The JEHM Net News

Website Design Considerations

By: Tim Knox

Q: Should I build and maintain my business Web site myself or pay someone else to do the work for me?
– Wesley L.

A: When you say, pay someone else to do the work for you, Wesley, I am going to assume that you are talking about hiring a professional Web site designer to do the work and not your next-door neighbor’s teenage son. If my assumption is correct, then read on. If not, go ahead and surf on over to Dilbert.com. You will get no good out of the advice I’m about to give, so you might as well consult Dilbert for your hot business tips.

Should you build and maintain your business Web site yourself or pay someone to do it for you? Let me answer your question with a couple of my own. Number one: is building and maintaining Web sites the key focus of your business? Number two: could your time be better spent doing more important things like, oh I don’t know, say running your business? If your answers were no and yes, respectively, then you have no business building and maintain a Web site.

Remember this: (more…)

By: Silvia Hartmann

Writing chained auto-responder messages to sell a product is a good idea in principle, but in practice it can LOSE you clients just as well if you don’t get right.

A chained auto-responder is a sequence of emails that gets delivered automatically when someone subscribes to this autoresponder.

It is used in marketing to deliver mini-advertisements, teaser courses, demo extracts, testimonials or stepped sales letters, and all of this is designed to get the client eventually to click on the “buy me now” link for the main product that is being promoted.

There are three main problems with chained auto-responders. Avoid these, TEST your linked auto-responders before you inflict them on the general public, and you should see significant increases in your sales. (more…)

By: Dean Shainin

There are many important aspects to consider with web HOSTING services and plans. Choosing the wrong web HOSTING plan can cause a real problem down the road with your business. This in turn, can cost your business lost customers and sales. If you take some time to compare the different options available to you, and to see what is the best web HOSTING plan for your situation, it can help you in the long run.

Are You Going To Have A Personal Home Page Or A Business Site Hosted?

The first thing you may want to consider with the web HOSTING service is the type of website you are going to have hosted. A small business may not need the options that come with larger HOSTING plans. On the other hand, if you are going to plan on having a large ecommerce site hosted, you may want all the bells and whistles that are provided from some web HOSTING services. When you have decided on what type of website you will have hosted, you can then figure how to compare the web HOSTING services and plans. (more…)

By: Halstatt Pires

Many new webmasters, and even seasoned web designers, create web sites that are very inefficient in regard to updates. Updating your site keeps visitors coming back day in and day out, while at the same time giving search engines plenty to index. Yet if the task of updating your web site is not an efficient one, hundreds and thousands of hours can be lost. Using simple solutions, such as content management systems, the efficiency of updating a web site can be improved dramatically.

The Trap of a “Simple” Web Site

When I first started learning web design, I learned enough to make a simple web page. “Cool! I made a web page!” I thought. Indeed. Then I proceeded to make an entire web site, several hundred pages deep. “Cool! I made a web site!” Then came time to update the site. This is what I call the trap of a “simple web site.”

An inexperienced webmaster makes a web site using HTML with no CMS (Content Management System), no Style Sheets, no includes, then finds things need to be updated and goes through and changes every single page on the site. Mean while, a Webmaster using includes or a CMS is able to update his or her site in a fraction of the time. (more…)

By: Donald Nelson

When it comes to search engine optimization, the single most important sentence that you will write for your website is the title tag of your main page. If you write it properly then you will have taken a big step towards getting your site well placed in search engine queries for your important keywords.

Before I give you a step-by-step guide to writing title tags, let’s define what they actually are and see why they are important. When you look at a web page in your browser, the writing in the blue strip above browser’s commands (file, edit, view, etc.) is the title tag. On your actual html document the title tag is in the head portion between the notation. (more…)

We are excited to release the first 6 TEMPLATES of our new collection of website TEMPLATES.  Now you can have a fully functional and professionally designed website without all the hard work.  We have done all of that for you!
What are CRE Loaded TEMPLATES?

CRE Loaded strives to create the most usable and stable open source shopping cart system available to the small or medium business and entrepreneurs alike. Based on the massively popular free open source shopping cart - oscommerce, CRE Loaded takes good and makes it better.

If you are using the osCommerce System, you will need about five minutes to switch your online shop to one of our professionally designed CRE Loaded TEMPLATES.

Want to learn more about CRE Loaded?  Visit CRELoaded.com!

Each week we will be updating our collection with a couple new CRE Loaded TEMPLATES. We recommend that you check our site for fresh new CRE Loaded Template designs regularly.

Please note: To use our CRE Loaded TEMPLATES we recommend upgrading to version 6.2.

Take a look at our CRE Loaded Template selection here.

When it comes to broadband, Sweden gives a whole new meaning to the expression “taking ownership.”For in that country broadband users are also its owners.

It’s like assuming a mortgage, says Bill St. Arnaud, senior director for advanced networks at Ottawa-based Canarie Inc. “[Swedish] homeowners can purchase last mile infrastructure for an equivalent of US$20 a month.”

Canarie is a non-profit organization that promotes advanced Internet development in Canada. It seeks to foster widespread adoption of faster, more efficient networks, as well as innovative products, applications and services to run on these networks.

That’s quite a daunting goal, considering how far behind many Canadian cities are when it comes to hi-tech infrastructure and services. WiFi services in Toronto are currently among the most expensive in the world, St. Arnaud says, adding that we would do better if we took a page from the Swedes.

[Read the rest of this article here]

[tags]broadband, canada, wi-fi, sweden[/tags]

By: Bob Schwartz

Well, by now you most likely have heard that good design, proper key word density, intuitive navigation, correct Meta tags, quality incoming links and informative content are all important to achieving top search engine placement. This is especially true when it comes to law firm sites. Legal search engine standings are one of the top competitive classifications for search engine standing optimization efforts.

For this article, I’ll assume that your legal website already excels in the areas just mentioned and your site has decent standing for your desired legal keyword phrases. But, as you are keenly aware, the Internet can generate quality clients at a far more cost effective basis compared to any other medium. So, moving your legal website to the next level should be a very wise decision. (more…)

By: John Krycek

Do you have to sacrifice all of the creative and artistic elements of your web site to rank in the search engines? Later in this article I’ll show you a real case scenario and the design and SEO approach used.

Thanks to the birth of professional search engine marketers the top ranks are saturated with the pages of companies that can pay for such insight. That said, it’s certainly possible to employ high ranking tactics in your own website. Actually, the most basic tactics can move you up from an 800 position to a 300. However, it’s the top of the scale where efforts seem almost inversely exponential or logarithmic, you put a ton in to see a tiny change in rank. (more…)

By: John Fowler

Over the years there has been lots of discussion in the SEO community regarding building links to a web site. The debate is particularly heated at the moment, as Google rolls out its “Jagger” upgrade.

Let’s start with what we mean by inbound links, also called backlinks. These are links from other sites to your URL, which direct the surfer directly to your site when the link is clicked. The basic premise is that if you have high ranking sites linking to you, then you must yourself be important and have valuable content, and hence you should rank highly. The way in which Google ranks sites is called Pagerank and can be seen as a green line on the Google Toolbar representing ranks 0 to 10. As Google states (more…)