Why Your Small Business Website Should Have a Blog?

Many small business owners think that promoting and branding their business will cost them huge amount. They generally are weak in finances and look for cheaper alternatives that can make a huge impact. Maintaining a good website with a decent blog is one such alternative that helps small business promote their businesses cost-effectively.

Having a blog in your small business website is very important. It has multiple advantages - it helps you gain your readers' trust, drives more traffic and expands your brand. A blog adds value to your Internet marketing strategy, and it enhances the interaction and engagement with customers. Let us discuss why you should consider having a blog in your website.

A blog is an inexpensive means of communicating with your customers
Blogging is an inexpensive way to brand and promote your business and a great way to communicate and connect with your potential customers. Through the blog, you can send messages to customers, reply to the comments and address their concerns instantly.

It is an inexpensive tool for communicating with customers and a low cost method to get your company's name out in the World Wide Web and reach a larger set of targeted audience. Literally, maintaining a blog (creating content, publishing and responding to comments) for the full month costs lesser than 1/10 of a 10-second TV ad during prime time.

Better relationship with customers
Publishing educational and informational content relevant to your service/product helps businesses better engage with their customers, drive sales and build customer loyalty.

A blog enables you to interact with your customers regularly. Interaction with customers gives good insights. As you keep posting good content, over time customers are likely to develop trust and you will earn their goodwill. Your blog is likely to become an important source of information for customers. It improves your relationship with your customers.

Customers can express their concern as and when they need
The blog in your website helps customers express their view point on your product/service. They may express their genuine concerns on the blog any time. They can simply write their view point and post it immediately.

Watch out for such comments. Be proactive while replying to the legitimate concerns and posting content. This is likely to make customers loyal to your business. Such loyal customers are likely to yield conversions. It helps in measuring user experience and keeping a track of what users are saying about the business.

Blog helps in better search engine rankings
Blogging regularly helps in improving search engine rankings. Search engines have a positive impression on blogs that are active, accurate and provide authoritative and original content. Search engines look for fresh content and give prominence to websites with such content. Your blog is the best way to provide fresh content. Small business owners need to remember that, to get the most out of their blog, they need to monitor and update their blog regularly.

Better late than never, small business owners should realize the importance of a blog in their website and maintain it properly to attract more traffic and sales to their business. So, in order to be successful, keep blogging regularly.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7901608

Free download: CSS3 buttons

Button states saved as images and toggled by CSS are so out of date it’s painful. We should all be using CSS3 to create buttons. We all know why: they’re easily editable, cross-platform, lightweight, accessible; the list of benefits is endless.

What’s not always so easy is coding them up. Sure you can use a framework, but for most projects that’s just too big of an overhead. Maybe you want to stick to flat design; just add a background color and make sure the default border is removed. Anyone else will be delighted that Irina Petculescu, a self proclaimed CSS3 junky and founder of prowebdesign.ro has put together these free CSS3 buttons. See her site for more freebies.
They come in two styles: flat, which maintains a small bevel; and glossy, with nicely rendered gradients. There’s even some basic transitions to make the rollovers nice and smooth.
What’s even better is that the team made sure they used rgba formatting for the styling, leaving the background colors in hex format. That means you’re free to change any of the hex colors you see in the CSS and the button background color will change instantly.

The buttons are free for personal and commercial use, so download them now and start tweaking them for your brand.

Article : http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/07/free-download-css3-buttons/

E-Commerce Web Design Essentials

The number of e-commerce websites currently in operation is said to be in the millions. This means there's huge potential for businesses to reap rich profits by taking their marketing online. If you're a web designer, you know just how lucrative website development is.

This huge number should be cause for motivation. Competing against well-known companies and their online stores is not easy but wholly possible by focusing on the target market and presenting products and services in an easy-to-understand manner. Inspiration can be sought from any one of the top websites out there but make sure you don't forget to follow these important tips.

Layout

There's no standard layout as this depends on the client, the designer and what the business is trying to sell. For example, a clothing retail store follows fashion's footsteps so it can't be devoid of trendy elements. Similarly, an electronics store is part of technology and the use of clean lines and futuristic accents complement what's being sold.

Search bar

In a store selling thousands or millions of products, customers don't have the patience going through everything. A visible and properly functional search bar makes it easy to filter items even with the inclusion of filters.

Filter

Filters like 'Men', 'Women' in a clothing or footwear store are standard. Under them, more options like 'size', 'color', 'tops/shirts', 'skirts/pants', 'stilettos/loafers' etc must be included. First-time shoppers are taking a risk by shopping online and they'll want to make sure products fit. Filters make the experience easier and give them confidence.

Images

The use of medium to large images is recommended because tiny photos don't show details clearly. High resolution images optimized for fast loading and expansion are close as customers get to touching them. The use of editing software to clean up photos is, of course, necessary but not so much so that products look artificial.

Images for a product should have different views, front, back, side, underside (for shoes, toys, electronics etc). A 360-degree view should be used for complex products with many parts.

Breadcrumb navigation

Breadcrumb navigation gives a user a clear view (through links) of the pages he's visited in a website. An example is Home-Men's footwear-Lifestyle-. This system enables him to go back to any one of the three links instead of pressing 'back' several times on the browser.

Emphasis on clean design

http://ezinearticles.com/?E-Commerce-Web-Design-Essentials&id=7887661

Create Responsive Website With 10 Varied Resources

The sagacious website designing is the source of attracting visitors and elucidating them about the strength of business. The website should have the ability to attract visitors and also emphasize on the different aspects of your business. If the web designing is interesting then the viewers will visit the site again and again that improves the chance of increasing the sales of your business. Hence, it is important for the business owners to use the best resources for the development and designing of the website.

Resources to Develop a Better Websites

Here, you will find 10 exclusive and attractive resources to design a website that reaches the expectations of savvy world.

Columnal

This elastic grid system is made up of cssgrid.net and the idea of sub-columns is driven from 960.gs. It is basically a blend of some custom codes.

Bootstrap v.2.0 from Twitter

Bootstraps stylesheet offer help in easy implementation of 960grid for efficient layout and allows developers to avail crafted styles for typography, navigation tables, forms buttons and more. By using Bootstrap, it's very easy to carry JavaScript touches as it provides a set of jQuery plugins for menus, tabs, tooltip, alert messages, drop-down list and more.

Normaliz.css

By deploying normalize.css file, developers can enjoy a great cross-browser consistency with a default styling of HTML elements. It targets all the HTML styles that need normalizing. All the elements are rendered with modern standards in varied browsers.

Mobile Boilerplate

Website development can turn into an enchanting experience when worked with the new resources such as Mobile Boilerplate. It helps in building fast, robust and adaptable web apps or sites.

Button CSS3 UI

Button CSS UI is easy to integrate and thus used in many websites and blogs these days. It adds numerous functionalities to the website and enhances the design to attract visitors.

CSS3 Patterns Gallery

It offers a large collection of CSS3 patterns and that's why called as the gallery of CSS3 files. The front page will give you many options of varied patterns, and with a single click you will be able to fetch codes to create the patterns.

Modernizr

Quite frequently, you can see web development agency using Modernizr in the development process of websites. It is a JavaScript library that observes HTML5 and CSS3 features in the browser and runs at high level on page load to find the features. At the end, it creates a JavaScript object with results and adds classes to the HTML element to work on CSS file. It also supports varied tests and sometimes includes YepNope.js to load external.js and.css resources depending on the needs.

Initializr

Start your project with magnificent Initializr to develop a new website. It creates templates that are based on HTML5 Boilerplate and allows you to choose between the different parts to be deployed. It gives basic design with responsive template instead of a blank page in the starting of the website.

Sencha CSS3 Animator & HTML5 Animations

New rich media ads are now created on Sencha Animator that uses CSS3 animations to give a modern and new generation look. You can easily captivate your audience and engage them for long time by providing animated text and images with smooth transitions, design buttons with gradients and embed analytics.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Create-Responsive-Website-With-10-Varied-Resources&id=7887088

Making Website Using Bootstrap

Bootstrap is an open source set of files written in CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets, a programming language used to dictate how a website or web app looks and works) that covers some of the building blocks of most web apps, such as buttons, tables and forms, page templates, app navigation and even stylistic matters such as typography and color gradients.

Downloading Bootstrap

The simple and small tools released by Twitter, The file size would be around 300-500 KB so it doesn’t matter anyway. Extract the bootstrap in a directory named bootstrap and place it inside the folder of the theme for which you wish to add the bootstrap.

Your Bootstrap folder will contain 3 folders named css, js, and img and just as the name suggests they contain CSS files, JavaScript files, and some related images. If you have downloaded the customized version of bootstrap from the link given above then you will have 2 files in the CSS folder named bootstrap.css and bootstrap.min.css but if you have downloaded from another source, make sure that the CSS folder contains bootstrap-responsive.css file as it would be necessary to create a responsive website.

Once downloaded, unzip the compressed folder to see the structure of (the compiled) Bootstrap. You'll see something like this:

Read More : http://varadesigns.com/making-website-with-bootstrap.html

CSS Gradient Text Effect

Do you want to create fancy headings without rendering each heading with Photoshop? Here is a simple CSS trick to show you how to create gradient text effect with a PNG image (pure CSS, no Javascript or Flash). All you need is an empty tag in the heading and apply the background image overlay using the CSS position:absolute property. This trick has been tested on most browsers: Firefox, Safari, Opera, and even Internet Explorer 6. Continue to read this article to find out how.

Benefits

• This is pure CSS trick, no Javascript or Flash. It works on most browsers including IE6 (PNG hack required).
• It is perfect for designing headings. You don't have to render each heading with Photoshop. This will save you time and bandwidth.
• You can use on any web fonts and the font size remains scalable.

How does this work?

The trick is very simple. Basically we are just adding a 1px gradient PNG (with alpha transparency) over the text.



More Detailed at : http://webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/css-gradient-text-effect

50 Awesome Animations made with CSS3

CSS3 has brought some amazing new features. And the most fun is playing with the CSS animation. Here is a compilation of 50 CSS3 animation that allows you to perform many motion-based functions normally Delegated to JavaScript. In order to view this effect, you are required to have WebKit browsers like Safari and Chrome ( very sorry for the users of Internet Explorer )

1. CSS3 Clock With jQuery

Use the basic features of the CSS3 Transform: rotate. And the combination of javascript frameworks like jQuery can produce a cool CSS3 clock



2. Analogue Clock

Analogue clock created using webkit transition and transform CSS. JavaScript is only used to pull in the current time.


Source : MORE

Custom theme on JQUERY THEME ROLLER

Building your custom theme with the JQUERY THEME ROLLER is very easy and fast. This tool is a state of the art style builder used by thousand of websites. You’ll need to have access to your website to upload the files.

It is recomended that you pick one existing theme and edit it instead of creating one from scratch. Navigate to JQuery Theme Roller, click the gallery tab, choose one of the theme to use it as a starting point, and then click the “Roll your own” tab.

jQuery UI is a curated set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library. Whether you’re building highly interactive web applications or you just need to add a date picker to a form control, jQuery UI is the perfect choice.

http://blog.varadesigns.com/build-your-custom-theme-on-jquery-theme-roller/

Resources for Twitter Bootstrap

Bootstrap
Sleek, intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development.

StyleBootstrap.info

As with Twitter’s own tool above, this tool allows you to use a simple interface to customize various aspects of Bootstrap. The difference here is that this one focuses primarily on the visual, design aspects. You can easily go in and change colors, fonts, borders, and a lot more.

BootstrapStyler

A wonderful collection of different themes, you can access and download all the themes in the collection. Really stunning design work.

Bootstrap Fireworks

This is a completely vector based UI toolkit built to mirror Twitter Bootstrap. This is great if you’re not a coder or just need to have a place to shuffle the pieces around without bothering with CSS.

http://blog.varadesigns.com/resources-for-twitter-bootstrap/

HTML5 responsive frameworks

HTML5 Boilerplate
HTML5 Boilerplate helps you build fast, robust, and adaptable web apps or sites. Kick-start your project with the combined knowledge

Once you have cloned or downloaded HTML5 Boilerplate, creating a site or app usually involves the following:
1. Set up the basic structure of the site.
2. Add some content, style, and functionality.
3. Run your site locally to see how it looks.
(Optionally run a build script to automate the optimization of your site – e.g. ant build script or node build script).
4. Deploy your site.

Twitter Bootstrap

It is a collection of CSS and HTML conventions. It uses some of the latest browser techniques to provide you with stylish typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation and everything else you need in a super tiny (only 6k with gzip) resource

Zurb Foundation
Foundation is the most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world. With Foundation you can quickly prototype and build sites or apps that work on any kind of device, with tons of included layout constructs (like a full responsive grid),

Skeleton
Skeleton is a small collection of CSS files that can help you rapidly develop sites that look beautiful at any size, be it a 17″ laptop screen or an iPhone. Skeleton is built on three core principles:

HTML KickStart
HTML KickStart is an ultra–lean set of HTML5, CSS, and jQuery (javascript) files, layouts, and elements designed to give you a headstart and save you 10′s of hours on your next web project.

http://blog.varadesigns.com/

Top 5 Reasons to Create a Unique Website

Gone are the days when procuring new business deals depended merely upon the traditional forms of advertising, such as newspapers, TV or radio. Today, unless you are innovative and proactive in your thinking as well as actions, you may easily fall way behind your competitors.

Well, if you believe that you can succeed in getting good returns by just creating a plain-looking website, think again. Or rather, think on the following lines-take a look at the multifarious benefits waiting in store for you if you spend some time and energy in adding value and uniqueness to your website:

i. Create more scope for visibility

Since there are thousands of websites already existing in your chosen field of business, it is quite natural for visitors to look for something unique and eye-catching in your site. They don't want to go to a site that is boring or too jazzy. On the other hand, if you are able to add value and uniqueness to your website by adding fresh and informative content, appropriate videos, suitable sitemaps, and so on, visitors will be easily impressed and would like to come back to your site again soon.

ii. Effective tool for diverting traffic to your website

Once the visibility of your website increases, consequently, the volume of traffic it receives also goes up. This is a welcome sign for your site and business too. With potential customers visiting your site more often than before, you stand a good chance to start receiving more calls or emails about your products or services. You should aim at converting these calls into actual business deals.

iii. Good chance to edge your competitors

With an attractive, fresh and informative website to support your business, you gain better chances of winning over your competitors and improving your ROIs.

iv. Create a distinct market niche

An increase in the number of successful business deals in turn paves the way for your business gaining a larger market share. In turn, your brand image is enhanced and satisfied customers begin to refer your products/services to their contacts. Such referrals also add to the expansion of your business. In a nutshell, your surge way ahead of your competitors by creating a unique market niche.

v. Start ranking higher in search engines

http://ezinearticles.com/?Top-5-Reasons-to-Create-a-Unique-Website&id=7828680

Responsive Website Design: What Is It? Why Is It Important for a Business Website

In today's world, the internet is a vital tool especially for small businesses and for interacting. It is agreeable that the internet impacts our lives in many ways. Before, a user can only access the internet through a computer (with internet access) at home or office. Then, laptops became available, thus, giving us the ability to have internet access - almost - everywhere we go. And now, we have mobile phones that are web enabled (internet in our pockets or at the palm of our hands). In fact, eighty-five percent of mobile phones sold in 2011 were web enabled and twenty-five percent of web users are mobile only. In one hand, it is a cool thing to browse the internet on your mobile phone. On the other hand, there are drawbacks.

One drawback with internet access on a mobile phone is the screen size. The screen sizes on mobile phones are smaller than those of a computer or laptop, which makes it hard to browse most web pages. Sometimes, you would have to zoom in or zoom out, or buy a new mobile phone with a slightly bigger screen size. For this reason, a solution has been found and this solution is "a responsive website."

Lately, there has been a lot of buzz about the new responsive website(s). What is it?

Responsive Websites Benefits

A responsive website changes its appearances and layout based on the size of the screen the website is displayed on. Also, a responsive website can be designed to make the text on the page larger and easier to read on smaller screens (no more straining your eyes). In addition, this future of web designs empowers you (or web designers) to make changes to the sites content without a lot of knowledge of HTML. That way, there would be no need to develop a second website exclusively for mobile use.

Moreover, users who browse the internet on their mobile phones as a hobby or for business is now able to benefit from a responsive website. Some of the benefits are:

• It keeps your website continuous
• It is cost effective
• It's a time saver

http://ezinearticles.com/?Responsive-Website-Design:-What-Is-It?-Why-Is-It-Important-for-a-Business-Website&id=7827165