http://www.umassociates.com Creative and affordable designs for your small business. Fri, 22 Jan 2010 02:45:39 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.1 en hourly 1 http://www.umassociates.com/blog/2008/04/six-ingredients-for-a-successful-website/ http://www.umassociates.com/blog/2008/04/six-ingredients-for-a-successful-website/#comments Wed, 23 Apr 2008 05:23:38 +0000 admin http://umassociates.com/six-ingredients-for-a-successful-website Becoming successful in your online marketplace can be quite challenging. Always consider the following important attributes when planning for your website:

1. Accurately reflects the character and personality of your company and communicates its philosophy, uniqueness, strengths, products and services.
2. Intuitively easy for visitors to move around effortlessly and quickly find the information they are seeking. By creating a rewarding experience for your prospective customers, we are creating a buying atmosphere.
3. Compatible with all major Internet browsers. Your prospects are coming to your site from different browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Every browser “reads” your site a little differently. We program your site to load properly and look great on all browsers. This ensures a uniformly positive experience for your prospects and customers while avoiding compatibility errors that could sabotage their visit.
4. Pages load quickly. We use clean coding standards to ensure that your visitors don’t have to wait for images and text to show up when they click on your link. (Slow-loading pages are a top reason your traffic will get frustrated and leave or “bounce off” your site without taking action.)
5. A wide-open door for search engine spiders. Google and other search engines regularly send out automated programs called “spiders” to crawl around your site and find out if your company has the products and/or services that prospective buyers are searching for. Our clean coding makes sure that spiders don’t miss any important details about your company. That means your company will have higher search engine rankings.
6. Incorporates new media and technology such as interactive elements, streaming audio, video, flash, podcasts, RSS news feeds, slide shows and photo galleries.

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Discovery. The first and most important step in the process is the planning and discovery phase. This is when we find out what you want—and what features will help your business grow the most. We will need to determine the following:

• What are your objectives for this project?
• Who is your audience and what are their expectations?
• What actions do you want to inspire?
• In what ways do you differ from your competition?

Contract Proposal. After determining your needs and evaluating how we will meet them, we will provide you with a contract proposal detailing our solutions. The proposal will also include an estimated time/cost breakdown, and recommended SUREclient Workgroup hosting platform for your site.

Contract, Initial Payment, and Content. After we receive the signed contract agreement and initial project deposit, we will begin developing your website. At this point, we will need you to send any text, photos or additional media that you would like included on your site. After work has begun, we will send you monthly invoices until the project is completed, at which time we will bill you for the balance of the project cost.

Implementation. Next, we begin the Implementation phase of your project. In this phase we design and develop the complete site. We will then upload the site to a temporary staged URL for your review and approval. Simultaneously, we will thoroughly test the site to assure that it meets our stringent quality assurance standards for a flawless user experience.

Deployment. Once you are totally satisfied with your site, we will launch it live on the Internet. At project completion, we will invoice you for the balance of the development cost.

Website Promotion. After launching your new website, we will promote your site by generating effective description and keyword tags and submitting the site with major search engines and directories. In keeping with your specific business goals, we can also begin a robust Search Engine Marketing Campaign which can include an organic Search Engine Optimization campaign and/or a Pay-per-Click search campaign to generate high search engine rankings and a steadily increasing flow of targeted prospective buyers to your site.

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