Turn on the news and you’ll hear about it all day.

But hidden in all of the ‘ doom and gloom ‘ is something that few people are talking about. Even though we’re in the middle of a recession, a lot of savvy eBiz owners have not only survived this economic downturn, they thrived in it.

How did they do it?

Well, that’s exactly what you’re going to find in a series of FREE videos, audio interviews and special reports in the upcoming weeks.

A few weeks ago, a company that I have a lot of respect for, Worldwide Brands, sent out a survey to their customer list and asked what their main concerns were.

Almost 75% of them said they were worried about how the recession will affect their business.

So, Worldwide Brands went to work and created videos, audios, and tutorials to show their
customers what they needed to do to grow their online business in troubled times.

Initially, this content was only available to their customers, but for the next few days you can get access to it for free.

You’ll get case studies, free tutorials, audio interviews, and free videos showing you exactly what you need to do to take your online business to the next level no matter what the economy looks like.

Click here to watch the first video and sign up for their in-depth video series.

Trust me when I say this, they can easily charge a lot of money for this information.
Worldwide Brands is the world’s largest provider of wholesalers and drop ship companies pre-qualified to work with small business owners.

They know what they’re talking about and this is insider information you can’t get anywhere else.

So sign up to get all of this valuable content for free, before it’s gone:

Thanks and I’ll talk to you soon.

Susanne
DoYourOwnMarketing.com

P.S. – If you have more questions and comments after you watch the videos, you can drop them
a line on the blog. They’ll be watching the blog to answer questions and get more ideas
for upcoming videos. Click here to check it out

In the real world, people are looking online for things to help them do what they want to do. In order to create effective web designs, we have to be understand how people use the web. Effective design is made for the real world.

As designers, we enjoy looking at beautiful design, well balanced elements and nice color schemes. And most importantly, we really look at websites, as though we’re looking at a work of art. But most people do not look at websites this way. They simply look for information – and they want to get that information quickly and easily.

Designing for the content is our focus and our challenge, because we believe that the content is the key to a website’s success. Content is what it’s all about. It’s content that makes a site work, flow and communicate well with the right tone. Our job is to maximise a web site’s effectiveness and that means understanding how users will interact with a site’s content. Our first priority is function, but function can’t live without good design.

It always helps to have a framework to start from, so that we’re not designing without a plan. A good way is to list what your site needs to communicate, and then prioritize those messages. We like to start with a basic bullet point list, and then create a basic flowchart in Mindmeister. (www.Mindmeister.com)
This is an easy way to communicate see how the flow of the content is going to work.

What do we want the visitor to be able to do? Find information, order products, send for more information, browse our catalog… The more we know about the user, and what the user needs to be able to find on your website, the easier the design process.

Great design just means that the look and feel works hand in hand with the functions of the website to ensure a great experience for the website visitor.

Many websites own more than one domain name and point the extra domain names to the website. The reason for this is to make it easier to find your website, even with a typo for example.

So what’s a good domain name? That really depends on what you’re doing online and how you’re doing your marketing. How are you planning to have your clients find you? If you’re a retailer and you send your clients to your website through advertising in your store, on your business card, in your print advertising etc. you probably want a easy to remember name for your customers. Let’s say you’re selling widgets, maybe www.Mywidgets.com would be a good name for you – or www.WidgetsGalore.com if that’s the name of your store.

If you’re going after search engine traffic you want to use your keyword phrase in your domain name. So then www.Luxury-Widgets.com might be appropriate.
Domain names are similar to real estate in that domain names are virtual properties on the internet. You use the domain name to build your website on – just like a house is built on a lot. The highest quality domain names are sought-after just like waterfront property, and they carry significant value. This is why you want to make sure you have your name on the domain name registration, just like you would have your name on the title of your house. This way you will get notified when your domain name is about to expire for example. Many businesses have lost their domain names because they simply didn’t understand that they had to keep track of their asset and left it in the hands of a web designer instead. Once the web designer leaves, nobody has passwords, or log ins, or even a receipt of ownership to the domain name.
So, how do you register your domain? Well, there are plenty of places you can go to to register a domain name. Here are a few examples:
www.GoDaddy.com
www.1&1.com
www.register.com

HOSTING
You also need to consider hosting. Where are you going to host your website? We prefer usually recommend using a big hosting company like 1&1.com or GoDaddy,com, just because it’s easy and reliable. They have tech support 24-7 and guaranteed uptime. This means that your website will not go down due to problems with the host. In the early days of the internet, many smaller web design firms hosted website on their own servers. This sometimes meant that the server would shut down due to a virus attack or some sort of technical issue, which could be devastating to business. Nowadays hosting is not a large cost. It’s usually inexpensive to host your website, most of your monthly fees will be related to the e-commerce part of your website (such as shopping cart, payment gateway and payment processing fees). But we’re getting way ahead of ourselves. Let’s back up to hosting.

I usually think of hosting as parking. Basically you rent a space in the parking garage for your website where it can reside. You want to use a large parking garage to ensure that your pass code always works and that there’s security so that nothing happens to your car. You want security cameras, and a guard onsite 24-7. You pay a monthly fee for your space.
The parking garage can be compared to a server. A server is really nothing but a super-computer, and in this case it’s used as a container for websites. When we speak of servers in the web world, it sounds as if these are magic devices floating around in cyberspace. Many web designers, or other businesses, rent space on someone else’s server for storage. Sometimes they’ll rent the whole server, sometimes just a part of it. They can upload large amounts of information to this server for storage, but now I’m getting off track again. Let’s get back to our hosting.
As a website owner, you don’t want to have to deal with maintenance of the parking garage. You want to be able to sleep at night and not have to worry about if someone is breaking in to the parking garage to steal cars, or if the light bulbs needs changing, or the floor swept. This is what we pay hosting for. We let the experts handle this part. Trust me, they have all the necessary tools for the job – the fancy security cameras, the armed guards and the floor sweeping mobile.