prices for her professional photo retouching services affordable for any magazine, artist, photographer, or modeling agency. In fact, RA Retouching offers a 10% discount first time orders.

Any additional information you might need is located at her website: www.raretouching.com. Feel free to browse through her website, check out her portfolio, and maybe view some of the most common Q & A’s before you request a quote.

by: James Weir, Xpirt Design

Fixing the “Please Wait” problem in Magento’s Category Management

On behalf of Xpirt Web Design and SEO, I would like to provide the Magento open source developer community with a simple and straightforward solution in fixing the notorious problems with Magento’s category administration panel. If you get the dreaded “Please Wait” image that gets stuck or frozen when trying to add or modify categories on a fresh install, then this article is for you.

On a side note, this solution applies to Magento fresh installs on the latest stable version of 1.3.2.4, and also applies only to the problem of adding or modifying categories, as well as attempting to create, upload, or save a new product. This solution also applies to some users who are having trouble with the “Security” problem when trying to upload an image to a product. And lastly, this is a solution to the problem of saving configurations within the admin panel, such as editing and saving your company information, ect. This is “A” solution to these problems, not “THE” solution to these problems and I sincerely hope this solution works for you.

Problem:

Just recently, we were trying to install a fresh version of the latest stable version of Magento (as of today, 12/17/09) for a new web design client that required the robust and feature-packed e-commerce solution, Magento. After a flawless install at the hosting company “Blue Host”, we logged into the admin panel of Magento and proceeded to start adding categories and products. Of course, like so many of you, we ran into the “Please Wait” problem when trying to add new product categories. We also ran into the common problem of getting the “Please Wait” notification when trying to save or add a new product, as well as the common problem of the “Security Risk” when trying to upload a picture for a new product. We followed all the directions that both the Magento Community and Blue Host documentations provided. As you can imagine, we were stumped.

After several hours of searching through the Magento Community Forums, we were left with no other options than to plead with our hosting company to help out. The hosting company (Blue Host) refused to assist in this matter and basically told us to go back to Magento with the problem. I expected a response like that and wasn’t surprised.

Solution:

Just before we were going to give up, I thought to myself “why aren’t the updating information functions working either?” After thinking for a while, I decided to check out the .htaccess file in the public_html root to see if there are any 301 domain canonical redirects (in English, that’s the non-www. to www.). There was a 301 canonical redirect in the .htaccess file in the root, and another thing I noticed; If you use the “www redirect” in the C-Panel of your web host at the same time, it confuses the server and applications, such as Magento, will throw errors and won’t work correctly. So what I did was turn off the “www redirect” in the hosting C-Panel, then deleted the 301 canonical redirects (again, for those of you who still do not know what this is, this 301 redirect either adds or removes the “www” from your domain name, since search engines see the www. And non-www. As two separate websites and will penalize your SERPS or Rankings for duplicate content). Sure enough, the next time I logged into the Magento admin panel, the categories worked perfectly, the adding products functions worked perfectly, and uploading product images worked perfectly. No more “Please Wait” or “Security Risk” issues at all, whatsoever.

Lesson Learned:

Magento is extremely finicky. On a fresh install, check your .htaccess files for errors and temporarily turn off the www redirects in the C-Panel of your hosting account. Then take one step at a time in setting up your canonical 301 redirects, preferably, use the .htaccess file instead of the C-Panel www redirect function.

Conclusion:

I really hope this article will help some of you fix this problem. I can’t tell you how much of a headache this was, and how many hours of being frustrated, pissed off, and just plain irritated I was because of this problem. I mean, Magento is the Rolls Royce of e-commerce and it’s exciting to finally get to use the product, and then the nightmare begins when the darn thing wont just work. In any case, the problem is solved, and I would like to know if this solution helped some of you out there with the same problems. Please feel free to post comments about your experiences. These are DOFOLLOW comments for you SEO guys out there, but I do keep a close moderation on them so careful with the spam.

Also, for those of you who need any web design services, or need to design a template or theme for Magento, or any other E-commerce software, please visit our orange county web design section and find out how Xpirt Design can help you.

Build high PR, Do Follow links fast and easy!

By: James Weir, Xpirt Design, seach engine optimization los angeles

In this tutorial, I will show you how to effectively build one-way links by finding, analyzing, and commenting on blog sites. Commenting on blogs can yield a large amount of high quality links, but you need to make sure you are commenting on the right blogs, and your comments are worthy of the link. This link building technique has really come in handy for Xpirt Design’s SEO efforts and hopefully, it can be just as successful for you.

Plug-ins / Programs needed:

• You will need the No Do Follow extension for Firefox. When activated, this extension will highlight all links on the web page. The red highlights will be the links that are No Follow. The links that are blue will be the Do Follow links.Download the No Do Follow extension for Firefox
• You will need the SEO Quake extension for Firefox. When this is activated, you will see all stats for any website or web page that is of importance in SEO (Page Rank, Inbound Links, Outbound links, Alexa Rank, page age, and other stats).Download the SEO Quake extension for Firefox
• You will need to download the Back Link Analyzer tool from SEO Book.com. This tool will find the inbound links for a website.
  Download the Back Link Analyzer Tool
  • Set the option to Google (http)
  • Set the option to Yahoo (web service)
  • Set the option to “1000″ on result limit

Use the Back Link Analyzer tool to gather your competitor’s links

Basically, what you want to do here is analyze the back links of any given competitor. There are many back link analyzer tools out there, but the easiest one (and it’s free) is the back link analyzer tool at SEOBook.com. You can also use the link analyzer tool that is offered in the WEB CEO program. The WEB CEO program takes a very long time to search and update the results so for this tutorial, I’ll be using the back link analyzer tool from SEO Book.com.



Back Link Analyzer v2.0

Setup your options

You will need to setup the options for the Back Link Analyzer Tool.



Setup the options as shown

Run the tool. You will soon see a list of back links pointing to your competitor’s website. Here’s the trick on finding blogs. Most, if not all, blogs will use a certain URL structure, for instance, www.example.com/2009/11/9/title , or www.example.com/archives/web-design-stuff/ , or something similar to these. When you find a URL that you think might be a blog, click on it and it should open up your Fire Fox browser. Make sure your extensions are activated.



Find and recognize blog-type URLs

Take a quick look at your SEO Quake stats. Use these stats to determine whether or not this blog is worth commenting on. Try to find blogs with high page ranks on the actual article page itself. Usually, blogs with high page ranks on the domain will have articles that also have high page rank.



Analyze the blog posting according to PageRank, outbound links, ect.

How to know if your comment will be a Do Follow Comment

Take a look at the comments other people have posted. Most blogs will setup a link with the anchor text of the “name” text field. Make sure your No Do Follow extension is activated. If it’s not, go to “tools” and click on “No Do Follow”. So, if the link/name of the commenter is highlighted in blue, the link is a Do Follow link. Also look for the ability to insert a link within the actual comment. Sometimes blogs will allow these.




Make sure the comment links are DoFollow (the link that will be pointing to your site)

Make sure to leave good comments

Leaving good comments is the key to getting back links from blogs. Take the time to read the blog entry and leave a constructive and useful comment related to the subject of the entry. If you don’t leave a good comment, the moderator will simply just treat your comment as spam and you will not get the link. Time will be wasted. So make sure you read the entry and leave a good comment.
Some blogs will allow you to use keywords as your “name”. The blogs that don’t let you use keywords, just use your name or company name. A link is better than no link.




An example of a spammy blog comment



An example of an acceptable blog comment



Screenshot of the input fields for commenting

Conclusion

And that’s pretty much it! Keep doing this for your competitors and when you have run out of competitors to find blogs from, you can just do a Google search to find them. Good luck with your link building and feel free to comment on this post, Digg it, ect. And don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS Feed!

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…