Friday, 16 March 2012

Why Should my Company Have a Website?


You are a small company with a very few people and only two products but do not have a website of your company. You have no wish to get it done either. When my company is so small and my business is local why should I have a website? Well! Join the group of like-minded people like you. The good news is you can survive just that way without a website design to speak of. The bad news is you can just survive that way and not grow. Life is happening over the Internet and you cannot afford to lag behind.

One very valid point to have a website is that your competitor has a website in the first place. If a customer finds his site before he finds information about you, you have lost a deal. Your website is a business card that you give to multitude of people whom you do not even meet but are your potential customers. Any information that you may give your customer through a business card or by any other way is available to them through a website 24/7 all year through.

Changing technological scenarios have made it a necessity to have a web presence. This adds value to your business and lends credibility. Web design companies specialize in the development of a website with your requirements in mind and make it appealing to your online customers. A good website design is both attractive and publicizes your products or services. It is an effective business tool that can describe and answer all the frequently asked questions (FAQ) that your customer may have.

Advertising has been a popular game being played by companies for centuries. But it has a cost. On the other hand a website is a cheaper alternative and can bring a lot of customers repeatedly. A website design company would charge you for the design only once and your profits are again and again. Internet is the fastest way to gather information for anything around. If a person moves into a new locality, if a person has to buy a product, is a person has to launch an event and you name it. All the information is ready to use on Internet and to network with world and to make your presence felt a good website is the answer. Roughly 500 million people in the world use Internet and your website will increase your chances of getting more customers just by being there.

Tuesday, 28 February 2012

Have You Optimized Your Website Lately?


Search Engine Optimization or SEO can help your website accomplish reaching the first page of Google searches and gets you more traffic. Internet marketing is a useful tool for those businesses which are really active on the Internet and make it big through Internet. Business enquiries pour in after a point of time when SEO is in place and converting them to actual revenue is your call. SEO can do wonders to your business. However, every good thing in life takes time and so does SEO. Do not expect results within a month or two. Expect good results after six months and great results after an year.
It would be better to start optimizing your website in the rudimentary stages. If you are planning to have a new website or redoing the existing one then it would be a great idea to start a new design with SEO in place. Web Designers often follow the finer points of optimization but having an SEO look into the onsite aspect would fetch higher points. Ideally a new website should begin SEO first optimizing the design and then growing from there. But, what if an existing website chooses SEO? Then the optimizer can ensure that the design is optimized by using onsite techniques.
Navigation should be easy in a website with no broken links in the URL. Making use of Webmaster Tools by Google is a useful exercise along with the use of Google analytics. Using the URL in visible places and having unique and accurate page titles, is yet another aspect of good SEO. Blogging, commenting on blogs, forum posting, and video commenting are all good ways to build visibility and back links. Having a resource page with back links listed makes you score some more brownie points. Images in the website cannot be read by a Crawler and these should be optimized by giving Alt attribute to the images.
Above all the techniques in SEO is fresh content. Content is for users and not search engines and hence should target the readers primarily. Keywords though are useful for crawling, they should not be used in high numbers would only annoy your visitor and he may change his mind from staying on the website for longer. After all holding the visitor on your pages is the most important factor to your business. In any case all other techniques can contribute to a crawler’s use.

Friday, 17 February 2012

SEO can help Position your Website in the First Page


Web designs and applications have many purposes serving differently to different businesses. A simple web design is usually developed in HTML. Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) has gone through metamorphosis since it began its journey in the World Wide Web. HTML5 is a search friendly application that enables the website’s visibility to visitors in their search with specific keywords. Search engines cannot see or appreciate the images on website. It is content and content only that is interpreted by search engines when they crawl the web. To get visibility or to be displayed in the results there are certain critical factors that should be taken care of by the web developers.

Content is crucial to any website to be listed in the search engines. Of course plain content is visible to us but HTML text format should be used to allow search engines to decipher. Plain content is understood by crawlers and it should be in tags. Search engines do not understand images, flash files, java applets and non text content. However much crawling technology may advance non text content cannot be deciphered by crawlers. To ensure visibility to crawlers, content must be given importance. Images can be given “alt attributes” in HTML which will in turn provide text to search engines.

Creating web designs that not just appeal to eye but include all search engine friendly options to ensure a faster way to index and appear in search engine ranking. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in itself is a wholesome way to make your web presence felt. If you aspire to reach the first page of search rankings then be prepared for the toil you have to put in. Alternately you may outsource the SEO work to a company that specializes in the area. It is an ongoing activity that has a many aspects to attract traffic and appear in the first page of search engine rankings.

There is no one rule for all search engines. Some engines may index some pages more and others some other pages. So it is difficult to explain why a particular page is indexed or why so many or so few pages are indexed. Search engines depend on links for ranking. Internal linking explains to search engines what each page contains in terms of content. If there are more clicks for a particular keyword in your favor, search engines may pull down a more popular site with less clicks from visitors.

web designs resplendent in search engine optimization definitely can rank better than those that are not optimized.

Friday, 3 February 2012

SEO Web Designs Attract More Traffic


The basic objective of a website is to attract visitors to the website. But a search engine friendly website is more popular than the regular one. Web designers are required to have basic knowledge of search engine optimization techniques. The more the knowledge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)s, the more the web designers’ bargaining capacity.
Though companies do not create websites for search engines, it is worth their money if the web designers follow SEO guidelines. Utmost importance should be given to the human element of a website. It is a known fact that websites are designed or programmed for human beings. Hence an SEO website should be user friendly or searcher friendly. The design is meant for a searcher and not for an inhuman engine. Then how to design a website that is both attractive to eyes, friendly to use and promotes searches organically?
The idea of search engines is to reach the right destination quickly. The humans who design and maintain these search engines follow this precisely. The value add of a search engine is to deliver the user to relevant site by a click of a mouse. There are five major points that a web designing company should look for:
• Web sites should be easy to read and comprehend, otherwise visitors do not stay on the page

• Navigation should be easy from one page to other

• People often search for particular pages with particular information so your page should be easy to locate

• The look of the website should be one of reliable layout and design

• The most important point: people do not have time to wait for the pages to download; a website should be fast to download
The study of web designing and SEO is like exploring the ocean. The study of SEO shows that crawlers index text. Keywords placed rightly in the text in the concerned page are indexed fast. Internal linking is especially an issue for search engines. Search engines find the popularity of a particular site by following the external links of the website. There should be a clear sitemap and resources page to indicate both the pages on the site and the external links of the website.
If a user has not found what the website is all about in 8 seconds then there is something wrong with the design, layout or content. Placing keywords at right places increases the SEO value of a website design. Many software development companies are opting for web designing based on SEO. Even Web Application Development is poised for a pleasant change by following SEO guidelines to allow their web applications to be ranked high in searches.

Monday, 23 January 2012

The Future of Web Applications


The future of software industry lies in web applications that are used to showcase business plans and procedures implemented on the Web. The medium through which these applications are used are user services, business services and data services.

Many business to business interactions are done through web applications over secure networks. There is an increasing popularity of web applications because many overseas companies intend outsourcing their projects which requires well defined web applications. Developers sitting seven seas away can deploy an application on the Internet and you may work from the other end. Huge applications can be uploaded from wherever you are and accesses from anywhere in the world.

Web applications are popular in all industry verticals like finance, software, hospitals, hotels, schools and many others. The basic web applications or web designs are created in HTML, DHTML and some sites use COM components and Java applets. These basic websites then move further using business logic and with a wide range of web scripting in Java/PHP/.NET. As the requirements become complex the website owners choose programming languages like PERL, CORBA etc to perform complex actions through web interface.

Web applications become even more sophisticated and complex when data needs to be saved, stored, retrieved and update information at higher levels. Databases are the most convenient way to organize the entire data in a systematic fashion.

Web design and development has taken a new turn over the last few years with more businesses choosing to use web applications. It is also useful to understand that these businesses also care for their web presence and optimize the web presence by using many methods in search engine optimization (SEO). Web design/application can succeed highly if we spend a few hours every day on optimizing the site.

Search engine optimization (SEO) yields high results in terms of an increase in number of visitors and revenue. More visitors to the site mean more traffic and this translates into more business and their revenue increases. A good design appeals to the visitors’ eye and good content to his senses. A well optimized site appeals to the crawlers and throws up in the search with relevant keywords. The present online business state of affairs demands an increasing need for today's businessmen to escalate business and its presence from existing phase to the next phase. Therefore web presence should be in existence to gain maximum customers’ reach.

Tuesday, 17 January 2012

Outsourcing Software Development to India


In this world of ever changing technologies web design and web applications have stood the test of time in software development. Software development companies have mushroomed in India over the years but only some have withstood the times of recession, turmoil, growth and so on. This is so because of the fundamental organizational skills in the companies.

Web application development is a vast arena where design and development are the key words. What appeals to your immediate eye is the front end design with images, text, digital media and interactive elements. But to present this web designers use markup language, usually HTML for structure and CSS for presentation. Designers may use JavaScript for interactivity to develop pages that web browsers can read.

In a web application there can be many pages linked from a main home page. These links are known as hyperlinks commonly in blue color and underlined to catch the attention of a visitor. Images can also be linked with the help of hyperlinks. A dynamic website or otherwise known as a web application may be built using any or many technologies such as Ajax, Java, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, CSS, Cold Fusion, JavaScript, Perl, Ruby or Ruby on Rails and so on. There is no dearth of technologies that could go into building of a web application. Software development companies per se have designers and developers who can cause applications effectively to enable a smooth functioning of your business. Each business has a specific requirement and one application may not suit all. It is imperative for a developer to understand the requirement and develop the application to meet the business needs.

Software development industry in India has thrived on the needs of the various industries. Countries from the west depend largely on the software industry in India. Hyderabad stands a good bet for software needs of the businesses of the west. Much of their requirements are outsourced to India in general and Hyderabad in particular as this works out cheaper compared to all other options.

A related and a supporting area to web applications is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that has found a firm footing in the software industry in India. This effectively optimizes your web application and enhances your revenues in the form of frequent visitors to your site for business. This is a monthly activity that is carried out as a part of Internet Marketing to make your Internet presence felt.

Monday, 9 January 2012

Web Application Development is a Boon to Users Worldwide


World-Wide Web was initially envisaged as a means for transporting documents. It is now being used as a platform for sophisticated interactive applications relocating the conventional methods. Web applications present abundant benefits like remote access, quick work, access too many people spread over huge platforms and so on. Work can be collaborated on a gigantic size seamlessly. Web application development is a special area of software development that has emerged as an arena of possibilities.

Building web based applications also has taken a turn over the last few years. The traditional desktop applications now have become limited and are built for a custom audience. Web based development has many different approaches involving many technologies that are growing at a very fast pace in the market. There are the open source technologies like PHP and Java and the Microsoft licensed technologies like ASP.NET that are among the most popular versions in web based applications today. The simplest form used to portray your business on the web is browser rendered markup language like HTML with a combination of browser supported language like JavaScript.

Since a Web application is accessed over the Internet it is worthwhile to understand the many advantages this application would have, given the fact that it can be accessed worldwide at the same time. These applications can be updated and maintained worldwide without distributing or installing any additional software to myriad users. This has made the applications very popular.

Web design is a form of web application which may or may not have a dynamic functionality. The recent trend in web designs is to optimize the design and other aspects of the website to suit the crawler. This means that the site is search friendly and is made visible by the search platforms due to its optimization. Search friendly sites are much sought after these days as search engine optimization (SEO) has become a branch requiring much knowledge and study. There are companies that master in building search friendly sites and optimize using various techniques to make the site suitable to the latest algorithm to the most popular search engines.

Software development companies have altered the ways businesses performed and have grown in numerous ways over the last two decades. Software and specially web based applications have created a whole new landscape of choices that directly affect our business growth.