Maintainable by Site Owner | Portfolio | Retail, Antiques and Gifts
Retail Gift Store
I created this website to provide a branded theme of quality and integrity. I craft my sites with a goal of simplicity and professionalism and strive to inject each design with a dose of modest elegance. I believe that your website is not just a tool, it is an integral part of your identity. My job is to respect each customer by providing attractive and user friendly sites that will help you achieve your online goals
what you get
Each website comes expertly coded in valid XHTML and CSS, and all are made compatible with the latest version of your browser. I make sure that each site performs flawlessly in each of the most widely used browsers to ensure maximum functionality. Furthermore, all sidebars are made widget ready for your convenience.
cross browser
Cross-browser compatibility guaranteed
options
Intuitive theme options page gives you control
support
A focus on support and community
updates
Frequent site additions and upgrades always available
You may view this site live at http://www.everythinguniquess.com
An Italian Restaurant
Create a website like this for your Restaurant or Cafe business using our expertise in just few a few days. This site style is maintainable by the restaurant owner if you wish or we will do it for you.You get to edit each and everything in the site without touching a single line of code from the site control panel. Strategically designed, it covers all aspects that a restaurant website should actually have. What are you waiting for? Grab this design now!
Strategically designed and coded, this professional site covers all aspects that a restaurant website should actually have. Use this design to create professional, easy and quick online presence for your business.
Fully Customizable Front Page
Customize the unique home page of the site with your content and graphics via site admin options.
Custom Control Panel
The design has easy to use, advanced control panel that lets you configure theme settings so you don’t have to touch the code.
Drop Down & Breadcrumb Navigation
The site lists child pages drop navigation upto 4 levels. Breadcrumbs Navigation (fully customizable) in inner pages is also included for better user experience
Gravatar Support & Threaded Comments
Communicate with your readers. Our designs use the latest features of WordPress including threaded comments and Gravatar integration.
Ad Monetization
The blog page and sidebar has strategic place holders that you can use to sell ad space or promote your own products.
Search Engine Optimized
Professionally coded in a way that gives your site maximum exposure to Search Engines. The content part of your site comes first in the page. Proper use of titles, headings..
This site may be viewed live at http://www.niswebs.com/rest/
Dressed For Website Success
They say you should always dress for the job you want. It’s true — just ask the FreeCreditReport.com hipster. When it comes down to it, those who look the part usually get it. We live and work in a largely superficial world. As marketers, retailers and publishers, the perceptions others have of our websites and brands are inextricably linked to our ultimate success.
How is your website design holding up these days? Do you look amateurish next to your competitors? Are vital links easy to find — and do they all work? What about load time?
I do a lot of research around here. And while information abounds, trustworthy information is much harder to find. There are times when I might come across an interesting bit of information that warrants further investigation. But sometimes that nugget is buried in a pile of visual misery. Lime green backgrounds with yellow type, text that overruns the borders of the page, flashing ads all over the place … it all adds up to lessen the value of the information on the page. It’s hard for me to trust what I’m being told when I feel like a sucker for looking at the website in the first place — not to mention terrified to click a link for more information. A site like Wikipedia isn’t exactly a beauty. But they have the luxury of being a valued, known resource. You don’t.
More and more, consumers expect to find your business in multiple places — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and so on. Is your Twitter background consistent with the appearance of your website? It should be. Take a quick look at every portal on which your company has a presence. Is your brand immediately recognizable, or do you have to look for similarities?
Appearances must be kept. Avoid that photo of you from college with the beer-can pyramid for your Twitter profile. Keep your personal Facebook profile far, far away from your business page. And set up separate YouTube channels — clients don’t need to see a trip to the family fishing hole along side “a message from the CEO.”
You’re a professional.
But its not just design; what about your website copy? Pay attention to every word published on your website and in your ads … or anywhere else, for that matter. Take your time and read over everything you write. Use a spell checker. Did someone on your team major in English? Use them to proof your writing.
You don’t need to be a professional copy editor or possess the wit of Mark Twain. Let’s face it — writing about products and services isn’t exactly poetry. And, there are times when a casual or conversational tone is appropriate. But more often than not, that’s not the case. The point is, if it’s used to discuss your business make it business-worthy. You wouldn’t possibly hang a misspelled banner outside a brick-and-mortar store, would you?
You’re a professional.
Basic Elements Every E-Mail Should Include
Every e-mail is a valuable opportunity to connect with your consumer base. But opportunities are limited; even more so if the e-mail fails to engage or results in an unsubscribe. Before sending out that next e-mail, follow these three tips to make sure your message has the best chance of success.
1. Personalization: Nothing says “I don’t care about you” like a generic e-mail. It’s like getting those letters in your mailbox addressed to “Valued Resident.” Personalization can come in the form of customized salutations, messages sent with a specific initiative based on a recent user activity (taking advantage of list segmentation), or even just the tone of the message itself.
2. Branding: Every message must incorporate your brand in some way. It can range from the complex – like videos and flash – to the utterly simple, like a logo, customized signature or slogan. The point is, you want each e-mail to be immediately associated with the sender.
3. Call-To-Action: Every message no matter its content, must guide users toward a specific action. If you are sending a product announcement e-mail, provide a link to a pre-populated shopping cart and a FAQ page. If you’re soliciting feedback , provide a link to a form, or other places to connect with the brand like your Twitter account or Facebook page. In all cases, make your call to action prominent – tell the reader what you want them to doearly and often. Once users become accustomed to your e-mail as a portal for interactionand education, they will be much more likely to read it and respond.
The 4 C’s of Web Site Design and Developement
Culture, Customers, Cost and Complexity
Website design and development are highly technical fields. But even the most seasoned professionals can sometimes completely miss the mark, creating sites that fail to fulfill their value-generating promise. And, more often than not, this failure is caused by a lack of low-tech strategic thinking and analysis.
In a rush to launch sites, we can forget to examine four foundational topics: culture, customers, cost, and complexity. When poorly managed, any one of these can become the root cause of Web failure.
In this two-part series, we will examine the 4 C’s of Web failure and how to avoid them to improve your chances of seeing a positive return on your Web development investments.
Culture
Defining the culture of a website’s visitors is nothing more than old-fashioned audience analysis — something that should be done for every project, meeting, call, or engagement.
To effectively communicate in any situation, we need to understand our audience in terms of their preferences for subject, language, tone and — in the case of websites — visual presentation. Understanding these preferences will help us identify content and design options that will resonate with our site visitors. Skipping this step will likely result in choices that could repel the very people you are trying to attract to your website.
Customers
It is tempting to think that we know our customers by simply noting some generalities about the culture of our target audience. But understanding cultural distinctives does not adequately define our customers. The customers you must reach with your website are defined within your strategic framework. Review your market, competitive, and positioning analysis. Revisit the four P’s of your marketing strategy; product, price, place (or distribution), and promotion. Your commercial website is destined to fail if your design and development planning is not tied directly to your marketing strategy.
Cost
The global visibility of every website adds a new twist to traditional pricing strategy. Assuming you have a clearly defined pricing strategy and structure, you now have to carefully consider how to handle pricing online.
Again, go back to your strategy and align these decisions with your positioning and marketing tactics. If you don’t, you can undermine your own strategic goals by handling pricing incorrectly on your website.
Complexity
Your products and service offerings may be stupefyingly complex but their presentation on your website must be simple. They need to be elegant, clean, and intuitive. Anticipate expectations, needs, questions, and possible points of confusion in order to craft an interactive space that presents your information in a user-friendly manner — effort and frustration results in site abandonment and opportunities for your competitors.
While simplifying the user experience, keep in mind that every design choice should reinforce and build your brand. Otherwise, brand equity will erode with poorly coordinated online and offline marketing communications.
Business or Professional | Maintainable by Site Owner | Portfolio
A Business Professional or Consultant Site
Create a website like this for your business or practice using this theme in just few minutes. You get to edit each and everything in the theme without touching a single line of code from the theme control panel. Strategically designed, it covers all aspects that a professional website should actually have. What are you waiting for? Grab this theme now!
Strategically designed and coded, this professional theme covers all aspects that a website should actually have. Use this theme to create professional, easy and quick online presence for your business.
Fully Customizable Front Page
Customize the unique home page of the theme with your content and graphics via theme admin options.
Custom Control Panel
The theme has easy to use, advanced control panel that lets you configure theme settings so you don’t have to touch the code.
Drop Down & Breadcrumb Navigation
Theme lists child pages drop navigation upto 4 levels. Breadcrumbs Navigation (fully customizable) in inner pages is also included for better user experience
Gravatar Support & Threaded Comments
Communicate with your readers. Our themes use the latest features of WordPress including threaded comments and Gravatar integration.
Ad Monetization
The blog page and sidebar has strategic place holders that you can use to sell ad space or promote your own products.
On Page SEO and Alt Text
The most important on-page ranking factors for placing competitively in search engine results pages (SERPs) include keyword use in the title tag, keywords in the domain (page names and folders too), keywords in the headline tags, within internal and external anchor text, within page copy, and yes … keyword use in the alt text. While each of these factors is hotly contested in professional SEO circles, it’s image alt text that has our attention today. You may be asking yourself, “What is this … 2002 … with the discussion of alt text?” And I might agree completely if it weren’t for a recent spin I took on the SERPs of popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Let’s start by developing a definition of alt text. The alt attribute is used in HTML (and XHTML) documents to specify alternative text that is to be rendered when the element to which it is applied cannot be rendered. Over time, adding alternative text for images became a principle of Web accessibility. While alt text can be applied to media, applets or other non-text Web content (like entire areas of a Web page) the common understanding is alt text as related to images (and image optimization).
Why include alt text on images? While they do provide screen readers something to consume and aid those with visual disabilities, alt text provides a semantic meaning and description to images which can’t be read by search engines. Did you get that? Search engines, despite being technological marvels of efficiency and productivity, are dumb and they need your help (the webmaster/SEO) to tell them what an image actually means. That presents an incredible opportunity to influence position on the SERPs from where I stand. Don’t believe me – take a look at an example.
Today I searched for “Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal Bread” – after a good experience over the Labor Day weekend. I concede that the examples below are only one sample but the results encouraged me to rethink the use of naming images (as an on-page SEO tactic) that appear within content. More on that below.
Of the top five results on Google, three out of five returns named an image on the ranked page with the alt text (or some slightly modified derivation of it) with “Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal Bread”: AllRecipes.com, AndreasRecipes.com, and ClosetCooking (on Blogger) all had alt text on their images. And the last one didn’t even have any PageRank! RecipeZaar (which had an image but no alt text) and Cooks.com (its own search return list of related recipes) were the other two sites in the top five that were reviewed. Of the five final results on the first page, none had alt text.
Of the top five results on Yahoo!, three were identical to the top five on Google, but more importantly they (those with the alt text) were the ones that secured the first, second and third position. The next two results (position four and five respectively) did not have alt text on their images. Of the remaining listings, only one had alt text on its image.
Of the top five results on Bing, little had changed. AllRecipes and AndreasRecipes still topped the SERPs in the first and second position, but they were the only two of the top five that were using alt text. Consequently, of all the results that I encountered during this brief tour, Bing by far had the “spammiest” looking results.
So what’s the final verdict on alt text? While I do believe there are other more important factors in determining position (as outlined above) on the search results page, using alt text should be an important part of your on-page SEO – if only to be in-line with accessibility best practices. In the end, adding another layer of meaning onto your visual content can’t hurt
Real Estate ( Monetized )
I had a request to produce a professional real estate site that could be montized. That is the owners wanted to be able to sell ads on the site. This live demo is the result. I will be taking the ad code out later and will re-post the site as just a real estate site. The site features:
- A limited flash header.
- Ads in the top header and bottom footer.
- A rotating flash section which can continuously rotate 10 ads in the left sidebar.
- Two more static ads in the left sidebar.
- The right sidebar has i large static ad and a scrolling window which will support an unlimited number of ads.
- Ads may be placed at the top of each content page or at the bottom or in between if you wish.
- The site has a live event calendar.
- The site uses live mapping to locate properties and events.
- It features live video on each property page as well as live mapping
- A much bigger video effort supports the featured home section.
- It covers buying, selling, renting, residential, commercial and acreage.
- It has a large agent section with the ability to have seperate bio pages for each agent.
- It has a MLS search section as well as its own online database for local properties.
- It uses 2 different mortgage calculators.
- It features a pop up custom FAQ section to answer commonly asked questions.
- It has a live event calendar which can be maintained by the site owner.
- It has sections which explain who you are, what you do and how to be contacted.
- It has a statement of privacy policy which can be modified as needed.
- It has a customizable contact form which can be modified as needed.
- It has a number of information pages for buyers, sellers and renters.
- The site supports downloadable forms in PDF format.
This site maybe viewed live at http://www.niswebs.com/real_estate/ .
