The Consumer Salon

Are you a marketing person or general manager who has been put in charge of your company’s website redesign? If so, you’re in good company. A majority of the website redesigns being done today are not led by web professionals. They’re done by people who are experts in their product or service. With this in mind, there are several things you should know before you undertake your next redesign.

1. Understand each team person’s role

This may sound obvious. After years of working with clients on their website redesigns I know it’s not. What often happens is that managers are embarrassed to ask what role a programmer or designer actually plays. They believe that if they were more technically astute, they would know. Not so. Talk to each person on your team and understand what they do.

2. Ask WHY something can’t be done

This is another one that sounds intuitive. But often, managers assume that because a team member says it can’t be done, that they are using the same data to make a decision. When your team member says it will take too long, or be difficult, make sure you know what that really means for the project. Asking someone how they could make it happen is often enlightening.

3. Keep the timeline updated

During the project, update every part of your timeline on a weekly basis. Toward the end it must be daily. Make sure you regularly hear from the designers, the IT people and anyone connected with the project to make sure no one is hiding their concerns. This isn’t only a best practice; it will save you possible humiliation when your boss can’t show off his new website when he planned to.

4. Use visuals and software tools

It is helpful to use tools that assist you in working with people who are used to using diagrams and visuals. I use mind mapping software which lets you see the big picture and the details at the same time. Checkout my website for examples of how mind maps can be used for redesigns.

5. Listen to everyone’s ideas

It can be easy to dismiss someone who doesn’t view your business exactly as you do. That’s why marketers talk to marketers and sales people to sales people. If you run your project this way, you will be missing out on possible innovations. Everyone in your company has something important to say about it if you take the time to listen.

Stephanie Diamond is a 25+ year marketing professional experienced in building profits for a broad range of online businesses. As Marketing Director for AOL she created a line of multimedia software products that generated millions of dollars in incremental revenue. In 2002, she founded Digital Media Works, Inc. http://www.DigMediaWorks.com/ an interactive marketing and design firm which offers a complete line of solutions for online businesses. She helps companies figure out how to make their products easy to buy!

There is no refuting the fact that the triumph of a firm is attributed to the work undertaken by the team, but one misfortune can quickly wipe out your plans & bring down the revenue to zero. In order to avoid such an occasion, you are recommended to insure your company, whether it is a small business or a huge corporation. Though, please bear in mind that smaller firms are somewhat more probable to need business insurance cover in today’s world. This is for the most part as SME owners will have put their total lives & wages into the organisation.

A number of the things normally covered by the majority of business insurance covers include: natural catastrophes, landslides, mechanism or equipment breakdown that shuts down the organisation, loss of revenue as a result of worker blunder and court cases brought against the firm.

There are scores of insurance firms, which have covers that include protection for all important property & legal risks in one complete package. You can also get hold of a separate cover. Such a coverage is frequently called a business owners’ policy (BOP). Large sized businesses may well splash out on a business-related cover.

BOPs consist of property insurance for buildings & tools belonging to the business. If there is any loss of profits caused by disruption of processes & production because of accidents such as landslides, it can be insured under the Business Interruption Insurance policy.

There are a variety of policies, which insure the company’s legal liability for the injury it could inflict to others. It is the consequence your businesses failure to do the business operations. It can also be the actual injury or property damage caused through malfunctioning items, faulty installations and slip-ups in services offered.

However, BOPs don’t protect against professional liability, car cover, workers’ reimbursement or health and disability cover. Separate insurance policies are necessary for professional services, vehicles and workers. Commonly, floods, earthquakes and terrorist attacks are not covered in the business insurance. Please check before you acquire! Find cheap deals on professional indemnity insurance from Insured Risks.

Plan to write an article every 2 weeks or so. You will see a dramatic increase in web site traffic each time you submit yourarticle.. all without spending a dime.
In my previous article (Part 1 – www.isitebuild.com/writearticles) we discussed the 7 ways to benefit from writing an ezine article.

Part 2 will cover the formula and format you can use to write your own article as well as provide valuable resources where to publish your articles for maximum exposure.

How to write your own ezine article

1. Research a topic you are very familiar with or have a passion about. This makes it easier to write and will show through in your writing.

2. Take out a sheet of notebook paper and create an outline of your article. Write down all the points you wish to include. Don’t worry yet about the order because you just want to let your mind flow in the beginning.

3. Write down a number of headings and sub headings that concisely describe your topic. You will probably edit these a number of times before you have finished your article.

4. Write a catchy introductory paragraph that will immediately get the readers attention. If you are writing a “how-to” article, you could first explain the problems people are having “how to do this task”. You then provide the solution to their problems.

5. Offer clear solutions in succeeding paragraphs. These should expand and support the heading, introduction and sub headings.

Write four or five sentences for each paragraph. Your sentences should be formatted to 60-65 characters per line. This ensures your article can be read by all types of email software.

Most ezine publishers prefer short articles under 500 words, others prefer longer copy under 1000 words.

6. Write your conclusion – this paragraph should give a brief summary of what you have just written, emphasizing the main benefits.

7. Include a 5-7 line resource box at the end of the article – give a brief description of who you are, what product or service you are selling, your web site and email address. See the resource box at the end of this article for an example.

8. Revise your article – read through it a number of times so you are sure all the ideas build upon one another, support and expand on your main topic.

Use your spell checker but don’t rely on it (i.e. it won’t pick up the difference between there and their). Use the dictionary for words you are not sure of.

After editing it a number of times, leave it for a few hours or sleep on it then edit it again (or have someone else read it). This gives you a fresh perspective and you will often refine it until it’s near perfect:-)

9. Submit your article to online publishers and article banks – this will potentially give your article exposure to thousands of people.

Article submission resources:

http://www.ezinearticles.com http://www.ideamarketers.com http://www.makingprofit.com http://www.allwebarticles.com http://www.goarticles.com http://www.ezadsuccess.com/articles/submit.shtml http://www.netterweb.com/articles

Article announcement lists

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-Content http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PublishInYours http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aabusiness http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aainet

Directories of ezine publishers

http://www.directoryofezines.com http://www.ezinelocater.com http://www.ezinehub.com http://www.ezineuniverse.com http://www.ezinesearch.com

Software to send out your articles.

Ezineannouncer (Ezineannouncer.com)

Automatically sends your articles to 1000s of ezine publishers, saving you a lot of time and money.

Tips:

Keep it simple – write to appeal to a large audience, so don’t use large words or jargon that people won’t understand.

If you are planning on creating a web page from your article for the search engines, then weave your keywords throughout your text.

Send a thank you note to all people who publish your article. This will help you build long term relationships for your business.

Plan to write an article every 2 weeks or so. You will see a dramatic increase in web site traffic each time you submit your article.. all without spending a dime.

About the Author

Herman Drost is the author of the new ebook “101 Highly Effective Strategies to Promote Your Web Site” a powerful guide for attracting 1000s of visitors to your web site. http://www.isitebuild.com/web-site-promotion Subscribe to his “Marketing Tips” newsletter for more original articles. mailto:subscribe@isitebuild.com. You can read more of his in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles

There are many ways to drink soda and other carbonated drinks other than out of a can. An aluminum can is great to drink out of, however there is one thing that is quite interesting, the place where you put your mouth to drink the contents. The cans are transported around and travel great distances to make it on the shelves of convenient stores and markets. Drinking out of a can is safe and has not has any major bad things happen, but when you place your lips on the can and take a sip, where has that can been? It is like one of those things that when you think about it, it makes sense to not drink directly from. A straw can work and your lips will not contact the can. You can also pour the contents out into a glass and then drink it.

The best thing for your health is to drink water, and if you are losing weight with Acceletrim then you should be increasing your water intake and decreasing your sugar and soda consumption. Water is not served up in a can and is in plastic containers, this is a whole different topic and there is plenty of information available about this. Drinking out of a plastic container you don’t have to think about where the top has been because there is a lid protecting where you drink.

A large number of risk takers will surely have seen the term “offshore sports betting” recently, but aren’t entirely confident of what it actually means. A foreign gaming site fundamentally runs extraneous to the supervision of any given nation or alternatively it can mean a networked betting web site that has all of its host computer inside the boundaries of a state where web based sports gaming isn’t currently unlawful. To sum up then, it can be identified as a betting website functioning outside the area of the better. Live gaming webpages are mostly regulated through three federations. These are called the OSGA (the Offshore Gaming Association), the IGC (Interactive Gaming Council) and the Fidelity Trust Gaming Association (the FTGA).

The OSGA is in fact an autonomous institution which audits the modern overseas sports gambling trade, they are trying to also deliver gaming buffs an easy way to to readily distinguish dependable enterprises to play betting games on, without stress. It works to support customer’s rights, and they charge no enrollment dues.

The agency are a proficient and unbiased third party administration which reveals unbiased opinions, built on customer feedback, unbiased analysis, telephone conversations, inside prompts and additionally to supply industry information.

The Interactive Gaming Council are a not-for-profit agency. The organisation has been established to supply a platform for involved participants to talk about subjects and in addition to advance mutual matters in the multinational web-based betting trade, in an effort to establish sportsmanlike and also duty bound professional codes and practises which improve client certainty in online betting merchandise and functions, also to serve as the industry’s global policy advocate and the IGC works as a data depot.

The IGC has built up a regard for developing honesty, candor also plausibility due to its scrupulous principles, and its appeal for businesses of ethical practise. The Interactive Gaming Council regulates offshore gambling by means of utilising a specific 10-point basic policy rules and in addition bills sports gaming web sites license fees for publishing the council’s logo. Disgruntled clients can, if they demand to, state their issues to the IGC.

The Fidelity Trust Gaming Association was founded in an effort to present a benchmark which will upgrade the standards of on-line gambling trading operations. The authority trust that carrying on business with companies of honorable reputation, they can build a coalition of the most ethical and most proficient online betting companies all over the planet.

These are agencies who inspect the dealings of computer accessible sports betting and which should help to mitigate most if not all of the concerns held by cynics. World wide web based sports gambling web sites are now absolutely harmless, beacuse personal data should not be needed and the recompense and the odds are exactly as uniform and honest as in a normal Vegas-type wager. They cut back on travel time, but nonetheless maintain the basic character, only nowadays you may game in your house.

best bet online sports

A client of mine paid for a solo advert to promote
his website in the newsletter I publish at
e-bizministry about two months ago. As I
was about to send his advert to my list, he called
me up on phone and told me not to send it yet.
Naturally, I asked him why. His reply shocked me out
of my wits.

He said he had just discovered that his website had
disappeared from the net. He even said the same thing
had happened to the same website earlier in the year
when it disappeared in January only to reappear for
just one week in May. I could not help but laugh
because I knew his problem. He had made a wrong
choice of web host.

Your choice of web host can either promote your business
or ruin your business. You have to be very careful
when choosing your web host or you will be consistently
losing up to 80% of your income due to your web
host’s inefficiency.

Here are a few quick tips on how to know which
web host is reliable, affordable and right for your
website.

1. Check if the web host has a web presence. Face it,
if a company claims to be a web host and they don’t
have a functional website of their own, then they
have no business hosting other people’s websites.
Any web host you will use must have a functional
website where you can check for domain availability,
get support and order for their hosting services.

Additionally, you should conduct random checks on
their website. If you visit their site randomly ten
times and the site is not available more than once in
those ten times, forget about that company except you
want your own website too to be unavailable almost
all the time.

2. Any web host you will use must have an appreciable level
of relevant experience. A minimum of a full year of operation.
A new web host will only experiment with your website and
the result may not be good for your business. Visit
the web host’s website and read about them. If they
don’t talk about their experience, then they don’t
have it. Just leave them alone.

3. Look out for their present clients’ testimonials
on their website. Call or email the clients and ask
them questions. If they confirm that the web host is
good, then the company has passed this test. However,
if you don’t even find a single testimonial on their
website, they probably don’t have any satisfied client.
What to do? Just leave them alone.

4. How fast or how well does the company respond to
support emails? You can find out by conducting this
small test. Visit the web host’s website and submit
or email an enquiry to them. If you don’t get a
response in 24 – 48 hours, please run away as fast
as your legs can carry you. Why? When you host
your website with them and you have a problem,
it will take them more than a month to respond to
your support emails or requests.

5. You should not forget to check out their prices.
The prices must be within reasonable limits and
their packages must have the features you desire;
adequate monthly transfer, email addresses,
MySQL databases, CGI bin, FTP access, control
panel etc. Very high prices don’t necessarily
translate into very good services. Don’t be
fooled by high prices. It’s a common trick,
please don’t fall for it.

6. It must be easy and secure to make payments
to your web host. It is not advisable to fill
in your credit card details when making your
payment. You should rather use a web host that
accepts other forms of payment that do not
require you to fill in your credit card details
e.g. paypal and egold. If you are in a country
where you don’t have easy access to credit card
facilities, it is even better to use a web host
that accepts payment in your local currency.
This will ensure that you won’t have any
problems when you want to renew your domain
and your hosting accounts.

7. Use only web hosts that give 24 hour online
access to your account. With that, you have
total control over your domain and your website
and you can change anything including your
name servers (DNS)whenever you want.

8. It is better to use a web host that offers
additional web services such as web design,
website promotion, search engine submission
and website management. They can be of help
to you in future if you have any problems
with your website or you need any additional services.

9. Before you make your payment, read the
terms and conditions of the company carefully.
If you don’t understand or agree with any
of their terms contact them for more explanations.

10. Finally, I know it may be very time consuming
for you to conduct these tests on the hundreds
of web hosts out there before choosing one. I
have therefore taken the pains to analyse
hundreds of them. I recommend two web hosts
that have passed our simple tests. I can put
my reputation on the line and guarantee their
efficiency, reliability and affordability.

Oyeleke Toye is a web consultant, with expertise in web
hosting, web design, web promotion, website management and
custom scripts installation. The web hosts I recommend are:
http://www.netkonsults.com
http://www.hostplusng.com