That WEBSITE Designer

We really can’t deny the fact that businesses are testing out Twitter as part of their steps into the social media landscape. You can say it’s a stupid application, that no business gets done there, but there are too many of us (including me) that can disagree and point out business value. I’m not going to address the naysayers much with this. Instead, I’m going to offer 50 thoughts for people looking to use Twitter for business. And by “business,” I mean anything from a solo act to a huge enterprise customer.

Your mileage may vary, and that’s okay. Further, you might have some really great ideas to add. That’s why we have lively conversations over at [chrisbrogan.com] in the comments section. Jump right in!

First Steps

1. Build an account and immediate start using Twitter Search to listen for your name, your competitor’s names, words that relate to your space. (Listening always comes first.)
2. Add a picture. ( Shel reminds us of this.) We want to see you.
3. Talk to people about THEIR interests, too. I know this doesn’t sell more widgets, but it shows us you’re human.
4. Point out interesting things in your space, not just about you.
5. Share links to neat things in your community. ( @wholefoods does this well).
6. Don’t get stuck in the apology loop. Be helpful instead. ( @jetblue gives travel tips.)
7. Be wary of always pimping your stuff. Your fans will love it. Others will tune out.
8. Promote your employees’ outside-of-work stories. ( @TheHomeDepot does it well.)
9. Throw in a few humans, like RichardAtDELL, LionelAtDELL, etc.
10. Talk about non-business, too, like @astrout and @jstorerj from Mzinga.

Ideas About WHAT to Tweet

1. Instead of answering the question, “What are you doing?”, answer the question, “What has your attention?”
2. Have more than one twitterer at the company. People can quit. People take vacations. It’s nice to have a variety.
3. When promoting a blog post, ask a question or explain what’s coming next, instead of just dumping a link.
4. Ask questions. Twitter is GREAT for getting opinions.
5. Follow interesting people. If you find someone who tweets interesting things, see who she follows, and follow her.
6. Tweet about other people’s stuff. Again, doesn’t directly impact your business, but makes us feel like you’re not “that guy.”
7. When you DO talk about your stuff, make it useful. Give advice, blog posts, pictures, etc.
8. Share the human side of your company. If you’re bothering to tweet, it means you believe social media has value for human connections. Point us to pictures and other human things.
9. Don’t toot your own horn too much. (Man, I can’t believe I’m saying this. I do it all the time. - Side note: I’ve gotta stop tooting my own horn).
10. Or, if you do, try to balance it out by promoting the heck out of others, too.

Some Sanity For You

1. You don’t have to read every tweet.
2. You don’t have to reply to every @ tweet directed to you (try to reply to some, but don’t feel guilty).
3. Use direct messages for 1-to-1 conversations if you feel there’s no value to Twitter at large to hear the conversation ( got this from @pistachio).
4. Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone’s talking about you. Try to participate where it makes sense.
5. 3rd party clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl make it a lot easier to manage Twitter.
6. If you tweet all day while your coworkers are busy, you’re going to hear about it.
7. If you’re representing clients and billing hours, and tweeting all the time, you might hear about it.
8. Learn quickly to use the URL shortening tools like TinyURL and all the variants. It helps tidy up your tweets.
9. If someone says you’re using twitter wrong, forget it. It’s an opt out society. They can unfollow if they don’t like how you use it.
10. Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.

The Negatives People Will Throw At You

1. Twitter takes up time.
2. Twitter takes you away from other productive work.
3. Without a strategy, it’s just typing.
4. There are other ways to do this.
5. As Frank hears often, Twitter doesn’t replace customer service (Frank is @comcastcares and is a superhero for what he’s started.)
6. Twitter is buggy and not enterprise-ready.
7. Twitter is just for technonerds.
8. Twitter’s only a few million people. (only)
9. Twitter doesn’t replace direct email marketing.
10. Twitter opens the company up to more criticism and griping.

Some Positives to Throw Back

1. Twitter helps one organize great, instant meetups (tweetups).
2. Twitter works swell as an opinion poll.
3. Twitter can help direct people’s attention to good things.
4. Twitter at events helps people build an instant “backchannel.”
5. Twitter breaks news faster than other sources, often (especially if the news impacts online denizens).
6. Twitter gives businesses a glimpse at what status messaging can do for an organization. Remember presence in the 1990s?
7. Twitter brings great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn (if you look for it, and/or if you follow the right folks).
8. Twitter gives your critics a forum, but that means you can study them.
9. Twitter helps with business development, if your prospects are online (mine are).
10. Twitter can augment customer service. (but see above)

What else would you add? How are you using Twitter for your business?

By the way, Jeremiah Owyang has a great post on this, too.

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters. Original Article from http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/

A Winner makes commitments;
A Loser makes promises.

A Winner never quits;
Loser always quits.

Winners have dreams;
Loser have schemes.

Winners say,”I must do something”;
Losers say,”Something must be done.”

Winners are a part of the team;
Losers are apart from the team.

Winners see the gain;
Losers see the pain.

Winners see possibilities;
Losers see problems.

Winners hardly get mad;
Losers always upset.

Winners never whine;
Losers always bitching.

Winners are not pretender;
Losers wannabe know it all.

Winners believe in win/win;
Losers believe for them to win someone has to lose.

Winners see the potential;
Losers see the past.

Winners are like a thermostat;
Losers are like thermometers.

Winners choose what they say;
Losers say what they choose.

Winners use hard arguments but soft words;
Losers use soft arguments but hard words.

The Winner says, “I will do it”;
The Loser says, “Let me see what I can do”;

The Winner is always part of the answer;
The Loser is always part of the problem.

The Winner is always has a plan;
The Loser always has an excuse.

The Winner says,”Let me do it for you;
The Loser says;” That is not my job.”

The Winner sees an answer for every problem;
The Loser sees a problem for every answer.

The Winner says,” It may be difficult but it is possible”;
The Loser says,”It may be possible but it is too difficult.”

When a Winner makes a mistake, he says,”I was wrong”;
When a Loser makes a mistake, he says,” It wasn’t my fault.”

Winners stand firm on values but compromise on petty things;
Losers stand firm on petty things but compromise on values.

Winners follow the philosophy of empathy: “Don’t do to others what you would, not want them to do to you”;
Losers follow the philosophy, “Do it to others before they do it to you.”

Winners make it happen;
Losers let it happen

Whatever your skills, whatever your interests, everyone has the ability to be creative in their work. However, we can often lose our motivation and drive to create, making it difficult to stay focused on a particular work plan or project, especially in web design. So what is the best method for staying motivated?

The key to maintaining your own motivation to be creative is actually a long term effort. Starting out can be tough, and in most cases the most difficult part. But with the right methods and consistency you will be able to reach a point where staying motivated is easy. It is a simple case of knowing when to make the right choices at the right times.

Obviously everyone is unique and each of you will have your own methods and actions into being creative. But here is the chance to read something that offers some possible methods and solutions when getting motivated and staying motivated.

The main things to take into consideration are:

Set goals

• You will find it is a lot easier to stay motivated when you feel like you’ve reached a target. Give yourself something to achieve and break the work load down. If it is a large website project you are working on, set yourself mini goals so you are reaching targets every few hours or days rather than spending weeks trying to get the lot done.

Small bite-sized objectives

• As mentioned briefly above, set yourself up for more success than failure by being realistic in goal setting and come up with small, bite-sized tasks to start with. As you complete more tasks, start making your goals more ambitious.

Build a creative workstation

• Whether you design websites at your desk, in a dark room or a home office, you need to assign a place to yourself where you can be creative. Once you’ve decided on that place, use it! Each creative task and success you achieve in your ‘creative workstation’, will slowly train your mind to be creative within it. When I first set up my creative workstation it took me about 3 months for it to click in my mind that it was actually my workstation but as soon as I enter now, I can focus my mind that I’m ready to work.

Walk away, but don’t quit!

• Whatever you do, you must always remember to never give up on a website or problem. Put them to one side for a while but always come back it later on, even if it means coming up with a theory for solving the problem. These problems build confidence and develop a nice portfolio.

Find your creative time zone

• Just like your body’s sleeping and eating times, there is also a best time when your body can be most creative. For me, the best time to be creative used to be late at night, now-a-days it’s usually between midday and late evening. Although I do have a creative burst where I get most work done after 9pm. Your main objective is find out when you are at your most creative side and start using that time to your advantage.

Using the right tools

• When being creative designing websites you need to ensure that you are using the right tools for the job. The ‘right tools’ doesn’t necessarily mean the best tools but being creative can be difficult enough, therefore, the idea is to make the job / project as easy as possible. For example, my best choice design software has got to be ‘Photoshop’, you may make this more difficult by trying to use ‘mspaint’ to come up with some amazing graphics. It’s something you just don’t do!

Following progress

• One of the key points in being creative is to follow your own progress. As mentioned in step 1; the main objective is to break the task down into smaller parts. Therefore, after a few weeks working on a project look back and see how far you’ve come. If you don’t stop every so often to see where you were a couple of months ago, and where you are now – do it! You might just surprise yourself on how much progress you’ve made and how your creativity has grown.

Get out of the house

• This may seem a bit like the step where you walk away from your work and come back to it later, but there is a fine line between setting aside some work and actually taking a break from your workstation. Whilst a creative workstation can often be the best practice, it sometimes helps to go somewhere different to work. It can provide a different level of ideas and influence your creativity and work.

Work through it

• You may think that it’s pointless trying to force yourself to be creative when you’re ‘not in the mood’ but often it can work in your favour. It may feel difficult to start with but as you gain momentum you’ll find your motivation returns almost every time! After all, you have nothing to lose; you get the job done and you’re still producing quality work / websites. It may not seem like they are of good quality but you may still be working the same as you usually do, you’re just in the wrong state of mind to realise.

Cheap Web Design UK

Articles on Designing a Website

There is no doubt that website redesign can be necessary for anyone. Here, we will take a much closer look at some of the things which you should be sure to take into consideration when you decide to have your website redesigned. Read on to learn more about this, as well as why website redesigning may be of importance to your website.

Who is it the Most Suitable For?

There is no doubt that a website redesign can be suitable for just about anybody. It is probably the most suitable for a company or business that is looking to improve their success. It is also suitable for a company that is looking to get the best results out of website promotion or website optimization. Of course, if you just have a website which can use some readjustments, considering a new website design can be a very good choice for you.

Why is the Best Website Designing Important?

There are a number of different reasons why making sure your website experiences the best website designing can be very important to its overall success. The reasons are as follows:

* It can improve your websites overall appeal to anyone, through some of the best website graphics and styles.
* Website promotion can be a whole lot more effective, due to the new appeal of your website.
* It can help you pick out some of the best wording for your website, in order to make sure that your website optimization is top notch.

Why Can Website Redesigning Be Important For a Company?

Although you may have heard that it is true before, chances are that you may not know why a new website design can be very important for a company website. Well, for a number of different reasons.

* When people can easily understand how to use a website, they will be a whole lot more likely to use a service.
* The overall appeal, as well as how professional your company’s website looks can be a huge determining factor as to how successful your company may be.

Know What You Want to Improve About Your Website

One of the main keys to getting the best website redesigning is knowing what it is that you want to improve about your current website. For example, do you want to get rid of those lousy graphics and have a graphic design company replace them with their professional graphic services? Or do you want to make sure that everything that it is on your website sounds professional enough? No matter what the case, it is important to have a good idea of what you would like to improve beforehand.

Know What You Want to Keep About Your Website

One of the main keys to getting the most through website designing is knowing what your website’s strengths are. For example, do you like the way that everything is worded, but you simply do not like the way that it is laid out? If this is the case, all you will need is a new layout. Or perhaps you just want to make your website easier to understand. No matter what it is, you should have a good idea of what it is that you like about your website as it is right now.

Have Ideas in Mind

Having the right ideas in mind can be very important for you. It can make the entire process of redesigning your website go a whole lot smoother. Chances are that you will also probably have a much better chance of getting what you are looking for if you have some ideas of what you want beforehand. Otherwise, it will be completely left up to your website designer. It is safe to say that; overall, brainstorming can be very helpful to anyone.

Know How Well it Grabs Attention

One of the main keys to having the ultimate website promotion, as well as the ultimate website optimization, is making sure that your website grabs attention. Chances are that if the design of your website is boring, people will not become overly interested. However, if you make your website interesting and very stylish, chances are that you will begin to see much3 better results.

If you do not know whether or not your website grabs attention right now, you should make sure that you ask several people what they think about your website’s appearance. If they like it, chances you will not need to change much but if they do not like it, you could end up needing a complete website redesign.

Understand The Purpose of Your Website

The most important thing about having the most effective and well designed website may be understand what the purpose of the website is. For example, if it is intended to advertise a company, you should know that. If it is used to sell your company’s products, you should be able to freely identify that.

Whether these are the purpose of your website or if it is just used to teach others about your personal interests, you should have a good idea of what your website is supposed to do. This can make the website redesign process go a whole lot easier.

Improve the Content on Your Website

There is no doubt that the content of your website is probably the most important thing. It can completely determine how effective your website promotion or website optimization will be. Not only do you want to make sure that the content on your website flows, but you also want to make sure that the content on your website also sounds credible. This is especially important if you have a company website, in order to ensure the sale of your products or services.

Hire The Best Website Redesigners

Although anyone can redesign your website for you if you pay them to, not everybody will be able to do the same job. It is important to make sure that you hire the best people to transform your website through website redesigning. In order to find the right company, it is important to find people who are experienced in website designing, and who will also cater to your needs.

Although you may find a website redesign company who will offer you cheap services, the most important thing is quality.

Quality will determine the complete success of your company, or overall effectiveness of your website.

Rajesh V. Tavakari, Senior SEO of Website Promotion & Ranking-Services. Offering affordable Website Submission Services and Website Designing Services for higher ranking since 1998. You may freely reprint this article on your website or in your newsletter provided this courtesy notice, author name and URL remain intact.

Articles Website Design

There are many conflicting theories about color and layout of a website, however I would like to list a few rules that will help you improve your website visitor experiences.

I have seen literally hundreds of landing pages and websites that have great sales copy, are promoting quality products, and have a lot of potential to be a great, but the page looks horrible. Today we are going to focus on the readability and layout of a website.

The purpose of a landing page or website is to get your visitors to read what you have to say. Whether you’re selling products and services, or providing useful information, you need to be able to effectively communicate with your visitors for them to take the action you desire. That action could be clicking on a link, signing up for a newsletter, or purchasing a product. The size and color of your text play a huge part in communicating your message to your visitors. Having Black Text, on a white background is THE easiest form of text to read.

Using color schemes that clash, or cause the text to be difficult to read will many times cause your visitors to leave your page immediately. If you want to use a different color background or text color, make sure that readability is not negatively affected. Below are a few rules that will help you improve your website.

1. Do not use dark text with a dark background. Dark text on dark background makes it hard to distinguish text from the background color. Thus making your eyes have to focus harder.

2. Do not use text colors that clash with background color. White text on a black background has a “glowing” like affect that makes your text hard to read. Red on blue also creates a negative glowing affect.

3. Do not use large text for your main sales copy or body paragraphs. It is ok to use larger text for links and headlines, but the main text of your page should be Arial Size 2 (12pt). Arial Size 2 is the internet standard.

4. Do not waste the space at the top of the page with unnecessary graphics, flash, or banners that have no purpose. Simply listing the name of your website, or domain name is a very poor use of this prime real estate space. The first fold of your website is the most important space that you have because it is the section of the page that is visible as soon as your page loads. Do not take up this space with unnecessary graphics, flash, or banners. A Strong headline that states the benefit of your product or service is always better than a banner that has no purpose.

If you are struggling with site design or if its taking too much of your time, here’s some tools that can greatly help you.

Site Rubix: Not free but well worth the investment. Cost less than most website builders. This website builder enables you to create professional looking websites within 5 minutes, all without any Html knowledge.

DreamWeaver: This software is allows you to build visually appealing websites without Html skills, but may take you awhile to get past the learning curve that the software presents. DreamWeaver is one of the more popular but expensive website builders.

Nvu: It’s free, but will take you longer to make a website and generally the site will not look as professional.

Remember, your website serves a purpose, whatever that purpose is make sure your visitors can easily read and understand message. I hope the tips provided above assist you in creating a professional looking website that you can take pride in.

Caleb Caldwell is a full time Internet marketer and web designer. If you’re interested in learning more about how you can quickly and easily build a professional website with no Html skills, then be sure you goto http://www.siterubixone.com for more info.

Website Design Tips