When it comes to website design, there are three very important elements that must influence the process of developing a site which can be viewed on the Internet.

1. Customer Satisfaction.

Although this should be common sense customer satisfaction does not always take a front row seat in the priority department for many agencies. It seems that in the era of our fast paced society a lack of customer satisfaction is the status quo. Companies often rush from completing one job to the next and in the process they somehow skip steps, miss promised timelines, or fail to meet agreed upon priorities. Which comes to my next point.

2. Listening to the Customer’s Needs

The old adage that the customer is always right has been somewhat lost. Clients generally have an idea of what they want to achieve with their websites. Usually, for businesses, it is to bring in new business or increased revenue. What they often do not know; however, is how to accomplish this online in the form of their website. This should not really be a surprise, because often this is not an area of expertise for many entrepreneurs or company executives. This also does not mean that the web development firm hired to complete the website should just run ahead without consulting the client on their needs.

It takes a practiced skill to help the client identify what they want to accomplish online and what the look and feel of the website should be. This initial groundwork will certainly go a long way in understanding the overall goal of the site, and how to best achieve this within best design and development practice.

3. The Ability to Communicate with the Client

This skill of helping the client identify what they want to accomplish online can be best identified as communication. It is the process of exchanging information through various means to accomplish an understanding or shared meaning of ideas. The ability to do this well only comes with skill and practice. A good analogy of this process would be the traveller looking for directions in a foreign place using a different language. The traveller is like the website design firm looking for directions from the local: the client. Like the local who may or may not know the directions, the client may or may not know what they are looking for in their website. A good project manager in the web design firm will use all their skills to gather the information, and help the client along in their journey of conveying what they want in their website.

These skills may include interpersonal projection, asking for clarification, using probing questions to seek further details, and evaluating and explaining the process thoroughly. The client needs to know sooner than later what is possible with the budget specified, and how modifications during the website design process can increase the cost to develop the website.

Although there are many other elements that contribute to excellent website design, web designers or their project managers must be able to provide these three main aspects for the web design project to be on a successful track.

Wayne Peters is the CEO of The Creation Studio, a website design company and is located in Ontario Canada.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Wayne_M_Peters

There is an ever growing number of sites where you can submit your content to be rated by users. This can be an amazing way to generate traffic to your website. I created a new twitter account yesterday, and with in 24 hours was able to get over 500+ click-throughs on my links. Just think about that for a second. On just one social networking site where all you do is update your status, I was able to generate 500 targeted leads to my websites.

How Did I Drive Traffic Using Twitter?

I used another website called hootsuite to schedule posts to my twitter account ever 5 minutes, and then once an hour when I got tired of typing. I followed as many people with similar interests as I could, and I made my posts very intriguing and mysterious. I used a method called the Zeigarnik effect. I will tell you more about that in a minute, but first let me tell you a little bit more about myself.

I have been a Asheville web designer for the last 2 months, although I’ve been into web design for 11 years. I create stimulating graphics and animation that have helped my clients establish an online presence. I am always available for worth while projects. I am also a DJ/Producer and have been playing music all my life. I have pictures to prove it. I have many interests like marketing, the law of attraction, quantum physics, healthy living, spirituality, dancing, juggling, magic, art and travel, and I joy myself in being of service to others.

Now, back to the Zeigarnik effect. What I’m about to share with you is a very powerful marketing technique, and should always be used for good not evil. With that said, here is what Wikipedia has to say about the Zeigarnik effect:

“In psychology, the Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.

Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik first studied the phenomenon after her professor, Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin, noticed that a waiter had better recollections of still unpaid orders.

In Gestalt psychology, the Zeigarnik effect has been used to demonstrate the general presence of Gestalt phenomena: not just appearing as perceptual effects, but also present in cognition.

The Zeigarnik effect suggests that students who suspend their study, during which they do unrelated activities (such as studying unrelated subjects or playing games), will remember material better than students who complete study sessions without a break.”

So, that’s what I did. I would write awesome little one-liners that made people have to click on my links just to find out what I was talking about. You can use these same techniques to explode your downline if you’re into home based business opportunities. I usually try to stay away from them, but this one really grabbed my attention. I really think this is a great idea, and something that could really make you a lot of money if you work just a few hours a day. Even just a few minutes. Click here to see what I mean…

To your success!!!

Jacob A. Louis
Multimedia Producer

My name is Jacob.  I’ve been designing websites since 1997, and I can design anything from an elegant one page site to a high quality interactive flash website. I also have experience with search engine optimization, so if you search for “DJ Story”, you will find my music website intuitivebeats.com is number 1 on google, yahoo and many others. If you search for “Affirmation Music”, you will find another website of mine myaffirmationsong.com on the first page. You can find out about some of the services I offer in my web design portfolio

Client Testimonials

“I had a vision for my website- and I was blown away when you made that vision come true on screen. And then, it just got tighter, and better, and went far beyond my expectations. Thanks again for such a great job and professionalism throughout building my website.”

-Brenton Keith

MagicBrent.com

“Jacob is incredibly patient, helpful and easy to work with. I highly recommend his web design services.”

-Kristin Melissa Pixiemagic

SeedofCreation.com

The first step in getting prepared to a web designer is to know why you want a website. What purpose do you want the website to serve. Many people start a website for enhanced promotional reach, and to create a stronger branding of an already existing business, product or service. Some people start websites to showcase their work as an artist, musician or anything else. Others just want to share information and help educate. The bottom line is having a website is almost essential if you want to keep up with the rest of the competition, but not just any website. You want a website that achieves your desired results. Here are some things to check off your list before hiring a web designer.

What is Your Call to Action?

Marketers realize that web design is essential in getting someone to take the action they want. Every good website is completely leading up to the prospect taking a specific action. Some websites are trying to get you to call them by phone. Other websites are designed to get you to sign up to the email list. Whatever action you want prospects to take, the content has to be quality to get people to stay on your page long enough to take any desired action. It is important in choosing your content to know what the desired response is, so you can lay down the bread crumbs along the right path so to speak. Often you will see red or orange colors near the call to action, because those colors increase blood flow, and make you want to take action.

Planning Pages and Choosing a Color Scheme

This is an important thing to think about before you get started, because you want to keep your main navigation consistent. The more organized you have the web pages the better. I think it’s a good idea to keep the number of buttons in the main navigation down to 7 or less web pages to making it look too busy. With a content rich site you can usually group everything in the website into a few categories, and have more pages within those 5-7 pages. Usually it’s something like this:

Home | Services | Articles | About Us | Contact | Links

Within those 6 pages you can have as many links on either side or in the middle to just about anything. The most important thing you want your visiter to see should be on the home page. You don’t want them to get board while it’s loading some huge image or intro, and leave your website.

The color scheme is also an important thing to consider. The designer can help you find the exact colors, although it’s usually good to keep the website design’s main color scheme simple. If you have too many different colors in the design it starts looking busy. Using just 1 or 2 colors makes your color rich images stand out more. Black, white and grey are neutral colors that can be used with any other colors.

Making Your Content Search Engine Friendly

It is important that your content be engaging to the reader, and while gathering your content you will want to make sure any blocks of text you use are rich with keywords and phrases to help boost your search engine ranking. To find the most effective and relevant phrases, I usually go on google adwords keyword generator to discover what the most searched phrases are with the least competition from other websites. Then I use those keywords and phrases throughout the site.

You also need to make sure your web designer puts what are called “alt tags” on the images. These make it so that people with disabilities can hover the mouse over the image, and it will speak what’s in the alt tags. Another good reason to have alt tags is that if for any reason the image doesn’t load or loads very slowly at least people will see the description in the alt tag. It’s also a good idea to have your keywords in the alt tags.

Where to Find Good Content for Your Website

Besides creating your own content, there are many free content sources available on the internet. For text content there are article databases where articles can be used royalty free in exchange for a link back to the authors website. Using these articles is a great way to build up your keyword rich content fast, and writing original content, and submitting it to these databases is a great way to get targeted links back to your website. Having targeted links back to your website helps generate more traffic, and it also helps with your search engine ranking. If you are looking for quality images then I recommend using stock photos. There are many websites that offer free stock photos, or you can pay a little bit for them. It’s better to use stock images than going and using people’s random images from the web, because you can get in trouble for copyright infringement if you aren’t careful.

Summery

Now that you’ve followed these 5 steps, and you’re ready to have your professional website designed contact me for a free initial consultation:

Jacob Louis
Multimedia Producer
http://www.webheadservice.com
jacob@webheadservice.com
828.398.4723