Every website needs a web address or domain name where it can be found. Usually, your web designer will help you in making the correct choice, but how should you evaluate his or her recommendations? Or what if you want to register a website address yourself?

This guide aims to help you with these questions.

Finding an Available Domain Name

A good place to check for available domain names and potential variants is NameBoy. It will show you web address alternatives, and what names are still available. Even if a domain name is taken, you can still go back to their homepage, enter the domain name there, see who owns it and how you can contact them to discuss buying the domain name from them (warning: this can be an expensive option!)

Another great service is Picky Domains. For $50 (or free when you are a blogger) you can get help finding the ideal domain name. If no ideal domain name is found, you pay nothing. This can make the ordeal of finding a suitable domain name relatively easy for you.

You can also ask our community to help you with brainstorming a domain name in our Forum.

Your Web Address Should Ideally Be the Same As Your Company Name

Our firm is called Online Design Bureau. As a result, we registered the domain name onlinedesignbureau.com and all of its variants (.biz, .net, .org, etc.)

Microsoft owns microsoft.com, Apple owns apple.com. Examples are league.

But why is this important?

When people know your brand name, they will conduct a search for your brand online. The website that is most likely to show up is the site that has a web address with an extension (.com, .org, .biz) at the end.

You want that result to be your site. How bad would it be if you did a search for Sony, and the first result (sony.com) did not belong to the Sony corporation? Exactly.

For that same reason, you should also register all variants of your brand name. At least the ones that would have relevance in the countries where you trade. So when you register a domain name, register all the suggested variants as well. E.g. Microsoft owns .com, .net, .org, .biz, .us and all other variants on the net. You do not want one of your competitors to buy up one of these domain names and undermine your brand.

Choosing a Good Web Address When You Have No Company

Sometimes you want more than just a corporate address. You might want to build an alternative site, or you might be a blogger without a corporate brand behind you. How do you choose a good web address then?

1. Your web address should relate to your product, service, business or the content you deliver

What do you do? If you are a plumber in Dallas, Texas, a good website address name could be plumbingdallastexas.com. If you write about agriculture in Nebraska, a good name could be agricultureinnebraska.com. Etc.

Think about what best describes what you do and then try to find a catchy web address that corresponds with that.

If consumers might get confused about alternate spellings, register these domain names too. For instance, if you run a blog that speaks to both US and British readers, keep in mind that the Brits spell many words differently. Register domain names according to this spelling. You can then redirect these extra domain names to your main website.

Chances are that the domain name with your profession or industry topic + location is already owned. Keep in mind that there are plenty of key phrases people type into Google’s search engine to find your brand. To see what type of popular searches relate to your brand or product, simply go to the Google external keyword tool.

The video below will show you how to use the Google external keyword tool:

http://www.youtube.com/v/bcIBsMr19_k

(You can subscribe to our YouTube Channel to get updates about our latest tutorials on YouTube.)

Once you know the keywords that people are looking for, try to see if there is still a domain name available with these keywords avaible (NameBoy will help you with this).

2. Your web address should be memorable

Yes, the main source of traffic for your website will be the search engines. But once in a while your website might come up in a conversation between 2 people you might not necessarily know. If they tell each other they found this great website and that the other should check it out, you don’t want it to be something complicated like AnantharamanSubbaraman.com. However, if I told you that the main competitor for Ikea is thisisfurniture.com, than that is a name you might be able to remember until you come home, or would find easy to type into your browser. An added bonus is that if you own thisisfurniture.com, it isn’t hard at all to have top billing for the search ‘this is furniture’, the brand name of the company.

3. Good web addresses aren’t easily confused with other addresses.

If your website is all about recipes, and you try to compete with a famous website called recipezaar.com, it might be unwise to name your brand recipebazaar.com. You’ll end up being responsible for sending more traffic to the better known site.

4. Beware of trademarks

When web addresses were new, people made it a sport to buy up famous brand web addresses, and then ‘cybersquat’ them, often selling them on for major money. Recently, legislation has caught up with technology, and the legislator now favors the trademark holder. So if you’d own nike.com, chances are that Nike would still get the name if they took you to court and you couldn’t justify how that domain relates to you or what you do.

As a result, it is important to tread carefully if your domain name could be confused with that of a major brand. You might put in all the work to promote your web address, only to lose it when contested.

Registering a Domain Name

Registering a domain name is easy. Probably the best value for money is by registering your domain with Google. For full disclosure, we are heavily integrated with Google’s services and love these people. Again, your web designer will be able to guide you in this decision, or simply look up “domain registration” on a search engine of your choice and compare prices. You should never pay more than $10/yr for your domain name!

Over to You

If you have additional observations, or find yourself with additional questions that we didn’t fully answer here, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or contact us.

Have more questions about how to make the most of your website? Join the conversation in our forum.

Welcome to part 2 in our series on how to create a successful business website. Yesterday we discussed how to choose a domain name, today we’ll look into how to hire a web designer or a web design agency.

Step 1: Searching a Web Designer or Web design firm

1. Do a search online for web designers + your local area. That way, you will find web designers that are local to you and that you can keep accountable. One way of suppressing cost is by looking for foreign website developers, but keep in mind that creating a website is never a one-off job. You will want updates in the future, your web designer will from time to time need to update the security of your site to prevent your site from being hacked, and you might want extra functionality.
2. Always look at more than one web design company. Do you like the design of their site? Then check out their portfolio. Do you like the style of the work they’ve delivered? Does the work look sufficiently different from site to site? If the answer is no, you are dealing with a company that only can create a generic, ‘one-look fits all’ site. If the answer is yes, you have found a design company that is flexible enough to cater for different needs.

Step 2: Conducting the interview

1. When talking to a web design firm, really notice how much they talk about your business. This is a good indicator of what type of partner they will be in the project. If they try to close the sale too hard without showing interest in your business, they will offer little value. Only a firm that wants to know your business intimately will be able to represent your business as it is.
2. Make sure you ask them if they do all the design work of their websites themselves. Some firms hire outside designers and only take care of the technical side of creating websites. That means that you are dealing with a middle man when it comes to trying to get your site designed, which pushes up cost and Chinese whispers can soon get the better of your project.
3. Equally, ask them if they did the programming of the websites in their portfolio themselves. If the company doesn’t know how to program a site and hires third party service providers, you might be facing unpleasant surprises that the firm cannot solve easily. Programming a website isn’t that hard for a firm, but managing a third party programmer (usually in India) can lead to a number of accountability issues.
4. Ask your web designers for a structured process on how they develop a site, clearly detailing every design phase. It will show you how organized they are. They should be giving your an opportunity for input with every step along the way, otherwise how could you make the site into an accurate representation of your company?
5. Do they know about SEO? SEO is the art to have your site rank well in the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Your site should be designed with the search engines in mind, so that you can be found online for your products and / or services.
6. Also ask how you will be invoiced. Never accept a ‘payment up front’ arrangement. Instead, look for a deal where you pay 50% now, 50% after satisfactory delivery of the website. We offer payment terms of 30% at the beginning, 30% midway through and 40% payable 30 days after the website has been launched, giving you every opportunity to spot mistakes in functionality before you have to pay the full sum. It is important that you can agree with your web designer that you don’t have to pay on the day of completion, but that you get plenty of time (a minimum of 14 days) to ‘play’ with the live site to find if there are any glitches. This makes the web designer more accountable.
7. Ask if they will maintain your site. The more dynamic your site is, the more it will need security updates, in order to make sure that nobody can hack your site. What are their terms, how much will you be charged on a recurring basis?
8. Ask them if they offer technology that helps you edit your site yourself. You don’t want to have to call your web designer each time you need to update text on your website or each time you want to add an image. You should be offered a simple way to update your website yourself.
9. Make sure that any contract states that you own the copyright of the look and content of the site and that you own the domain name.
10. Tell your web designer what your deadline is and what sort of compensation they offer if they go beyond this deadline.

Your website is a crucial part of the success of your business. If you pay attention to the above tips you will find a web designer who will be able to meet your needs and help you make a success of your website and in turn of your business.

If you’d like to talk with us about your website design project, please contact us.

We've gone through choosing and buying a domain name and finding a web designer. Now comes the hard part: building your content. But before you can do that, you must know two things:

1. What interests your target audience?
2. How do you communicate with them effectively?

Step 1 Define your target audience

No-one will look at your website unless you have valuable content. You need to be interesting to attract attention and get others to talk about you!

In order to create good content, you need to understand who your target audience is and what type of content and style they'd value.

The Review process

Much of your success is defined by your own personality and the people you naturally connect well with. The first two questions to ask are:

1. Who did you do your best work with in the past?
2. Do you have easy access to that type of target market today?

This will define your target audience based on strenghts you already have.

Example

When Apple made their iPod, they defined their target audience as non-tech savvy. MP3 players were originally build for tech-savvy users, and the industry was embroiled in a technology war to create ever more features.

Apple knew that in the past it had already had success with getting non-tech-savvy users to use their Macs. Now they were going to target an audience nobody previously cared about: non-tech-savvy users who don't look for advanced features, just a product that is easy to use. And thus the iPod was born.

Example for blogs – Andy Beard points out that targetedness, not hype, makes a big difference:

"I have very specific goals, and a very specific target audience. Some people measure success by how many subscribers or how much money someone makes from their blog. I have never had a front page Digg, but my target audience doesn't really use Digg.

I define success by who reads my blog within my target audience as my defined goal was to attract people within a specific niche, and even specific individuals."

- Andy Beard

Define your target audience more narrowly

You cannot be everything to all people. If you want to win in business and create a successful website or blog, you need to be the best at what you do within your existing industry.

If you are not the world's best within your market, all you have to do is to define your market more narrowly. What niche are you better in (or could you become better at) than any other competitor?

To find this niche, ask the following questions:

1. Does your market have an urgent pain and / or an irrational passion?
2. Are they actively looking to resolve this pain / passion (if not, find another answer to the above question)
3. Can you clearly define a niche around the pain / passion they try to resolve?
4. Do you have clear and effective answers to resolve the markets pain / passion?

Example

Keeping the iPod as an example, the pain of the audience was that they couldn't use these complicated MP3 players and had no clear software to rip and download music to their devices. Their passion was easy access to music, but they had turned to the illegal service Napster.

So Apple not only created an easy player, but an easy music library called iTunes that also enabled the user to buy music in MP3 format directly from their online store.

Example for blogs

When Copyblogger looked for a blog topic, he realized that many people wanted to learn how to blog, but that there was no easy manual for the average writer who hasn't majored in journalism and has no technological skills to speak of. So CopyBlogger seized on this target market and created easy to absorb content about becoming a successful blogger.

Your niche will probably be narrower, since the blogosphere today is more competitive and territory on the net is more effectively conquered niche by niche.

Profile your audience

Okay, now you have a clearly defined niche. You know who you work well with + that you have access to them. You clearly defined needs and wants that no-one is fully providing solutions for.

Now it is time to build a profile of your audience. You'll create a general stereotype that defines your audience in such a way that you have someone you can imagine communicating with.

Answer the following questions: of the narrow target market you defined, what would you say are their

1. Desires (things they aspire to but not necessarily need)
2. Values (a code of behavior they define as 'good', 'cool' and /or  'appropriate')
3. Needs (things within your niche they cannot do without and if you provide solutions will 'hook' them)
4. Can they pay for the products you promote or sell?
5. What is their level of expertise (you need to pitch your ideas slightly above that, but not too far above that).

Conclusion

Answering all these questions will enable you to create a clear, living, breathing profile of an audience you already connect well with and have some type of access to (we will widen this access in future tutorials.) You will be able to speak in their language, conform to their codes and behavior and rattle their cage enough to stir their curiosity, enthusiasm and loyalty.

Over to you

Leave us a comment with your own link building ideas. We value any contribution that keeps us motivated, points out mistakes or gives constructive criticism to help us improve our content and website.

You can also connect to our community in the forums. Discuss how to build links in our Link Development forum. We are always prompt to answer questions.

Earlier we spoke about how to find a web designer. Design is an important part of creating trust in your brand. Today, we are going to discuss another important strategy to create trust in your brand: content creation.

When creating content, many website owners fail to recognize that content is an important element of your marketing strategy.

Whenever somebody lands on your website, your content and imagery are effectively your sales people. The content needs to be convincing, persuasive and give incentives to the reader to contact you and buy your product and service.

But how do you get your content to do that? We’ll, that’s what we are here to explain:

Website Content That Sells

The first thing to do when creating content is to define:

1. Who your ideal customer is and what their defining attributes are;
2. Understand the problems they face;
3. How you can offer them solutions that solve their problem.

Now understand the mindset of your customer. He or she is trying to solve a problem related to your product. In our case, our customers try to find a website. Since our ideal customers are business owners, we know they are looking for a professional website that can generate leads and converts customers. As a result, our content reflects that.

If you understand the NEED of your customer, and you can immediately show him or her that you can address this need in a professional manner, than the battle is already half won.

To better understand the needs of your customers, read our blog post on defining your target audience.

Caveat: The Best Sales People Are Mentors

Once you start trying to sell to someone, you activate the ’sales wall’. Many sellers approach a sales man with their guard up, the erect a wall of suspicion. And that is the correct attitude: after all, sales people could have their bottom line in mind more than the customer’s need.

To avoid skepticism, structure your content so that it becomes a guide or a mentor in the customer’s quest to solve his or her problem. You want to have a conversation with your prospect that is free of pitching and selling. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a call to action, but it does mean that you should focus on the problem, not the sale. At least, not just yet.

Add a Call to Action

There is a term that was coined in the late 90’s to describe the average surfer: ‘wandering drunk’. This seems a bit harsh, but on the Internet, everyone seems to have ADD. Content is scanned, people stare at pages an average of 10 seconds before they decide whether they like your site or not, and you get very little time to sell your proposition.

You already know that your content needs to be targeted. It also needs to be short, to the point, and visual where possible.

But you don’t just want your visitors to understand that you can solve their problem. You want them to CONTACT you.

‘That’s what the contact’ button on my site is for’, you say. We say: ‘on the net, you have to be more obvious.’

Numerous studies have shown that if you end your copy with a way to contact you, either by calling or via email, you will dramatically increase the amount of people who contact you.

On your website, it is important to tell people what you want them to do: ‘you found your solution, now contact us’.

Content and SEO

The more content you create, the more your website can be found for important keywords in your industry.

Just like in real estate, on the web, websites thrive based on three rules: location, location, location. In case of your website, you should be prominently featured on the first page of google when somebody looks for your product, service or brand.

How to do this is part of a longer discussion, and we’ll discuss how to attract visitors to your site via social media and SEO in the two coming months.

For now, it is important that you know what people type into the Google search box when they are looking for a company like yours.

How to do this is demonstrated in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/v/bcIBsMr19_k

Now that you know what your audience is searching for, make sure that you include these keywords in your copy. This will help your users find your website. Don’t force it though, keep your site sounding natural.

Mention your keyword once in your contents title, once in the first paragraph and once in the closing paragraph.

There is much more to this – including coding of your website (talk to your web designer) and some advanced strategies. Stick with us, because we will be discussing how to get your website to rank well in search engines in the coming months. You can also get help in our SEO Forum, where our community is quick to respond to questions.

The Beauty of Content Marketing

Television ads work because of their wide reach, but they convert less. Websites convert more visitors to customers than TV ads (in general) and with the help of SEO can attract a large number of visitors month by month.

Why do websites convert better than TV ads?

Because TV ads interrupt. You are watching a program and all of the sudden your are told of a solution when you really rather be relaxing. It works, because with enough exposure, you start feeling that the brand is somehow ‘familiar’. But it takes a lot of repeated exposure, and that is why mobile phone companies for instance advertise so often on TV and elsewhere.

Websites are different. When you get a visitor, it is because he or she did a search on Google or another search engine and landed on your site. They have a problem and are actively looking for a solution. So if you can convince them that you have a solution right there and then, your chances of having the visitor contact you are dramatically higher than a TV ad.

And that is why you should pay attention to your content. It is a powerful marketing tool, but often misused. Follow the guidelines in this article, and you should see a rise in the amount of people who contact you after visiting your website.

If you need someone to design your corporate site, take a look at our web design services, or contact us here.

Any thoughts, any questions. Feel free to leave us a comment or see advice about building your website in our forum.

Colors influence your visitors

When deciding on a design for your website, two challenges arise:

1. choosing a layout
2. and choosing a color scheme for your website.

When you start thinking about how you want your website to look and how you want it to behave, it is best to do a search online and find other websites that you like. Bookmark these sites and make notes of the specific elements that attracted you to the site. Don’t worry too much about looking too similar, during the design process, yourweb site will start looking distinctively different from all the other sites out there.

Layout often seems a daunting decision to make, but you will soon notice that the best sites have similar layouts. Reinventing the wheel makes no sense, as it would only serve to confuse the user. E.g. you could put you logo at the bottom right hand side of the page, but users would not notice it. We expect logos to be at the top left. This is true for most elements on your page. Just look around on the web, and you’ll quickly notice what I mean.

Colors are more challenging and matching colors is as much an art as it is based on making educated decisions.

Nevertheless, there are some simple guidelines that will greatly simplify your decision process.

Step 1: Choosing Your Primary Website Color

Your primary color will set the mood for your website. It will instantly communicate the emotional tone of your company and is therefore one of the most important decisions you will make. In order to understand the feelings your primary color will generate it is time to go to the shrink.

The Psychology of Colors

Blue: coolness, spirituality, freedom, patience, loyalty, peace, trustworthiness; can also imply sadness, depression.

Blue has a calming effect on our brains. Just look at the sky or the sea, and you’ll feel its calming effect.

We tend to associate it with safety and stability and it has become to signify intelligence, reassurance and trust. It calms our energy and enables us to focus better, think more rationally.

It is for this reason that blue is the color of business. Business offers pragmatic solutions to our needs and problems, and strives to create stability and progress in our lives.

Blue is a great color for sites that deal with practical problems, intellectually challenging solutions and brands that aim to give you more control over your daily activities.

The U.S. Air Force chose blue as their primary color to emphasize that they are not focused on war, but on creating stability in the world.

Red: energy, passion, excitement, power; also implies aggression, danger.

Red is a powerful color, a real attention grabber. Our instincts register it as passion, fire, love and lust, or on the dark side with war, violence, blood and aggression. Psychological tests have shown that red raises blood pressure and can cause perspiration.

Red is associated with blood: the flushing of cheeks, the redness of a woman’s lips.

There is a reason why stop signs are red: your eye is drawn to them, we are hard-wired to notice red.

Sites that deal with romance will also benefit from using red as a primary color.

Youthful brands that aim to tap into the passionate nature of their audience tend to use red in their branding, example in case: Coca Cola.

Note: Pink is the softer side of red. Pink is romantic, calming and feminine.

Yellow: light, optimism, happiness, brightness, joy.

Yellow, the color of the rising sun, has come to signify hope, light and energy and simply looking at the color increases your metabolism.

Brands like Fair Trade choose this logo to symbolize the benefits they bring to the world, particulary producers in the third world.

Yellow is an attention grabbing color, but use it sparingly, as it is the most fatiguing color to the eye due to the high amount of light it reflects.

Green: life, naturalness, restfulness, health, wealth, prosperity

Green is the color of spring, of fresh grass, of the Earth renewing itself. As a result, it has come to signify health, growth and wealth. Green symbolizes renewal, and fertility.

Green is shown to be a color that relieves stress and improves healing.

That is why many healthy choice brands embrace green in their branding as the example below illustrates:

Orange: friendliness, warmth, approachability, energy, playfulness, courage.

Orange is very blatant and vulgar. It makes you immediately start having feelings.–Wolf Kahn

Orange is the color we find most in autumn, or towards the end of a day. It is vibrant and warm, a bit removed from the passionate and sometimes dangerous nature of red.

Orange has been known to stimulate the appetite.

The telecommunications company of the same name choose orange as its primary color to reflect its youthfulness and zest for life and to illustrate a more carefree attitude.

Black: power, elegance, secrecy, mystery.

Since the dawn of time we’ve known black as the color of night, a time when darkness shrouds the world in mystery. It is often associated with evil and menace or mourning and death. This is however a purely cultural preference, as the ancient Egyptians used to associate black with life and rebirth, seeing the night more as a gestation period (the sun was reborn every morning).

Black has also come to symbolize power and elegance, popularized in fashion because of its slimming nature.

The colors in Batman’s logo did not come about by accident. It tries to express the menace, the power and the mystery of the dark crusador, while the yellow tries to show the mission of the Batman: one of hope and renewal of the world. In the last 20 years Batman has been portrayed as a more tortured character, and the yellow was often removed from his logo in order to better reflect his menace and moral ambiguity.

White: purity, cleanliness, youth, freshness, peace.

White…is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black…God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. – G. K. Chesterton

White represents cleanliness, purity, and spirituality. It represents life and marriage in Western cultures, but it represents death in Eastern cultures.

Dove’s branding focuses on using white to appeal to women and promote its main message of cleanliness.

Color tells people who you are

As a brand, one should not underestimate the power of color. Color tells your audience how you perceive yourself. It plays an essential part in your communication strategy and should be chosen with care.

Overview of brands and their color schemes

Share your ideas about branding and color

Use the comments to share some of your thoughts on color and branding, and upload your logos to illustrate how brands make use of colors to communicate their messages.

Good quality web design insures the site works in all common browsers and systems (including Windows, OS 10 and Linux) and appears in all browsers in exactly the same way. This is a challenge for many webmasters. Inferior websites are only tested in Internet Explorer or Firefox and as a result, the site will contain errors or be slightly different in other browsers or other systems. There are fortunately several software and online solutions made available to website designers (html and CSS) to control many different browsers, different version numbers and different systems. Below is a list of tools and programs that perform a Cross browser check for potential problems.

1. Install all current browsers

The first option is to install all the different browsers on your computer. The problem is that you can not always install older versions of a browser simultaneously on a computer.

Latest versions of the 5 major browsers:

• Mozilla FireFox
• Internet Explorer
• Opera
• Safari
• Google Chrome

Offline cross compatibility check

There are tools available to check if your site displays properly in older Internet Explorer browsers:

• Microsoft Expression Web 3 Super Preview (Only IE 6, IE 7 en IE 8 )
• IE Tester

Online cross compatibility check

And finally, there are several websites / online tools you can use to view a particular website within the various browsers. The disadvantage is that you often have to wait before you see results.This can be very annoying if you have a tight deadline.

• Browsershots (Multpile browsers at the same time!)
• Browser Sandbox
• Netrenderer (Limited posibilities)
• Adobe Browserlab (Currently in beta with limited access)
• Browsercam (Requires login)
• Browsrcamp (1 browser at a time)
• Cross Browser Testing (Requires payment)
• Litmus (Requires payment)
• IE Capture (1 browser at a time)

The above list is not exhaustive. It does, however, show most open source or free options. Paid programs were listed because they offered the best value vs cost.