Use your website statistics

Ok, so web statistics are standard with most hosting packages and most people ask about them but they rarely ever actually USE them. 

You may be one of these people.  I would highly recommend that you start to look at your web stats before you spend 1 more dollar marketing your website.

Your webstats will tell you the following minimally and probably a whole lot more:

• How many UNIQUE visitors you have. Forgot about hits, those days are long gone
• Which pages people are visiting
• Which search engines have visited your site, when and how often
• What people are searching for within google, yahoo and it actually shows you which search terms they used to find your website
• It shows you which geographies are searching for your site
• You can also see which pages are visited the most frequently which helps you know what information people are either interested in or identifies which links are setup more prominently on your site. if you have a page getting little traffic, then you will surely want to talk with your web master and work to promote those pages.

Website statistics provide real data about your website and tell you exactly what is happening. it does not lie to make you feel good and always tells the truth so before you spend another dollar on marketing find out what is really going on on your website and market intelligently to your prospects based on what you know rather than guessing.

Check them at least weekly!

I have an idea, what’s next?

If you’re like many other like minded individuals who have a business idea and want to take it to the web to realize the millions of browsers and potential prospects to embrace your idea but you have no idea on where to start, this article is for you.

I’ll be brief and five you the abc’s of how to get started and an overview of the process.

The very first thing you will need to establish your website is a domain name. You can visit here to register your domain name: http://www.ebizsitedesigns.com/domain_registration.htm

Secondly, you will need to establish web hosting. Web hosting can be provided on either a windows or linux server which probably means very little to you. You will want to ask your web designer to assist you in this decision.

Aside from those two basic items you will want to begin the web design process and start choosing a web design company.  You will want to ensure you have checked their background through services like the better business bureau.  Ebizsitedesigns has a clean better business bureau record and is an accredited member of the bbb in satisfactory rating. You will then want to ensure that they have phone availability during regular business hours.  There are many web design companies that APPEAR to be legitimate when in truth they are fly by night freelance web designers who may very well disappear with your hard earned seed capital tomorrow with no heads up and no remorse.  This is why its important to choose a company that has been around for years with a credible portfolio, references and solid cutomer support.

In addition, you will want to ensure you get a satisfaction guarantee. There are many firms out there limiting you in concepts you can see and revisions you receive once you have confirmed a project. Buyer beware, web design is a shady business and you can easily be taken for your money.  Come and ask the pros how to get started.  We have the experience to lend solid advice given your current situation as we have seen thousands of customers who are looking to either start or grow their online presence. Leverage that experience and contact us today! Click here to learn more about our web design company: http://www.ebizsitedesigns.com/index.htm

I have a website, now what?

What is a great website without traffic? This same question is synonomous with having a great retail store yet no one visits and worse yet, no one knows it exists! What if they did know? What if you were able to get a primetime store location and now suddenly you have visitors who are interested in buying your products, your services?  What if you could get that primetime placement?

EbizSiteDesigns has proven experience in optimizing your site and your business for search engine marketing leveraging several techniques including search engine optimization, pay per click marketing and public relations.

Our solutions are so effective because your website that was otherwise non-existent can get new QUALIFIED traffic to your site today!  We then follow this up with a long term strategy through our search engine optimization program.  We have proven results optimizing for key phrases and keywords that are coveted on the web.

You can quickly see the value of google and yahoo pay per click programs by simple viewing our return on investment (ROI) calculator here: http://www.ebizsitedesigns.com/ppc_roi_calculator.htm

In short, we drive qualified traffic to your site within 24 hours and develop a long term strategy to ensure your success in your online ventures.

WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

 Search Engine Optimization is a process that will help your website improve its ranking among other competing websites.  Many people think that the number of clicks a website gets determines their ability to be seen on a search engine.  This is not the case.   There are several steps to take to optimize your website.  The following information will help you better understand what can be done to help improve your rankings, and hopefully, over time your site will appear near the top of most search engine inquiries.

            When you go to Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista or any other search engine, they will have a certain set of criteria that they use to rank your site.  One of the most basic parts of the SEO will be your “relative word” matches.  For example,  If you had a shoe store, you certainly would want your site to be available for viewing if someone types in the word “shoes”, “new shoes”, “shoe stores” etc.  These words are important because they are directly related to your website and your business.  By having these words, you now will be on the list, but the problem is that there could be a very long list.  

            Lets say you sell other things than shoes.  Maybe you have laces, socks, and other products available in the store.  All these are things that people would search for in a search engine.  If someone searches for “shoe laces”, and you do not have “shoe laces” as part of your relative words, you may fall toward the bottom of a very long list of websites who contain that material.  It is very important that every page of your site contains these words so that what is seen on each page can be directly accessed through an inquiry from a search engine. 

            Over time, people began to put as many words as they could think of so that their site would be visible with inquiries that have nothing to do with their website, which would ultimately generate a lot of clicks for that site.  For a time, the rankings were done through click popularity.  This made a website rank based on the total number of times a person clicks on the website vs. how close is the information on this link, to the inquiry in the search engine.

            This made it difficult for people to find exactly what they were looking for.  This is because the information that was behind the links was not relative.  So they would have to click back and continue clicking on links until they found what they were looking for.  So search engines began to utilize other ways of ranking websites.  This is where the complexity really begins with an SEO. 

With Ebiz’s SEO package, you will have a research and development team dedicated to the optimization of your website.  We understand the complexity of the SEO, and are continuously working hard to improve the rankings of the websites who use Ebiz as their SEO provider.  Our hard work and dedication will end with great results for those who utilize this service.   

To learn more please visit: http://www.ebizsitedesigns.com/searchengine.htm

EbizSiteDesigns now offers OSCommerce and ZenCart Integration.

EbizSiteDesigns has trained its staff to integrate with both OSCommerce and ZenCart open source solutions to assist our customers with their current shopping cart installations as well as offer affordable shopping cart solutions.

We have experience and an online portfolio of Shopping cart websites to view at http://ebizsitedesigns.com/live_portfolio.htm . We have several more in development so be sure to email sales@ebizsitedesigns.com to learn more about our shopping cart solutions.

With our shopping cart solution you can do the following:

• Allows customers to shop your store 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365+ days a year!
• Easily keep your product/catalog updated — no HTML coding required to add, delete, or modify products.
• Works on the popular combination of PHP and MySQL technologies
• Secure — no one but your administrative personnel can access your customer/catalog data
• Easy to install — our helpful installation program guides you easily through the setup process
• User frontend is validated to XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• Advanced Template System using stylesheets and images
• Any PHP coding changes can be protected during upgrades by using the built-in override protection system
• Switching from one installed template to another is as simple as a couple of clicks in the Admin
• Merchandise Pricing options — Single and Multiple items can be put on Sale. Sale options include Percentage-off, Fixed Amount off, New Price, etc. Sales can include or exclude product attributes. You can add or exclude a discount from a Special. You can put a whole category or the entire store on sale!
• Products can be marked as Free, or “Call for Price”
• Products can be marked as “Featured” for specific highlighting/attention.
• Products can be linked and/or copied to multiple categories
• Minimum or Maximum Quantities and Units - You can sell 1 per customer, or require at least 4 and in multiples of 2. You can set requirements on a per-product basis.
• Quantity Discounts can be configured per-product for varying pricing levels or quantity levels.
• Product Attributes can be added, either as Radio buttons, Checkboxes, Drop-down lists, Text Boxes, File Uploads, File Downloads, and more. Attribute Options can upcharge the price of an item, and an item can have its price completely controlled by attributes. Attributes can be configured as “read only” so as to provide a Features List.
• One-Time Fees can be added to products via attributes
• Attributes also support Text Pricing, such as price-per-word or price-per-letter for personalizing
• Attributes can show image/color swatches
• Store layout can be controlled in great detail simply by switching settings in the Admin area. Choose your side column and box widths, Breadcrumb Separator, which Sideboxes you want to appear where on the page, enable/disable links in various places.
• Entire categories of products (or individual products) can be enabled/disabled with just a few clicks
• Sort order of products is easily controlled in the admin area
• Integrate with phpBB so that your support forum login passwords match your Ebiz Cart shop.
• If you need to take your site offline for a period of maintenance, you can do it easily by posting advance notices, as well as a friendly Down For Maintenance page that’s also Search-Engine friendly. Webmaster and WebDesigner can specify IP addresses to override maintenance and still access the site for testing.
• You can send administrative emails on most customer shopping activities to various administrators as desired. Email addresses are protected from abuse, as they are not displayed on-screen. The Contact Us page can be configured to support multiple destinations, such as Sales, Technical Support, Webmaster, and so on.
• Nearly every piece of information about your products can be controlled in the Admin areas, giving you the ability to fine-tune how your products and services appear to your customers. Features and options can be enabled/disabled quickly and easily.
• Multiple items can be added to the shopping cart by simply entering quantities and click Add
• The Product Type feature allows you to customize information fields and display format for different products differently. Products for sale vs Documents for viewing, vs Music Downloads, and the list goes on.
• You can add multiple images to your products, in small/medium/large format. Popups are available if desired for viewing of larger images.
• A verification for Agreement to the Terms of Service has been added for compliance with new laws regarding privacy and disclosure.
• CVV2 card verification number support is available for compliance with most Merchant Agreements. This feature is enabled/disabled in the Admin
• Shipping Options — multiple carriers are supported, including Hold for Pickup, Free Delivery in an area, and most major couriers and postal services
• Customer Access Control — You can set up your shop to only allow customers access to pricing or pricing but not buying until after being authorized by an administrator. You can restrict them from browsing at all too, if desired.
• Showcase - You can set your store up to be simply a product showcase, without pricing at all.
• Search options allow you to search for products based on name, description, metatags, price, and more!
• Meta Tags keywords and descriptions can be controlled at the per-product level, all from the administrative interface
• Automatic detection of search engine spiders
• Intelligent generation of metatags content for search engines
• Easily upgrade from one version to the next. Upgrade Detection notifies administrators of new versions at login.
• Built in WYSIWYG page editor for modifying non database pages. (version 2.0)
• Tight security on password handling, login/logout, and more.
• HTML-style email supported
• Email can be sent via sendmail, smtp, or smtp-with-authorization
• Email archiving supported for audit trail
• Administrative activity logging enabled for audit trail — especially beneficial with recent Merchant Agreement requirements concerning tracking of activity related to accessing customer information.
• Advertising Banners — show information about your business colleagues and track banner link activity. Banners open in new windows so that customers never really leave your site.
• Shipping Estimator allows your customer to get an idea of their shipping costs prior to checkout
• Coupons and Gift Certificates are easily handled both by customers and administrators
• Customer “Group Pricing” allows groups of users to receive a set discount amount at checkout
• Newsletter system and Product Notification system
• Low-Order Fees can be configured
• COD Fees can be added
• Shipping Tare, Large-Package handling to give fine-grain control over shipping services
• Tax rates, tax zones, etc easily configured in the admin area
• PayPal IPN and many other popular Merchant Services supported
• Customers can write product reviews (approvals can be required by an Administrator)
• Low-Stock notifications to administrator when inventory is getting low (level can be configured)
• For the Developer… simple customization via Stylesheets
• Developers Toolkit helps quickly locate a setting or text string to be customized
• Scalable from small shops to larger shops with hundreds of thousands of products
• Track Who’s Online interactively
• Multiple Language Support
• Multiple Currency Support

We also offer payment plans of 4 to 6 months on all programming projects.

New Website Launched!

We are proud to announce the release of our new website.  With the new website our customers and prospects will have a large web design gallery to view to get some ideas for their projects.  All of our designs are created from scratch and our design gallery will exhibit thousands of web designs we have created for both informational websites as well as ecommerce shopping cart and custom development websites.

The new website will also feature live chat capabilities as well as an extensive listing of completed projects and testimonials supporting out committment to a quality projects.

Let us know what you think of the new design at sales@ebizsitedesigns.com.

Website Design Resellers Program

We are proud to introduce our web design reseller program which allows Marketing firms, web hosting companies, software development and other web design firms the ability to leverage our creative design and development team to work for your company behind the scenes to provide the very best in website design and programming services.

As a reseller for ebizsitedesigns you will receive free web designs concepts for all of your qualified prospects.  There is no charge to utilize this service so take advantage of it and we will grow together. Under this program you will work with  a dedicated project manager and discuss the clients web design needs to determine the best design for their online business or ecommerce store. Once you have been awarded the project by the customer we will work directly with the customer for you or behind the scenes as an agent of your company or with one of your project managers.

As a reseller you will be able to take advantage of the following skillsets on all of the web design and programming projects:

• HTML
• ASP
• .Net
• PHP
• OSCommerce Integration
• Adobe Photoshop design
• SQL / MYSQL
• Javascript

Please take a moment to fill out our reseller request form here( http://www.ebizsitedesigns.com/resellers.htm ) to begin a new partnership that has worked wonderfully for many of our partners in the past and on a day to day basis.