Underground Web Designs Blog

There isn’t one. Now get back to work!

No one denys the wisdom of diversifying your investments. By investing your money in several different ways, in different places, you may not be guaranteed a good return, but your chances of loosing everything suddenly are drastically reduced. 

The same could be said for your website.

Most business owners put up a website because they expect it to help them make money. Unfortunately, many people don’t use (or just don’t know about) all the ways that their website could be making them money. Because of this their website is like a single investment in only one company. It’s great if that investment does well, but if it goes bankrupt you’re going to loose money.

Instead of placing all your eggs in one basket, look at these other options your website might be able to use to bring in some extra money and diversify your web presence:

• Google Adsense and onsite advertising.
• Affiliate programs.
• Online contests
• Forums and community sites (with ads).
• An e-mail mailing list or RSS feed.
• A free give-away with a powerful upsell.
• Social media (youtube, facebook, delicious, etc)

You’ll notice that not everything on that list will make you money by itself. The biggest key to being successful online is not to focus only on money, but to diversify your efforts. Have a strong focus, and then try many things to accomplish your goal and build your brand. By spreading out your efforts to gain traffic, build your brand, and yes, make money you may not become an overnight millionaire, but chances are you’ll slowly build a successful site.

When running a bricks and mortar business your marketing options are limited by time, manpower, and cost. Online you have much more freedom to explore different ways of advertising your business, making passive revenue, and communicating with your market. So do a bit of research and try something new. You may be surprised at the results.

(Watch future articles for more details on setting up an affiliate program, google adsense, and more).

Everybody knows that you should color coordinate your wardrobe in order too look your best. Don’t wear clashing colors, pick one or two colors that complement each other, etc. In the same way that you wouldn’t be caught dead wearing socks in sandals *chuckle* you should be sure that each of the various components of your website match. I’m not talking about just each of the pages on your site — I”m talking about every step of the process ANYBODY could use to interact with you online.

In order for your website to fulfill it’s full potential every part of it should match. This includes the shopping cart, your affiliate program (if you have one), your e-mail campaigns, any videos you do, and even your advertising. In the offline world this is known as branding, and is practiced by nearly every company. Sadly, many websites are strongly lacking in branding. Even if you paid for a professional, brandable theme for your home page, you may have still kept the default theme in everything else, such as your shopping cart, which hurts your branding efforts (not to mention conversions).

Imagine you’re shopping at a large online retailer. Their site looks very professional, with a color scheme of blacks and blues. You like the site and browse around for a while until you find something you like. You click “Add to cart” and it suddenly looks like you’re on a totally different site! Everything is white and orange! Are you going to be quite as eager to give up your credit card number and make the purchase now?

How can you stop this from happening to you? First, ask your web designer if he’s familiar with the shopping cart system you plan on using, or the forum software, affiliate software, etc. If you don’t yet know what software you want to use, ask your designer if what he/she recommends. If your designer is familiar with the other software you plan on using he/she can usually create themes for your other software that match the theme of your website. If your site design is already complete, talk to your designer anyway. They should still have the working files for your design saved somewhere, and from these they can easily build a template for your extra software.

A large part of doing business online is establishing trust. Before someone will do business with you, you have to convince them that you are trustworthy and will give them a fair deal. Without the face to face interaction that an in-person meeting provides, your site has to work extra hard to develop that trust. Take a look around your site for anything that jumps out or looks like it doesn’t belong. Then remove it. Remember that on the internet people are looking for any reason NOT to trust you, and will judge you by the smallest things. For that reason, making each part of your site match will go a long way towards making a customer feel you care about them, and are serious about business.

If you’re in the market for a new website, you may hear the term “accessible” tossed around. Just like a wheel chair accessible building is usable by people who cannot walk, an accessible website is built with those who have disabilities in mind. Though some disabilities prohibit use of the internet at all (paralysis, for example) some disabilities still allow a person to use the internet if certain considerations are taken into account when a website is designed.

Two of the most common disabilities that web designers can compensate for are blindness and colorblindness. Because so much of the internet experience is primarily visual, it is important to take into consideration how someone who has difficulty seeing can interact with your site.

Most colorblind people will be able to navigate most of the internet without trouble, however some sites that look fine to most people can be unendingly frustrating to them. Because colorblind people have trouble seeing one or more colors, using the wrong colors in your website can cause links, text, or background to blend together, resulting in a site that is unreadable, or a menu that disappears to a colorblind person. The good news is that it’s relatively easy to test how your site will look to a colorblind person. Tools such as this one show you how your site looks to people with various types of color blindness.

Outright blindness is a much harder thing to design for. Since blind people cannot read your web page at all, they must rely on programs called “screen readers” to read the text on the screen out loud. Though this may sound straight forward, often it isn’t. For example, screen readers cannot read flash content or text contained in images. It is possible to design a website in such a way that screen readers will still be able to use a site that makes extensive use of images, or even flash (often by having a separate “non flash” site); and yet many sites don’t make use of these work arounds.

When you’re looking for your next website, be sure you specify that you want a fully accessable site so that everyone can access it equaly. In fact, accessability is more than just the right thing to do. Many of the same practices that make your site more friendly to those with disabilities will also help your site be seen better by search engines. This in turn can result in higher rankings and more traffic to your site. As if that weren’t enough incentive, In some regions you may be legaly required to ensure that your site meets minimum accessability guidelines.

Don’t just go with good enough. Making sure your site is easily accessible to everyone can be a powerful compeditive advantage in a mediocre marketplace.

One of the first steps to getting a website is choosing a company to host your site. This process doesn’t have to be hard, and can be made all the easier if you know what to look for. Cheaper is not necessarily better when it comes to web hosting. As you evaluate hosting companies, keep the following five tips in mind:

1. Bandwidth. Get as much bandwidth as you can afford. Bandwidth is the amount of information people can transfer to and from your site in a month. The more bandwidth you have, the more visitors your site can support. If your site runs out of bandwidth your site will “go down” until you purchase more. For small business sites, make sure you have at least a few gigabytes, and watch how much bandwidth you use closely. If you are anywhere over 80% of your bandwidth it’s time to upgrade your hosting package, as a sudden spike in popularity could easily push you over the top and bring down your site.
2. PHP Support. Check to make sure the web hosting package you are looking at comes with PHP support. There are many web softwares (forums, blogging platforms, etc) that are written in PHP. These softwares are often available for free, but will be of no use if your server does not run PHP.
3. Server Uptime. Do some research into the hosting company you are interested in and find out how good their server uptime is. Uptime is simply a measure of what percentage of time a host’s servers operational. Remember that if a server goes down, you won’t loose your website, but nobody will be able to view your site until the server is fixed and running again. For this reason it is important that the server you choose has a high uptime rating. Usually a quick google search using the web host’s name and “uptime” will turn up some comments on whether that host offers good server uptime or not. Don’t host your site with a host that has a poor uptime rating.
4. Add-on Domains, Parked Domains, and Sub-domains. Even if your website is a simple one, you may find yourself wanting to add extra domains (web addresses) in the future. For those that don’t know, parked domains are simply domains that are re-directed to current site. This way you can have two or more web addresses pointing to the same site.Sub-domains allow you to replace the “www” part of your domain with anything you choose, so you can have mail.yourdomain.com, testing.yourdomain.com, or anything else.Finally, add-on domains are almost separate hosting accounts, though they share the same resources as your main account. Add-on domains can be handy for small side-projects that don’t really fit on the main site, but don’t warrant the purchase of an entire new hosting account.
5. e-Mail Accounts. As your business grows you will want to have business e-mail accounts that end in @yourdomain.com and in order to do this you will need to use the e-Mail account features of your web host. Most hosts offer more than enough e-mail accounts with their hosting packages, but check the number anyway. You don’t want to find out after you’ve bought a hosting package that you only get 10 e-Mail accounts with it.

Keep those 5 tips in mind as you shop for web hosting and you will avoid many costly mistakes many new website owners make. Above all, use your common sense. If a deal looks too good to be true (like some of the “free hosting” options out there), it probably is. Your website is worth the time it takes to choose a good host.

UndergroundWebDesigns.com is hosted with Bluehost.com, a solid webhost that I have used for several years with no complaints. They have one of the best hosting deals I’ve seen, excellent uptime, and quick customer service. If you’re in the market for web hosting, I give them my highest recommendations.