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Tips For Quickly Creating Your Website

If you are interested in creating a website that does not solely look good, but also moves fast enough to keep your visitors content and constantly coming back, read on. You will learn how to boost the loading speed of your web pages and make sure you are using the right approach to reach the success you are aiming for.

Does Your Site Take More Than 3 Seconds To Load?

If your website requires more than 3 seconds to load, 4 out of 10 visitors will most likely abandon their quest and search for a different site. Does it take 4 or 5 seconds? Add an extra 7 or 14 percent to that same conversion rate drop and you should receive the wakeup call you need. The solution? Focus on diminishing the front-end loading time for your pages. Mainly, focus on HTTO requests and minimize them as much as possible. You can do it by creating a website design that is simple, but at the same time appealing enough. You might only need a couple of images and text to get started, and a few CSS elements which you can cleverly reunite with the help of just one stylesheet. Do the same with all the scripts on your website and combine them using just one script. Bring together your CSS sprites with your site images and use a specialized service that can help you reduce the request overloads and also the total page download bytes number. If you are also looking for ways to reduce your analytic call tracking costs, check out the addsource.com site. You can achieve similar results by enabling resource compression processes while using deflate or gzip options. Keep in mind your website content also needs to go through an optimization process in order for the compression to be ideal. Use CSS and HTML codes in order to do this and eliminate all line breaks and additional spaces that are not needed to get started.

Things To Do In Connecticut

If you are planning a trip to Connecticut and you would like to learn first-hand which are some of the most exciting places to visit here, you have reached the right page. Without further ado, here are a few of the highlights of the city and the reasons why they continue to be so popular even today.

The Mystic Seaport – New England’s Reacreation Place

The museum is located over 17 acres on the ex George Greenman & Co Shipyard and its builders have used no less than five dozen historic buildings and four huge ships to recreate old times. The addition of more than 500 small vessels nicely placed along the Mystic River is an extra touch of the Mystic Seaport. Come here and do not walk away without at least admiring the amazing crafts and trades created by traditional handymen. You will find out all about the history of the place with the help of the interpreters there and, as a surprise for most visitors, the whaleboat or ship rescuing live demonstrations will surely keep your spirits high. A smaller museum which plays the role of a children’s playroom can also come in extremely handy for parents travelling with kids. Finally, the seaport itself is composed of a general store, a jail, a boat shop, jail, pharmacy, chapel, sail loft, and a school. If you think you should postpone your trip to Connecticut because you’ve just discovered you have a broken lock somewhere around the house, simply contact the fellows at www.247locksmithservice.com and they should immediately cater to your urgent locksmith needs.

The Wadsworth Museum

This museum was built by Daniel Wadsworth, whose father made a nice fortune off trading, banking, or manufacturing. Daniel married Faith Trumbull, who was the niece of famous artist John Trumbull. The museum itself was constructed on the ground where the family had its home and it was later on taken by Elizabeth Colt, the widow of Samuel Colt; she added a thousand more pieces to the museum when she donated the items that she had bought after selling Colt’s weapons.

Web Design Invoice Cartoon

Cartoon is about invoices, but the same applies to website design and the use of templates. Great cartoon from webdesignerdepot.com.

Web Design Invoice Humor

Birthday Club Marketing

“Delight Your Customers and Improve Your Bank Balance: Easy Program Works Year-Round”

Birthday Club Coupon — Ask about Birthday Club Marketing

Are you looking for an easy, inexpensive way to market your product or service to new and existing customers? Then why not start a Birthday Club*?

Birthday Clubs have long been a favorite tool of savvy marketers.
Here’s why.

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People love to be remembered, recognized and appreciated.
Birthday Clubs help you maintain favorable “top of mind” awareness.
Birthday Clubs generate more business (money!) for you when someone redeems the offer.
They’re an easy way to collect contact info (name/email) for future marketing.

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NEW – Birthday Club Management from Your Friend on the Web, Diana Ratliff

There’s never been such an easy, hassle-free way to set up and manage a birthday club. I’ll set you up to collect names, email addresses and birth months on your website or Facebook page (you don’t even need a website at all.) Coupons are automatically delivered via email, so there’s no need to remember to send out the coupon every month – the software I use does it for you. This is truly “set and forget” marketing!

*Of course this program is not limited to people’s birthdays – why not celebrate wedding anniversaries or graduations? How about pet birthdays? Salespeople can celebrate the month someone bought their home/car, or the month they became a client.

Sample Birthday Club Offers

Of course YOUR offer can be whatever you want, but here are some ideas:

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Free meal or dessert
An upgrade to your normal service
$10 off a purchase
Coupon for oil change, coffee – the offer does NOT have to be from your own business. Partner with a fellow business owner and give away one of THEIR products/services!

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I’ll be happy to work with you to craft a good offer – and set any terms/conditions you’d like on the offer as well.

“Birthdays Mean Business – Contact Me TODAY”

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Be Suspicious of Award-Winning Web Design Firms…

… unless the awards are for the sales they generate for their clients.

David Ogilvy, considered by some to be the “father of modern advertising”, puts it this way:

Be suspicious of awards.

The pursuit of creative awards seduces creative people from the pursuit of sales. We have been unable to establish any correlation whatever between awards and sales. At Ogilvy and Mather, we now give an annual award for the campaign which contributes the most to sales. Successful advertising sells the product without drawing attention to itself, it rivets the consumer’s attention on the product. Make the product the hero of your advertising.

More great quotes from David Ogilvy

Ben Hunt, author of “Save the Pixel”, puts it this way:

“Design your content, not the box it comes in.”

How do you know you’re talking to a web designer who’s focused on your sales, not their design? By the questions they ask. If she’s asking about what products make you a profit, the most desired response from your website, how you want to follow up with prospects, your plan to keep site content current – that’s a good sign. Those questions relate to generating leads and sales.

If the conversation revolves around colors and layout and custom graphics – the designer is focused more on the “box” (the site), not your product. Yes, the graphic and visual appeal of a site is important – but look for a designer who realizes that the underlying goal if your web presence is to make you money.

To put it another way – look for a web design company who values sales rewards over sales awards.

Web Designers Facing Extinction

Web Designers Facing Extinction? It’s a tough time to be a website designer – how do you make money providing a service that people can get dirt-cheap, if not altogether free?

I’ve been hearing radio ads about a partnership between Intuit and Google. They’re offering a free domain name, free hosting for 1 year, and a free theme. Most hosting companies have their own website templates – in fact 1and1.com is offering theirs for free through TV ads.

WordPress itself, the CMS (content management system) that has rocketed to popularity in recent years, is absolutely free. You can buy high-quality custom themes (site templates) for less than $100. This site was built using the extraordinarily versatile Smallbiz Theme, and I’ve used it for quite a few websites.

So what’s a web designer to do? If your primary qualification has been “I can build you a nice-looking site”, you’re in trouble. Because it’s never been easier to get a nice site without a web designer at all.

Disclaimer here – yes, some business people don’t have the time or inclination to build their own sites, even if they are free. People aren’t so dumb as to think 1&1 or Google will hand them clients on a plate. And of course there will always be a need for higher-end, custom design work.

But no longer are people willing to shell out a significant sum of money for web design work. It’s time for customers to challenge their web designers to be web marketers. To expect traffic and leads from their websites.

In my opinion, website designers who don’t “evolve” to this changing environment are going to die out.

What do YOU think?