Choosing a web design firm.

While you are searching the web, or asking friends and family for references on a good person to help you design your website. Keep several important points in mind:

1. Check out your potential web design person's website. If it isnt amazing, that is a bad sign.
2. Uncle Billy's nephew may not be the best person either. You want someone who does this full time.
3. Ask them how they program or create it, they should walk you through a design process, and give you a hint of the tools they use. If they use Frontpage that is another bad sign. Frontpage is like using the fisher price tool set to fix your car.
4. Front page animations. It is tricky but basically anytime a web designer wants to help spend your hard earned money on flashy items instead of productivity items like shopping carts or contact forms, you should be raising a red flag.
5. If your web design person says your website will be best viewed in Internet Explorer, or Firefox only, then it is clear he does not understand web standards. There is no reason why your website should not look amazing in almost all browsers and media types.
6. Counters are not cool anymore. Sure you want to know how many people visit your website, but your web designer should be showing you amazing statistics programs that analyze your traffic from multiple data points.

Basically your website is going to be a key aspect of your business, much more so than a yellow page ad, or a brochure that is out dated almost instantly. You want your business to have the best it can, and have your money spent the most cost effectively.

You dont let your grandfather do your business taxes right? You dont let the neighbor kid down the street help design your business cards and brochures. Don't let them work on your website either, make sure you are working with a proven professional.

Of course if you've read this far in our blog post, perhaps you are in search of a great designer. We highly recommend Bry.Net Web Services, for all your website design and hosting needs.

Know your customers

One of the most important aspects for all businesses is to know as much as you can about the people you are selling your products or services too. Big business has done this for years, they have shopper club cards, and online profiles for you to fill out, all helping them gauge how much they can charge for the new products that are coming out soon.

As a small business you need to connect and really KNOW what your customer is looking for from your business. Perfecting your online web presence through email and a great web design is key.

With a website you can target your customers better by knowing exactly how many times a product has been looked at, helping you know which are fading fads, and your new hot items. You can track customer satisfaction through online surveys. You can gather feedback and reviews on your products.

Email is the perfect tool for businesses to use to reach out to their customers. You ask for it when they are checking out. You then use it for sending them special offers, or a thank you for shopping with us note, or ask them for feedback. It is perfect in the sense that it wont cost nearly as much as a post card with printing and mailing costs, just to get tossed out with the other junk mail, it can be personalized to help ensure they respond, and it is not as bothersome as a phone call interrupting dinner or another important event. It quietly waits in their inbox until they are ready to take action.

All these great options can be a little overwhelming so if you are a business looking for help with your website take a minute, and contact Bry.Net Web Services.

We would be glad to discuss our inexpensive and reliable ways to help you reach out to your customers more.

Part 6 - Join the community on the net

In the sixth installment of our ongoing series on how to increase traffic and sales to your website we are going to look into making you have a little bit of fun while promoting your website.

How can running your business be more fun? By contributing content back to the internet. My guess is that your passionate about your business, you want it to succeed. You love talking about it to almost anyone who will listen.

Take that passion, and pour it into the internet, there are a million ways to do so. We'll look at a few of them.

Message boards and discussion group forums - There are people just as passionate about your products or area of service. Seek out these groups on Yahoo groups, Google groups, or specific message boards all over the internet. Create an account, and start contributing, post a question your having a hard time answering yourself, or help someone else learn about something you know all too well. The key to it all is to mention your business, either in the signature part of your message, or as part of the actual answer.

Bry.Net Web Services' goal is to build your website, help you promote your website, and help with marketing your website to clients. With that in mind, we constantly are finding we can help fellow web designers learn more about Search Engine Optimization, or HTML. And we use these same forums to learn things ourselves.

Blogs and Video Blogs - There again are other people in your line of work, they probably have a blog. Find them, and leave them a comment, encourage them on a great job, or help them learn something they didn't know. Again the key is to leave your website link on the form, so they can come back and visit your blog or website as well.

The key to all of this contributing though is to be consistent. Again set aside 15-30 minutes once or twice a week, or less depending on your schedule, and find these places online, and check back, update a post, or add a new one. Slowly over time you'll build up a massive collection of links on the internet all pointing back to your domain. All while helping others learn more about your products and services, and they didn't even have to find your website directly.

We hope you've found this article useful, if you have any questions or suggestions, please let us know!