1. What is a website?
A website is simply an electronic book, brochure or flyer designed to transmit information or sell product via the Internet.
It is the "shop window" to your Internet business.
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2. What do I need to start the web site process?
- Call or email Absolutely Stylish Website Design.
- Time to ask questions, discuss your goals and plan your website over a coffee.
- An idea of your target group and geographical area.
- If possible view some websites for ideas to help you develop your website.
- Photographs, logo, company colours to be used on your website if applicable.
- Registered business name with Dept of Fair Trading. This enables you to purchase a domain name.
- Domain name is a unique name which identifies your website. ie www.absolutelystylish.com.
- Account with an Internet Service Provider.
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- Optimise and promote your website
- Use well designed page content which has keywords
- Optimise! Promote! Optimise! Promote! and keep on doing it
- Contact Absolutely Stylish Website Design and allow us to do it for you, we pride ourselves on offering you "simply the best promotion".
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If clients cannot easily navigate through your website they may never return. Web site navigation system must be clear and simple, otherwise clients may have difficulty navigating through the pages.
If your page elements do not serve a purpose, don't use them.
Use the "Home Page" to attract your potential clients and make it interesting enough to keep them there for a longer look. Important information should be on the first page. Your clients should not have to search through the website to find what you want them to see. Keep It Simple!
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Search engines are computers which store information for retrieval by you. Examples are Google, Yahoo, Excite, Alta Vista and NineMSN. They are simply libraries.
Typically, a search engine works by sending out a spider (bot) to fetch as many documents as possible. Some of these spiders have names like GoogleBot, Yahoo Slurp or Alta Vista Scooter.
Another programme, called an indexer, then reads the documents collected by the 'bots' and creates an index based on the words contained in each document saving them to the search engine computers for you to access in your searches. The Challenge!
To build a website, attract the 'bots' and people. Create it so that people can find it and spend time there. Write it so that it is on the first page of millions of search results just like in "Yellow Pages".
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Keywords are words included in the body text of web pages, they are used by both search engines and people. Keywords are also included in the coding of web pages.
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Hyperlinks are text words found on every web page, they are normally underlined and a different colour to the rest of the text on the page. Clicking a link with the mouse takes one to the location that the link has been programmed to go to.
Links are not always underlined, they may be a small icon (picture), they may change colour or even increase in size to name a few methods of letting one know that they are a link.
Search engines follow the path of the links in their continual search for information about websites. Links are very important to search engines. Links are the internet's navigation systems enabling access to the internet's highways taking a person from one website to another.
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Short for Hyper Text Markup Language, the basic authoring language used to create documents (web pages) in your website.
HTML defines the structure and layout of a web document by using a variety of tags and attributes.
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A Domain name (uniform resource locator - url) is a name purchased by the owner of a website. The Domain name is the unique address of that website, www.absolutelystylish.com is a typical Domain name.
At the end of the domain name you will find .com, .biz, .org, .net etc. These identify the type of organisation represented by the website. .au identifies the organisation as Australian, other examples are .my for Malaysia or .it for Italy.
Domain names are renewed periodically ie 2, 3, 5, 8 years otherwise they become available to other website owners on the open market even though you may have created the name yourself. Don't forget to renew yours! Domain names are relatively cheap these days costing as little as US$6.
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Optimisation (SOE - Search Engine Optimisation) and promotion are essential after the search engines have found the website and start making information available on the publics search patterns for the website.
Feedback from the search engines to develop the minor changes required for success becomes even more important as the website progresses through the ratings and competition is greater.
It is highly unlikely that a none optimised and promoted website will be found unless a person knows its domain name or stumbles across it by accident! The goal is to be on the first page of any search, preferably in the top five addresses.
Optimisation is required to develop, promote, upgrade, maintain and customise your website.
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Your website is your shop window. Clients should easily be able to find your "shop window" using generic terms. Typically, a generic term is a term used by a person wishing to locate a product by its common name ie cheese, car, dog etc. Some search terms for a bicycles shop could be "bicycle", "bike" or "bike shop". If a bike shop can't be found then adding another word such as the area can obtain results.
We now generate the generic term "campbelltown bike shop" or "sydney bike shop".
If the website cannot be found then their internet "shop" isn't open and they are losing trade.
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An elegant or fashionable mode, good or approved fashion, elegance, smartness - The Macquarie Dictionary
Style is in the eye of the beholder. Most website owners require a successful website which may not be stylish. It will however be functional, informative, to the point, easy to view, easy to move around and pleasant on the eye.
Certain website may need to be stylish like an Image Consultant, Fashion Designer, Interior Decorator, Hair Stylist and many more. Their websites will also need the characteristics discussed in the previous paragraph.
So who determines if a website is stylish or not. Your visitors vote with their mouse, they either stay and buy or move on and find something to their liking. Another reason to optimise and promote?
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