Tag Archive for web design

Make Sure Your Website Looks Professional With These Tips

August 9, 2011 No comments

When you are designing a website for your business, you definitely want to ensure that your website looks professional. You want visitors to get a sense of professionalism when they visit your site. After all, if your site looks like it was simply thrown together, visitors probably won’t feel comfortable purchasing from you. It’s important that your site makes people trust you if you want to turn them into customers. To help you ensure that your website looks professional, here are a few tips that you need to follow.

Tip #1 – Offer Helpful and Interesting Content

One tip that you need to use to make sure your website looks professional is to offer helpful and interesting content to your visitors. When they come to your site, they are probably looking for information in the niche you are working in, which means you need to offer them the information that they are looking for. If you don’t offer content that is helpful, visitors will quickly leave your site and go somewhere else. You also need to ensure that the content you have on your site is interesting. Make sure you hook your reader and keep them interested in what you have to say. With good content, you can keep visitors coming back and you will be better able to convert them into customers as well.

Tip #2 – Ensure Your Site Loads Quickly

Another important tip to remember for a professional looking website is to ensure that your site loads quickly. No one wants to sit there and wait a long time for a site to load. If the site takes too long to load, most people will simply leave the site instead of waiting. Check out your website to ensure that it loads quickly. Avoid using too many graphics, which can slow things down. When you do use graphics, make sure that they are optimized so you still get good load times.

Tip #3 – Avoid Popups, Music, and Playing Videos

Make sure you avoid popups, music, and automatically playing videos on your website if you want it to look professional. Popups are frustrating to most visitors, and if they get frustrated with too many popups, they will leave the site. It’s not even a good idea to use popups to collect information. Music that plays in the background, especially if it doesn’t have a stop button, can really be annoying to visitors as well. Skip the music for a more professional website. Last, don’t put up videos that automatically play on your website. Allow visitors to choose to watch any videos that you have up. Most people will leave if a video starts playing automatically when they arrive at the site.

Tip #4 – Keep Content Changing

Last, make sure you keep content changing on your website to make sure it looks professional. Make sure you are adding new content on a regular basis. This is especially important for getting return visitors. Visitors won’t want to return if they always see the same old content. Offering more helpful content that changes will keep them coming back.

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The Impact of Social Networking on Compliance

July 19, 2011 No comments

Popular social networking sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook all have their place in our lives. For the most part, that place is in our private lives, but some businesses have caught up with the potential of social networking to advance their own goals.

Social media compliance is proving its worth for lead generation, marketing, and self-promotion. Those businesses who are taking advantage of this new technology have been quick to benefit. Equally quick have been the warnings about compliance.

A company may be exposed to compliance risk if employees are editing their information on one of the sites, such as“favoriting” or “liking” posts. There are also risks in allowing recommendations to be displayed on a profile, communicating via status updates, tweets, or social media compliance without tagging, or using social networks without a stringent governance policy in place.

One of the other major concerns about social networking is the risk of data breach. Social networks are mediums where personally identifiable information and protected health information can be leaked either intentionally or by accident. Examples of this include an IM chat where a discussion takes place containing sensitive information. Another example is a non-real-time breach in which a file is transferred as part of a Facebookchat.

As a result of this emerging risk, FINRA issued guidance on blogs and social networking sites in Regulatory Notice 10-06. This was released in January 2010. It says that firms must adopt and define reasonably designed policies and procedures to protect themselves, and any clients or investors.

Such is the prevalence of social media use in the workplace that companies are now required to archive and preserve social networking communications. This is mandated under SEC Rules 17a-3 and 17a-4 and FINRA rule 3110.

Business is in a difficult situation here. Social networking is too good a resource to ignore, but it also has inherent risks when it comes to compliance. The easiest way for an organization to protect itself is by having a robust policy on using social networking sites during work time. Having a single, clear, robust social network compliance policy is the very first thing a business needs to stay on the right side of the law.

The main problem with social networking compliance is the tracking of breaches and use of these sites. A data breach is regarded as the disclosure of information, not the use of it, so businesses can easily find themselves non-compliant if they aren’t careful.

At the moment, companies have three options. The first is that they can ban access to social networking altogether. That cures the compliance problem, but they risk missing out on opportunities. The second is to have someone or something monitor social network activity in the workplace. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially with the advent of web-enabled phones.

The third option is to outsource compliance to a third party. This not only puts the responsibility on someone else’s shoulders, but it lets the experts take care of it. Paying someone with the right expertise and the right equipment is the ideal solution in most cases.

Social networking is a valuable business tool. The ability to collaborate and discuss ideas from anywhere in the world is too good to miss. That means these networks are here to stay. Businesses who can exploit them while remaining compliant will have a significant advantage over those who don’t.

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A Team of Web Design Experts with a Solution for You

July 5, 2011 No comments

It can be hard to select the best web design company from the many companies in the Charleston area, and there are many different companies that offer many benefits you obtain by using their services. Many companies offer:

  • Expert web design
  • Low prices
  • Prompt service
  • A simple website

We offer all these things and more.

When it comes to an expert web service, you will be hard pressed to find a Charleston web design company that has more experience and success than Thought Mechanics. Our team of graphic designers have years of experience under their belt, and our virtual portfolio speaks loudly of our success and expertise with web design.

Most of our designers are young, energetic, and enthusiastic, and they bring innovation and originality to the table. They all have many years of experience with web design, and we will only bring the best web designers to work on your project. All of the graphics and web designers that will work with you to create your website will be the best in Charleston, and we guarantee that you will be pleased with their services.

Any design that you can dream up, these talented professionals can put down on paper and transform into a website. No matter how unique or original the concept, our graphics design experts can take your idea and turn it into reality. Your imagination is the limit of our creations, and you can expect to see innovative and original concepts come to life as you work together with our designers to create your site.

The price that we offer is far lower than the majority of the prices offered by other premium web design services in Charleston, but the services that we provide far outstrip our competitors. You will be surprised to find how low our prices are, and you will be hard pressed to find a better service at a lower price.

Our team of experts knows how to work hard, and you will have your website promptly. We will work with your to establish a reasonable time frame for the creation of your website, and you can be completely certain that you will receive your website on the establish date.

Our websites are simple and easy to understand, even for those with no prior experience in administrating websites. Our team will create a website for you that is simple and easy to use, but that will provide you with all the services you need. Not only will you be able to upload videos, articles, and images to your site, but you will easily be able to handle the multitude of other administrational tasks that make running a website a full time job.

An added benefit that you will receive when you contract our services is the instant success of your website. There are millions of websites floating in cyberspace, and picking one website out of those millions is impossible. Or it can be with SEO.

Our SEO experts know exactly how to take your web page and place it near the top of the search engine results lists. Our SEO team will ensure that the SEO practices used by your website are ethical and effective, and you will find that you can continue the SEO practices on your website easily to ensure that you retain your high ranking with the search engines.

You will also receive the training needed to easily be able to take over the administrational tasks that running a website includes, and even the most technologically challenged people have found that our websites are easy to understand and use. After spending a few hours with our team, you will find that you have a much more solid grasp on the principles of running your website, and you will be able to fly solo once the creation of your website is done.

Our goals are to bring you results that are measurable and visible, and we are certain that you will be pleased with the outcome of your website’s performance. Our websites are guaranteed to bring results, and you will begin to see success once your website is ready.

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Web design and web development portfolio / case studies

June 30, 2011 No comments

Lone Star Media is the perfect choice to help your company achieve any online goal! We specialize in creating your site from the ground up, but also work with companies on specific projects.

We helped NAI/Stoneleigh Huff Brous McDowell develop an application to monitor commissions each month. Creating an intranet interface utilizing ColdFusion and Microsoft SQL Server 7.0, managers are better equipped to generate accurate estimates of the gross commission revenue each month.

Cormark Real Estate on the other hand, needed their site built from the ground up. This provided Lone Star Media with an idea of how they wanted to portray their real estate company on the web. Lone Star Media created a very unique design which enabled their clients to gain valuable information about their business and their agents. It gave their clients one place to not only view the entire list of property listings from the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), but to also gain valuable information necessary to buy or sell a home.

These are just a couple of the success stories resulting from working with Lone Star Media. If you are seeking personalized design services for any part of your business, please contact us directly so that we may show you a portfolio relative to your specific business goals and objectives. You’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg thus far!

Cormark Real Estate

Integrity Mortgage Group and Real Estate Services, formerly Cormark Real Estate Group, contracted with Lone Star Media to build a dynamic website for realtors to update their profiles in real time. Lone Star Media worked with North Texas Real Estate Information Services (NTREIS) to provide the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) listings to all of the realtors’ clients online.

Family Event Website

Maciel-Salazar Reunion is a website designed for personal use. Lone Star Media helps any client, small or large; achieve a web presence that is best suited for their needs. We have developed and designed several custom website for individuals. We do not use templates, allowing our clients to select any color scheme or design appropriate for their special occasion.

Look Into My House.com, Inc.

At Look Into My House.com, Inc., mortgage brokers and lenders throughout the United States provide virtual home tours to realtors, creating steady streams of lending services and lasting relationships among real estate agents, homebuyers, builders and developers. Lone Star Media designed the entire web-site, enabling a database search application, plus real-time client uploads of new and updated home profiles.

NAI Stoneleigh Huff Brous McDowell

NAI Stoneleigh Huff Brous McDowell, a global commercial real estate company, contracted with Lone Star Media to develop a back-end broker revenue application. This secure site allows them to log and evaluate monthly revenue performance for each broker.

Railhead Industrial Park

Railhead Industrial Park Investors, Inc. needed a clean professional site to assist them in marketing Railhead Industrial Park to potential and existing tenants. Lone Star Media built an application which also allows interested parties to contact the broker of record directly from the website, enabling Railhead Industrial Park to capture and process leads more effectively.

Sassy Cowgirls

Diamond M Ranch Designs and Susan Edison needed a website so that her artwork could be displayed to a national audience. Lone Star Media built a website to her specific needs including multiple portfolio sections and a contact page to capture sales leads.

Skin Transformation

Skin Transformation is an e-commerce site designed, developed and hosted by Lone Star Media. This site was developed using MySQL and Cold Fusion to sell Dermatology and Skin Care products. This site uses our newest shopping cart technology and is a fast growing, successful e-commerce site. We used our search engine optimization and e-commerce marketing skills to develop this company from ground zero into a profitable venture in only 4 months.

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Images, Web Design and Search Engine Optimization

June 28, 2011 No comments

It was some time ago now, but many of you reading this right now may remember that at one time, there were no images or graphics of any kind on the internet. You connected to the web using a dial up modem and the pages you could access were text only, usually without any particular attention paid to formatting or typography.

web design and seo

Of course, chicago web design has made incredible leaps forward since the days of 14.4 K modems and text-only web browsers. While text only browsers are still available (and actually, you may want to install one yourself for reasons we’ll explain later on), they are hardly the norm. Web content is now decidedly visually oriented and people think about the World Wide Web and the pages on it in a different way than they once did. The view of internet content was once that it was a sort of technologically advanced extension of print media, but the web has now taken on a life of its own and has become very much its own medium.

Photos and other images are now an important part of nearly every website, especially now that dynamic Web 2.0 platforms have become popular ways for users to share their own content. It’s almost unimaginable in this day and age that someone would create a website without including any graphical elements for readers. Everyone uses images as part of their web design now, but what not everyone is doing with their website images is using them to their full advantage.

If you’ve spent any time reading about web design or basically any other internet related topic, chances are that you’re at least somewhat familiar with the concept of search engine optimization or SEO. This is a fascinating topic in itself, though we’ll refrain from going into too much detail of the nuts and bolts of search engine optimization here. What is important to know about SEO for our purposes today is that it refers to a number of techniques which increase the amount of traffic to websites by fine tuning the content as well as some of the behind the scenes elements of web pages to make it easier for major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to index their content properly and increase site rankings in search engine results.

Even if you already know about using keywords to optimize your text content for the search engines, you may not know that the images on your website can also be optimized in order to make your site more attractive to search engines and thus easier for your target audience to find.

Optimizing your site’s images and other graphical content is a good thing to do for a couple of reasons. It helps your site to climb higher in the search results so that you’ll bring in more visitors. It’s also a good web design move in terms of enhancing your site’s accessibility to visually impaired web users and users who use older hardware and software with limited webpage rendering capabilities – and increasingly, the major search engines are starting to reward accessibility standards compliant websites with a boost in their rankings. It’s a win-win situation; your site benefits in terms of more traffic and you do the right thing by making the web just a little more accessible to users who sometimes find that not every website’s content is available to them.

Best of all, optimizing the images on your site is fairly easy to do. You don’t have to be a programmer in order to do this, though you will need to learn a few simple HTML tags. If your website is powered by WordPress or many other modern content management systems, you may not even have to do that, since these platforms usually offer a user-friendly method of tagging your images as you upload them to the site and post them on your web pages.

Assuming yours is a static HTML/XHTML based website, you’ll have to use Alt tags for your images; these provide alternate text which is placed on your site instead of the images themselves when your site is viewed in text only browsers or using screen reader software.  Without these tags, search engines don’t know what your images are or what they’re about  - they only see the text content of your site and its HTML code.

This is where trying out a text-only browser (like Lynx for Windows or w3m or Links for Linux systems) is educational. View your site in a text only browser before and after adding Alt tags; before, there’s nothing – but after, there’s a description of the image which actually tells your visitors something. Since these Alt tags can also incorporate your site’s important keywords where appropriate, it can also give your site’s SEO efforts just a little more of a boost. Every little bit helps when you’re trying to attract an audience, so optimizing your images isn’t just good web design, it’s also good business.

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Quality Website Development?

May 5, 2011 No comments

Web development is an essential approach for just about any business these days. More and more businesses are using the Internet to open doors to many more potential customers than the business could attract through traditional means of advertising.

So where do you start?

If you find yourself wondering how you will attract new customers to your website, you should look into obtaining a full web development scheme as soon as possible. There are few options out there to help you do this. If you have some money to invest, you may want to look at possibly outsourcing some of the more difficult tasks. Hiring a web development firm, or small group of designers can be a good approach. There are many places that can be found on the net simply by searching with your favorite search engine. A common keyword you might use is, “hire web developer”, or “hire web designer”.

 

Another approach is a using a free solution. This may seem to be a little unrealistic; however, there are good open source options that can offer a good foundation to start from. One of the most common and extremely reliable is, Word Press. Another (Although a bit more difficult to master) is, Joomla. A quick search on the net will provide a plethora of resources to learn about these solutions. Additionally, a good number of web developers have a vast amount of knowledge with these systems.

Before you can begin with any web development, you should really consider the approach of branding. Branding in simple, typically involves a slogan combined with a catchy company logo. One of the best examples is of course, Nike. Nike has branded itself as a sports apparel company and now people from all over the world immediately think of the company every time they need a new pair of shoes or some athletic gear. While it is highly unlikely that you will ever reach the heights of Nike, you want try and create something that will stick in the minds of your customers every time they need something that falls under your expertise.

The next thing you will need to do is establish your online presence. This can be a bit of a tough process when you consider there could be a vast amount of other websites out there competing for your customers’ business. The thing to keep your mind and focus on is having an edge, or an element about your website or service that sets you apart. In doing so, it can potentially cut the competition down immediately.  Study your competitors. The more you educate yourself on what your competitors are doing and are not doing, can very likely give you the first manifestation of ideas to help you formulate your edge.

When the time comes to finally get your website up and going, start simple. Begin by making your website as easy to navigate as possible. The last thing you want is to create a situation where your visitors cannot easily find what it is you’re trying to offer. To simplify this, think of it in terms of ‘clicks’ – how many clicks does it take a potential visitor to get to where they need?  Too many clicks and they could become impatient and choose to go elsewhere. Furthermore, try to develop a website with a homepage that concisely outlines who you are and what you do. A good homepage will typically summarize a good USP (Unique Selling Proposition, or “the edge” talked about earlier). This can be done with good, engaging copy, or even a streaming video. Potential customers usually have one thing in mind when ending up on your home page: How and what you offer can help them. It might also be a good idea to feature links to the most popular pages on the site, headings to help with navigation, and a search function.

In the end, it might take you some time to perfect your website, but it will be well worth it once the page begins directing traffic to your business. You do not have to be an expert to build a website, although it can be extremely helpful to hire a professional, as they know how to optimize the website’s layout and make it more appealing to customers. They can also troubleshoot any problems that arise as you gain traffic to your website, making it a much more efficient solution.

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