Web Design & SEO For Small Businesses

while designing and developing a website a web designer need to several tools to maximizing the effectiveness of the website. There are a wide range of different tools which is been presented here. Each of these tools is so important for a web designer.

1. 
   Web Page Analyzer Tool – This tool can be used to test the loading time of your web page. It gives a detailed report on how many objects and size of the objects on the page. These tools have several rating for each object like Green ratings is for good, Yellow for caution and Red for warnings.
2. 
   W3C CSS Validation Services – This W3C CSS validation Service is a web based tool helps web designers to check Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) are validated. The CSS can be validated here by three ways one is typing the URL, second is by uploading the file and finally by inputting the direct CSS code in the input box.
3. 
   Browser compatibility testing tool – By using Browsershots you can test your web designed pages in different browsers. As we all know the importance of checking the web pages with different multiple browsers. Browser compatibility testing is a critical element in the web development practice.
4. 
   Website Wireframe Tool – Wireframes are a basic visual guide for any web page layout design. Wireframe also allows maintaining design consistency throughout the site. Wireframes are very important part in the initial stage of the design process. Gliffy is a free web-based diagram editor. Gliffy free wireframe software makes it easy to create website wireframes and to share web mockups with anyone.
5. 
   Web color picker - This color picker will help you fine tune the hex color codes for your web page. These color picker tools are great for exploring colors and color schemes for your web design project.
6. 
   Screen Resolutions Checker – Quickly and easily test any Website in various Screen Resolutions! This tool allows you to check any web page in different screen resolutions. As web visitors uses different screen resolutions web designers need to check their web page design in different screen resolutions and make sure it looks in all of them.
7. 
   Dummy Text Generator – A dummy text generator will come handy to any web designers because when they wait for the content. Web designers can use dummy text generators to fill up that space.
8. 
   CSS Menu Generator – will generate both the CSS and the HTML code required to produce a text-based yet appealing set of navigation buttons. Menu generator makes it easy to create custom CSS menus without having to know all the complicated HTML and CSS
9. 
   Broken Link checker – Use this tool to check for Broken Links on a website. Broken links are links that lead nowhere; Clicking on the link will show an error page.
10. 
    Browser size checker - A nifty online tool for setting your browser size while doingWeb design.
11. 
    Robot Control Code Generation Tool – The only reason you might need to use a robots.txt file is if you want to prevent someone else from using this search engine to index your site
12. 
    Http header checker - Check your server to make sure the proper HTTP Status Codes (200, 301, 302, 304, 307, 404, 410) are being returned in the server headers.
13. 
    URL rewriting tool - This tool helps you convert dynamic URLs into static looking html URLs.
14. 
    htaccess tool – These tools will create .htaccess and .htpasswd files for you, without having to build these manually.
15. 
    Rounded Corner and Gradient Generator - This generates a basic box with rounded corners. It will create four image files and the necessary HTML and CSS code for you to put rounded corners around your content.
16. 
    Strip Generator lets you make your own comic strips. Users can even create their own Strip Blog, which combines the art of creating comic strips with blogging.

There are million of web pages offering useful information, products and services. But a majority of them are difficult for the user to use and ultimately doesn’t attract the your to stick with the website. As a professional web designer you should take a visitors interests and need while designing the website.

This blog posts presents 10 important common usability mistakes by a web designer.

1) Formatting linking text – An anchor text link is format with an underline which makes the user it is a clickable text. The current trend among web designers to make the remove the underline text decoration can make unnecessary confusion with the end user.

2) High contrast text on a light background – Another design trend which I have noticed lately among the designers to present a light text color like grey on a white background, this practice make vast majority of the users won’t be able to read what it is displayed.

3) Cluttered text – Another common mistake what I see in some websites are how the text is presented within the layout of the site with cluttering of the text. Remember the amount of time your get the visitor to impress is limited if the text is cluttered and make it difficult for the users. The best practice should be to have a fine balance of white space and text which increase readability and message mentioned on the website is easy to scan.

4) Confused navigation – It seems that many designers try to make new method of site navigation. Navigation should be clear and consistent through the all the pages. If you are using image and DHTML navigation make sure that you have a text link at the footer of the page.

5) Logo Consistency – Often this part is neglected most of the designers. The logo should be consistent through out the page and should have a hyper link to the home page.

6) Browsers – The layout of the website should be compatible with all version and different kind of browsers. Most of the web surfers have lower version of different browsers so make it compatible with all of them.

7) Online Order – Make the ordering process simple and faster, don’t make the visitor frustrated asking to do so many steps before they buy the product. If you can reduce the steps in the buying process it will increase the conversion of the site as well.

8 ) Bread Crumbs – Is a very type of navigation which will tell the users where they are currently located on the website architecture. Some sites ignore this accessibility issue and make the users lost inside a website without knowing where to go.

9) Loading time – Due to the over use of big graphics and other programs and multimedia like applets, flash files and videos elements can reduce the loading time of the website which make the visitor to leave immediately and your site will have a higher bounce rate.

10) Surprising the visitor – Most of the users are not comfortable with unexpected things occurring while they surf the web page like automated downloads and video and audio without the permission of the user.

The bottom-line is many, many sites are neglect the basic principles of a website design which mean the user is wasting time as they are looking inside the site trying to make some sense of its purpose.

I get several questions from non Internet marketers about affiliate marketing, when I tell them about what is my main source of income. I try to explain to them what is affiliate marketing is all about but still they are confused, now I started to respond to them as I do online marketing which is hassle free. Been said that I would like to tell you that Affiliate marketing is truly hassle free. Since it doesn’t involves complicated online transactions like merchant account, credit card authorization etc. It is very simple business with no overheads; all you need to spend is time and effort to build that business to the next level. Determination is key to be successful in affiliate marketing.

Some of the rules you need to follow if you want to start hassle free affiliate marketing business.

1) Start on a niche in which you are comfortable writing.

2) Buy a domain name which is relevant to your niche.

3) Contact a web designer to create a search engine friendly website or if you are good at HTML or can work on HTML editors you can work on it yourself.

4) Start of with at least 100 pages of unique content on the site.

5) Learn Search Engine optimization or outsource that to a SEO company.

6) Add more content pages on a regular basis.

7) Join Affiliate Networks like CJ, Neverblue Ads, Shareasale and Amazon Associate so that you can promote their merchants products.

Write reviews on those products, and insert merchants links on these content pages, Don’t over link and confuse the visitor.

9) Add on content until you get regular and good traffic from search engines.

10) Build links to your website with relevant and related website of your niche.

With the above said tips and if you are adding consistent content to your website and updating links sure in the long run you can start earning a good residual income from affiliate marketing.

I get several emails from my readers reading how to promote affiliate marketing. Just adding a affiliate link to your merchants website doesn’t bring you sales. Merchants give affiliate a discount or commission for selling theirs, because they know you will market their products in which ever means you can. So they are paying the commission by cutting down them from their profits.

There are several ways to promote a Merchants product. If you are looking for residual income without much effort is promote affiliate products through writing and review that product a lot. Visibility of your content is key.

One of the method which can bring you lot of residual income is promoting the product is through writing content about it everywhere possible. This can bring in lot of search engine traffic in turn increase sales. I promote couple of products like Aweber and Hostgator.com which bring me in a couple of hundred dollars every month. I try to promote this affiliate like through writing articles on my sites, in forum signature and where ever possible I could place a link. I write more reviews and features and any updated features often so that the visibility of the product increases and as well as sales.

This is one of the best methods if you have good time to promote it this way. It doesn’t mean that you can promote what ever product you think you should have some idea about the niche and should be successful with it. I am a great believer of list building so Aweber is a perfect choice for me to promote as well as I am a web designer so promoting Hostgator.com is not a problem.

I also write several articles in different networks about list building like helium.com, associatedcontent.com and ezine articles. This helps me to increase visibility of the content with not just on my sites and blogs but also on other networks which has huge traffic.

The bottom line is publish as much content possible to increase your affiliate residual income.

Recently, there where tons of blog posts over the internet about the Google Page Rank Update. The huge outcry about the Google’s PR update was from bloggers. Some of the top bloggers like Johnchow.com, problogger.net and copybloggers.com and many major website where all hit by this update. Page Rank popularity became popular in the last few years among Search Engine Optimization and Marketing professional because they understood a website Page Rank can bring their website higher on top of search engine ranking. These also create a multi-million dollar link selling industry. Since PR is closely connected to link popularity of a website a new industry started to involve which was known as Text link brokers. 
With this recent PR update we all have to learn a lesson that gaining PR through fictitious ways and means like selling and buying links can hurt your website natural growth. We all try to promote our website to gain maximum traffic for conversion and this should be our goal. PR will build naturally. For example my blog thomsonchemmanoor.com was started in May2007 to that old but I started building links naturally. It gains a PR of 3 right now. I don’t have any plans to selling or buy links for this site, I am sure with my effort by posting informative and valuable content on affiliate marketing, blogging, expired domain information, search engine optimization and contextual advertisement which is the theme of this blog will gain natural links and PR.

This should be the strategy for any blog or a website. By the way my title is about Google Page Rank is dead or still alive? The answer is PR is still very much alive if you do it in a natural way, PR shows authority of a webpage not just a green line on a toolbar. If you are trying to game the PR algorithm then for those it is dead. Right now the website which has lowered Page Rank their traffic from Google still remains the same.