Everybody remembers the 4P’s of marketing: Product, Place, Price and Promotion. But there are also a very important 6 C’s too. (No, you don’t have to learn them, but it would help if you used them.) The 6 C’s heighten your ability to promote your products/services through good Internet Marketing.

CUSTOMER: You must be customer focused. You really need to understand the targeted consumer - their needs,wants, and motivations. You need to understand why customers do (or don’t do) something - when they do it and why they do it. This knowledge is critical for internet marketing. Strong understanding of the buyer’s behavior will help you see what is important to the customer.

CONSISTENCY: Companies need consistency in their message. This will reinforce a brand’s image. (Wouldn’t you have questions if Coca-Cola used a green logo on their Webpage Template for awhile.)

CREATIVITY: Creativity in your message sets you apart. Customers need imaginative reasons to remember your product/service. Internet Marketing with creative messages sets your product apart from the clutter. Keep messages vivid - which attracts attention, maintains interest, and stimulates consumers’ thinking. Imagine using the same old invitation or email or billboard in Internet Marketing. Even if your Web Template looks fantastic you need a creative reminder for your buyers.

CULTURE: You will need cross-cultural communication to grow your customer base. Some cultures might love your product/service but they need an inviting message that’s culturally sensitve to their understanding or their language.

COMMUNICATION: Consumers want good communication - when they are comfortable in communicating they may hear your message. This means improved internet marketing.

CHANGE: Internet Marketing is not just a business function, it’s a process. Marketers must constantly CHANGE as society changes.

It starts with your webpage template, logos, text, content, quality and placement of pictures and graphics - observe the 6 C’s for superlative Internet Marketing.

Ever Vigilant,
Arthur Browning

Small businesses can make a BIG impression with a SMALL website. Flash Templates can be used to make that BIG impression.

So why does a cafe’ or restaurant want a website when they already have a street sign, yellow page listing, and some dedicated, brand loyal patrons. After all they are just a neighborhood business, right? MAYBE, but that cafe’ could become a regional business. The kind of cafe’ that people will drive across town or county to visit - early, late, or weekends. The cafe could even need two locations, raise prices, begin catering, host upscale meetings etc.

Small Cafe

A lot of other reasons come to my mind (a near brain storm really!!).

1) Maintain and increase market share.
2) Get new web-related patrons.
3) Offer patrons up to date menus and specials.
4) Publicize business events.
5) Much more image projection than a yellow page ad at a fraction of the price - and you can add your website address to your yellow page listing.
6) Build online communications by emailing to customers who enjoy promotions or buying logo cups, T-shirts, etc.
Many more reasons could be added to this list.

A cafe’ could put a one-page business card on the net, but for a little more money up front, and probably no more per month for hosting, that cafe’ could make a real statement. These Flash Templates make that kind of statment. If you like the screenshot then you are gonna love the demo. Great music, quick load, fun navigation, beautiful photos, etc. (I’m getting turned on!)

Cafe’ Name

Flash Templates for cafe’s, BIG impression from a SMALL website.

Brightening Your Day,
Arthur Browning

Web Templates Blog welcomes David Mason of Mantis Technologies . This interview is the latest in our series of interviews with web designers.

“I have always worked in the IT industry since I was 15. When the Internet first hit Australia I was working as a computer technician and doing programming on the side. I was very interested in the Internet and World Wide Web as a concept and started doing basic web pages for small local businesses.”

Do you remember the very first site you designed? “Yes, it was a basic static site for a local sign manufacturer. . . We are doing a great deal of ecommerce and real estate websites these days. This has become our specialty as we have designed some software that creates a template for an ecommerce or real estate website so our designers can then go in and apply the design.”

Where do you get your art for these webpages? “We have two full time graphic designers that create all the artwork. We also source photography from clients and Big Stock Photo.”

What will be the next big development in webpage design? “I believe mobile friendly websites will be the next big thing. For instance - an accommodation bookings website that can also be accessed from a mobile phone for last minute bookings, or a real estate website that sends property alerts with photos to a mobile phone.”

Have you ever worked with website templates? “Yes, when we first started out. We don’t use them any more though. We have used templatemonster.com and also a few other ones (that I can’t remember) when we first started out. . .We only stopped using them when our graphic designers came on board as many of our clients are now very picky about the exact design of their websites.”

What do you think about Flash technology? “I believe that if used sparingly and for the right reasons, it can really enhance a website. For instance, we used it on an upmarket commercial real estate agency website and it gives a very nice upmarket feel.”

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Flash? “The advantages are that you can present dynamic, moving content and ideas that just don’t cut it as static images. It is also great for demonstrations of products and services. I don’t believe entire sites should be developed in flash though (unless they are entertainment/movie/game websites). Flash can run too slow on older video cards and also does not give the same quality for printing text and information that html does.”

What are your sources of inspiration? “I look at a lot of other websites. Also I have been doing web design for about 10 years now so I love coming up with new things for clients. My team are also a great source of inspiration. I am very lucky to have such a talented group of people to work with.”

What are your favorite website designs that you did NOT design yourself? “I loved the XMen III website.”

What was the toughest project or customer situation you’ve encountered? “The toughest project we ever worked on was a website for a USA web design firm a few years back. It was quite a complex project handling bookings from tour operators around the country. The website went over time and budget but we were happy to deliver it to the client as a nicely working complete solution and they loved it. We learnt a lot about project management during this project and now have implemented many systems to ensure all projects after this one flowed a lot better.”

What are your interests and dislikes in webpage design? “I love nice clean designs, a good use of colour and photography, a splash of flash elements and over all, an intuitive, easy to use navigation. I don’t like pure flash websites or ones with navigation that is abstract or hard to work out.”

We appreciate your viewpoints David, thanks for visiting with us.

Racking up the Yardage,
Arthur Browning

Most webmasters are designing for IE (Internet Explorer) 6, which is not as W3C standards compliant as is FireFox, Netscape, Safari and Opera. Designers hopefully remember that web browsers are not all compliant, because a web page that looks great in Internet Explorer might be a wreck in FireFox or Netscape. With the wave of devices for internet applications, compliance with W3C standards is even more critical. Webpage Templates, WordPress Themes and Flash Templates must all be fully validated.

With the release of IE 7 for Windows XP, which is much more standards compliant, some web pages that look okay IE 6 might look different in IE 7. (Well , now, there you go again!) Microsoft has made serious efforts to make the browser compliant to W3C standards and compatible with CSS(Cascading Style Sheets). CSS interpretation, by recommendation of W3C, has been improved tremendously which gives designers more ability to create functionality in trans-browser design.

Microsoft says they are taking W3C compatibility seriously. So, if you are designing pages without checking them in W3C Standards Compliant browsers, you may be in for hard times with IE 7. You must incorporate W3C Web standards into design strategy. (Well, do I have to ask?)

Webpage Templates, even WordPress Themes and Flash Template designs, need to be seen in a browser like FireFox, which is backed by Google marketing. Prior to IE 4.x, Netscape was the leading browser with nearly 80% of the market. Microsoft took it’s opportunity however, and now controls most of the browser market. (See, and this is how it happens - yes, you knew it.)

Folks, there are a lot of webpages out there that are not standards compliant. If strict W3C standards were enforced in browsers a lot of sites would need major redesign. (A new specialty would be born - Webpage Standards Rehabilitation Therapist.)

If designers will observe W3C standards and incorporate CSS compatibility into their sites they should be more functional for a longer time. To work on CSS capability you need the Web Developer Extension for FireFox and the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. These are very helpful for creating and troubleshooting Web pages.

After completing your design use a MarkUp Validation Service to check whether your Web page conforms to W3C recommendations. If there are errors, the validator will notify you of them and suggest corrections. Also, remember that when you observe W3C standard guidelines many of the code(tags) that were valid in the “Pre-Standards” era have depreciated and may be ignored completely by browsers. So, if you ignore these errors during validation, your web pages may not render correctly. (Don’t be foolish!)

In some instances you may not be able to validate HTML or XHTML at 100%. So you want to put this DOCTYPE declaration into your document at the top of your web page just before the tag:

< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

This “Document Type Definition” or DTD supplies various browsers with the needed information as to which (X)HTML specification your web page is designed by. This instructs the Browser to render the page correctly. A complete list of recommended DTDs can be found at the W3C Website. If you don’t add the DOCTYPE browsers will switch to a “quirks mode,” so it is important to include this DOCTYPE declaration on each web page that you make for it to be rendered correctly. If your Web pages render well in FireFox at present you probably will not encounter any major problems in IE 7 other than minor adjustments here and there.

Gninworb Ruhtra spelled backwords,
Arthur Browning

Web Templates Blog welcomes Owen Gigg of WestWindMoves Web Solutions . This interview is the latest in our series of interviews with web designers.

How did you get into web design?  “I was tasked with writing web pages to provide support to engineers working on projects within British Aerospace around 1997.  A couple of years later, I left Aerospace and worked as developer at Liverpool University.  In 2001 I set up WestWindMoves and haven’t looked back.”

Do you remember the very first site you designed?  “It was a site to support engineers using a software tool called RDD-100. This was hosted on the company Intranet.”

Where do you get your art for these webpages?  “In house designers, stock photo libraries, photo objects.”

What will be the next big development in webpage design?  “XML - it’s already here but it’s going to change the way everything relates to each other.”

Have you ever worked with website templates?  “Yes, but our clients require tailored designs so templates aren’t really our thing.  However, we do sometimes use elements from templates such as a graphic, image or button.”

What website template providers have you tried?  “Template Monster and Boxed Art.com.”

What was your experience with them?  “OK - but our template use is limited.”

What do you think about Flash technology?  “Flash is a great technology but is often misused on the web.”

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Flash?  “Advantages - Streaming Video with Flash Video is great - it’s supported by 99% of browsers unlike some of the other formats.  You can embed some nice Flash snippets to improve the look of a site.  Disadvantages - Sites totally written in Flash are a complete waste.  Nobody will find them because their not indexed by Search Engines.   Flash is also misused by a lot of developers who simply want to ’show what they can do’ rather than fulfilling the purpose of the website.  You don’t see Flash at all on the most effective websites such as Google, Ebay, Amazon …etc.  If you don’t need to use Flash to get the message across, then don’t use it.”

What are your sources of inspiration?  “Other designers, nice sites we come across.”

What are your favorite website designs that you did not design yourself?  “Google.com - because it works. Effectiveness over elaborate design every day of the week.”

What was the toughest project or customer situation you’ve encountered?  “Customers often say ‘Our site needs to have the Wow factor’. This is a common request.  Customers need to understand that the ‘Wow factor’ is the site fulfilling or exceeding it’s purpose, not unnecessary graphical effects.  Google has the ‘wow factor’ because it works.  Could you imagine the detrimental effect of a Flash splash screen added to Google.  It would kill it overnight.”

What are your interests and dislikes in webpage design?  “Interests - Meeting new clients, dynamic programming, XML, inoperability. Dislikes - Amateur webbies who think the keywords metatag is all that is required to place highly in search engines.  It’s not even relevant to most engines.”

We appreciate your candor Owen, as well as the benefit of your experiences and expertise.

Beat the Drum,
Arthur Browning

Making a website search engine friendly is important. Title tags and META tags usually come to mind, but optimizing your images can attract more visitors to your site and enhance their experience when they get there. Fully optimized images decrease page load times, allow people with disabilities to understand the content they can’t see, and bring new visitors conducting image searches. The best ways to optimize images on your site are:

Give your pictures appropriate filenames - this helps search engines determine contents, especially for the image specific searches (Google’s Image Search). Naming a picture of a butterfly, “butterfly.jpg” is better than naming it “1234.jpg”.

Image Size and Quality - Lower quality images increase loading speed, but they hurt rankings in image searches, as well as detract from overall user experience. High quality images help image search rankings and look better, but they cause pages to load slowly - a real problem for visitors with slow connection speeds.

One good way to get the best of both situations is to use a small, lower quality image on the page that links to a higher quality image file. Then the page loads quickly and users who want a closer look can click on the image. Image searches will also have a high quality image to index which betters your chances of a higher rank. On an e-commerce site you should use small thumbnail images next to the description of an item with a link to a higher quality image for potential buyers.

Alt Text - images should include some short alt text that describes the image. Alt text helps search engine spiders see what your image contains so they can context your page better, and in turn direct more targeted traffic to you. Alt text also helps disabled visitors know what the image contains. Writing an HTML image tag with the alt text should be an effective solution.

Surrounding Text and Captions - It is important that the surrounding text and image captions are consistent with the content of the picture. According to the Google Images FAQ: “Google analyzes the text on the page adjacent to the image, the image caption and dozens of other factors to determine the image content. Google also uses sophisticated algorithms to remove duplicates and ensure that the highest quality images are presented first in your results.”

Avoid Putting Text in Images - it’s best to have the text actually readable by search engine spiders and screen readers as a caption. One alternative is to create your graphic with everything except the text, then write the text by itself (formatted to your liking using CSS), and then make the graphic a background image of the text (also using CSS). This makes it look like the text is part of the graphic, when in reality it is part of the HTML.

Lookin’ Out for You,
Arthur Browning

Yes, your blog can be beautiful. (Be one of the Beautiful People!) WordPress Themes are getting better everyday. I was cruising again and I am seeing stuff that looks like it came from high tech photo journals or glossy fashion mags. I admit it, I love eye candy. Most people do, unless you are color blind, then it’s not quite as fantastic.

In my quest for a cleanly functioning and esthetically gorgeous web experience I can’t help but express some opinion (blog). So these 2 are my latest favorites. To get the full impact hit the link below each screenshot.

http://osc.template-help.com/wordpress_12218/

http://osc.template-help.com/wordpress_11303/

Tell me you don’t like these WordPress Themes. Template Monster’s newer themes just keep getting better looking, more functional with widgets enabling. After all, blogreaders need eye candy too!

Esthetically Gifted,

Arthur Browning

Maintaining a static website takes a lot of time. You have to format new content in HTML, modify all the pages that have changed, and upload them to the server. You can pay your webmaster to do all this, or you can do all the code with all the text and pics then upload yourself.

OR you can use a CMS system. Content Management Systems keep the design independent of your content, so updates and changes can be handled the fast and easy way. You set up the software one time, configure your web
template(s), and then use a web-based content management system to update your website from any internet connection in the world. (Oooooh! Sounds like a General Electric Commercial)

Whether you want to add or change content, remove some pages, upload your images, or change your formatting, the cms software lets you handle it quickly and with much less possibility of time-consuming mistakes. User administration allows authorization of managers or writers that can update your website quickly, if you don’t want to do it.

A CMS TEMPLATE allows you to get started immediately. This allows you to keep costs and time involved very low. More and more companies are beginning to offer these CMS Templates. I’ve seen several but have not tried them out yet. So if you have tried one out send me a comment.

Many of these companies show screenshots, demos, portfolios, provide examples of various functions, sometimes testimonials, offer guarantees and support, etc. Some of these companies give a set price, others say “starting at $xyz”.

Because I am a support nut, I would probably favor the template deals that have a working toll-free number, English fluent staff, do emails or chats as promised, etc. Almost all of these companies declare that their CMS Templates are SEO friendly. Some companies mentionn CSS functions as well and/or changeable skins.

If anybody out there has a website based on a CMS Template - get back to me with your URL. I’ll try to make some good traffic for you, etc.

Show me the CMS TEMPLATES!
Arthur Browning

Web Templates Blog welcomes Christine Anderssen of Johannesburg. This interview is the latest in our series of interviews with web designers. Christine is the owner of Tailor Made 4 You.

“I fell into web design by accident about 3 years ago. My husband and I imported some flashlights from China and we had to set up a website to promote the product. It was originally a one page frontpage site and has since changed considerably. But I am an IT professional with more than 20 years of experience, mostly in the management side - project management, quality management, test management and so on, although I started with programming a long time ago. Somehow I just got sucked into the Internet and started to do websites on a part time basis. Recently I resigned my
corporate job and am now running my own website design business.”

“Well, since I am not one of those Internet veterans with more than 8 years of experience my first site is (unfortunately) still in operation. Or let me put it this way, the first site I did for a paying client. I am ashamed to admit that I used Iframes to do the whole site. Yikes. Don’t tell anyone! I am busy redoing the site at the moment and soon all traces of my sins would hopefully have disappeared.”

Are you secializing in any area? “Yes! I specialise in building websites using either Joomla or Wordpress. It is just so quick and easy to get websites going using either one of these tools. This helps me keep my costs down. Marketwise I focus a lot on small to medium businesses.”

“Because of my PHP and MYSQL skills I also do a lot of custom development. Recently I had to develop something again and decided to investigate some Development Frameworks and now I do CakePHP as well. I decided to use Cake because of its good documentation (they really upgraded their documentation from a couple of months ago), because I don’t need to learn a new programming language and because it supports PHP 4 and will therefore still run on the majority of shared hosts out there. I really love it!”

Where do you get your art for these webpages? “Because I use Joomla or Wordpress I work a lot with pre-designed templates, however, I often do modify the templates considerably. I make use of stock art - www.bigstockphoto.com is my favourite - or photos that the client provides. These are often not very good quality though, which means that Photoshop comes in really handy.”

What will be the next big development in webpage design? “I have to admit that I am normally so knuckled down in my own projects that when I pick up my head again the latest wave has just overtaken us. I am still battling to come to grips with concepts like Web 2.0….”

Have you ever worked with website templates? “Yes, I love working with templates. I have actually written an article about the pros and cons of using commercial templates and how to use them, ‘Custom Website Design or Website Templates’ which was published on Webpronews. It must have touched a nerve since I still get traffic from that article. In summary, I feel that website templates are a great way to get a good looking website. That is probably why I am now moving away from calling myself a website designer and rather a website developer since I definitely do not concentrate on the graphic design aspects that much but more on building functionality.”

What website template providers have you tried? “I love the Templatemonster templates, but I can also spend hours on the OSWD website. I have also used BoxedArt but that was a while ago. But you need to remember that I don’t use the templates as they are, I convert them to Joomla format to use with my Joomla websites.”

What was your experience with them? “I often find that the templates (the TemplateMonster and BoxedArt) are very well designed from a look-and-feel point of view. I constantly marvel at the quality of the graphics and the way that the templates ‘work’ from a graphical design perspective, however, when you dig into their insides you run into lots and lots of tables, inline styles (if you are lucky) and lots of tags. This is why I tend to then just use the graphical design and convert it to a format that suits a CMS.”

What do you think about Flash technology? “I love Flash where it is appropriate. For example, you almost cannot have a site promoting a movie these days without it being flash! And it is great! You can have a ‘mini-movie’ experience on the Internet. Other sites where flash is almost the standard - kids’ sites, online games sites and rock band sites!”

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Flash? “The disadvantages are that
a) you need to have the flash player installed
b) probably need to have broadband
c) flash movies are not easily indexed by the search engines.
I think the biggest mistake that a business can make is to have their whole website designed in flash technology. I think we are probably moving away from that (luckily) but every now and again I come across a business website that brings up the ominous white screen of death saying : ‘Loading….’ Don’t they realise that a visitor makes up his or her mind in a couple of split seconds whether they want to visit a site or not? You should make it as easy as possible for someone to visit your site and find the info. And if all of your content is hidden inside a flash movie the search engines will very rarely pick it up and offer it in the search results.”

“Where I am located in South Africa most Internet Users still access the Internet through 56K Modems, and asking them to download anything before they can visit a site is just plain dumb. Rather than have an ugly site that is directly accessible!”

What are your sources of inspiration? “I get the Sitepoint newsletters and devour them religously. Apart from that I also like to browse around sites like www.websitesthatsuck.com and www.webdesignfromscratch.com. I tend to not frequent specific sites but rather surf when I am looking for specific info. My Browser history of about 2 weeks ago is filled with references to sites containing info about CakePHP and other development frameworks since that is when I was looking for specific info on development frameworks.”

What was the toughest project or customer situation you’ve encountered? “Lots and lots of tough situations in my corporate job, but not with my website designs yet.”

Thankyou Christine. Coincidentally I recently asked someone to handle a project just as you desribed - creating a css & cms webpage from a template that wasn’t yet supporting those functions. I believe that is where the most bang for the buck is(as we say in the USA). I should have consulted with you. Hope you will visit with us again sometime.

The Bad Boy of Templates,
Arthur Browning

Everybody loves to travel. I’m more of a bus tour guy with groups, but I have been known to get on a jet or a ship for a big vacation. Travel agencies need a real presence in their community to sell the short and long trips. I was looking around for some Flash Templates for a friend who started her own travel agency and ran into some unbelievable values.

The biggest collection of those graphically gorgeous flash templates that I prefer was found over at TemplateMonster.com. I punched in Flash Template and Travel and came up with numerous selections. Two that really caught my fancy, in great part because of the music, are pictured here. But you have to see the demos on the links to really appreciate these fast-loading purely beautiful webpages.

http://www.templatemonster.com/flash-templates/11818.html

http://www.templatemonster.com/flash-templates/10084.html

You can read expensive black and white ads in the newspaper all you want but webpages like these give a business many and varied options at a low price. Flash Templates are not expensive, but good ones make a very expensive impression on your visitors.

My friend is starting with local and regional tours, but she wants to add some longer junkets, group trips to Mexico and the Caribbean. I think she’s going to do fine with her startup.

Basking in Nature,

Arthur Browning