"I have a small business with just a couple of employees and I don’t think my product can really be sold online. Do I need a web site?"

In this day and time, there is very little that can’t be sold over the Internet. There are over 20 million people shopping online, buying everything from movies to cars to real estate property. Research predicts that revenues will be over $200 billion in 2004 and will grow at a rate of 30 to 50 percent over the next few years. These numbers alone should be enough to persuade you that you and your business should be online.

Regardless of whether you sell your product online, you should at the very least have an online presence so that customers, potential employees, partners and even potential investors can easily and quickly find more information about your company, the products and services you have to offer, as well as how to contact you.

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If you're blogging on the Wordpress platform, I'll bet my entire life savings that the first thing you ever did was try to install a new Wordpress theme. I'll bet my future earnings that even today you're still occasionally changing themes and wasting a lot of time doing minor modifications that when summed up merely distracts you from blogging itself.

It's actually easy to see why this single aspect of running a blog demands so much attention. With the correct theme, you can accommodate all the nifty little widgets and codes, and may also mean better search engine rankings and tons of fresh traffic every day.

So what are the factors you need to consider to make theme-hunting easier? Here are five important ingredients:

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When creating Multi-Media Content, Flash or Video Clips for a client's web site or CD Rom Project, the last thing you want is to get him in trouble with the law. If there's a need for music in a project, using royalty free music is essential.

Here are some general music tips that you may find useful:

1) Finding the right kind of music

There are hundreds of choices when it comes to royalty free music and making the right decision can be hard. After all, most TV production companies have music supervisors on staff whose only job it is to select appropriate music for projects. Selecting music is an art in itself. In general, you will find that your clients would prefer to use something they heard on the radio, something from their favorite album etc. Unfortunately, that's copyrighted stuff and licensing an N Sync song for your next 'how to' video or CD-Rom may cost you a fortune. What you want to do is find buyout music that sounds similar to today's popular music. It's a little harder to find than your typical 'canned' music. A lot royalty free music may sound like music from a 70's sitcom or worse, a cheap porno flick.

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Many website designers now take advantage of Shockwave and Flash to add multimedia effects, such as animation with sound, to their websites. Both Shockwave and Flash are Macromedia technologies that let web designers add multimedia elements to web pages. Shockwave movies are the resulting files exported from Macromedia Director that display animation, special effects, and other types of applications for the web. Flash movies are animations and other types of interactive web elements exported from Macromedia Flash.

-Web designers add Shockwave and Flash files to web pages for several reasons, including to make web pages more interesting and interactive, to add colourful navigational components, to enhance a site visually with animation, multimedia, and special effects, and to add more complex components such as online games.

-Most Shockwave and Flash movies require a special plug in that is easy to obtain since many browsers and operating systems include the plug in. You can also export Flash and Shockwave movies such as Java, which does not need a plug in to view.

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Writing your quality articles using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) will insure that your articles will be both easy to read and aesthetically pleasing to the viewer.

A CSS style sheet allows the HTML code for your articles to be cleaner, table-less, easily customizable, and "liquid."

Removing the display attributes of your articles from the HTML code allows you to concentrate on using the HTML for organizing your document's content.

When you use CSS, a new approach is possible to writing your articles for the Web:

* First, you write your article in a very basic HTML document, using simple HTML code. At this stage, use only the most common HTML tags. Focus on organizing your article's content first.

* Next, you identify parts of your document for special display formatting.

* Finally, you define the formatting in the CSS file.

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You've identified the benefits you offer your customers, but how do you turn a list of benefits into engaging web copy which converts visitors into customers?

Recently I wrote an article explaining how to identify the benefits you offer your customers (http://www.divinewrite.com/benefits.htm). That article challenged business owners and marketing managers to think in terms of benefits rather than features when writing their web copy.

What the article didn’t discuss was how to actually write the web copy once they had identified their benefits. That’s what this article is about. (It even gives you a couple of templates you can use to make your job a whole lot easier!)

As a website copywriter, many of the projects I undertake are completely new websites. The client has some general ideas about what they’d like to convey, but they need someone who can fine-tune their message, and create web copy (and a web structure) which engages their readers. As a result, over the years I’ve developed a process for doing this effectively. There are four main steps:

1. Identify benefits
2. Identify how you deliver these benefits
3. Prioritise your benefits
4. Write the content

Although this article touches on step 1, it’s mostly about steps 2, 3, and 4.

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Anyone who knows anything about web accessibility knows that images need alternative, or ALT, text assigned to them. This is because screen readers can't understand images, but rather read aloud the alternative text assigned to them. In Internet Explorer we can see this ALT text, simply by mousing over the image and looking at the yellow tooltip that appears. Other browsers (correctly) don't do this.

But surely there can't be a skill to writing ALT text for images? You just pop a description in there and you're good to go, right? Well, kind of. Sure, it's not rocket science, but there are a few guidelines you need to follow...

Spacer images and missing ALT text

Spacer images should always be assigned null ALT text, or alt="" . This way most screen readers will completely ignore the image and won't even announce its presence. Spacer images are invisible images that pretty most websites use. The purpose of them is, as the name suggests, to create space on the page. Sometimes it's not possible to create the visual display you need, so you can stick an image in (specifying its height and width) and volià, you have the extra space you need.

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Xsitepro is one of the leading software's in the Internet Marketing industry. It has been popular among the masses of Seo's and Internet Marketers looking for a less time consuming means of quality internet rankings. But does this software hold up in its validity? Is this software really all that good? Let's take a look at form versus function to let you decide whether or not xsitepro is for you.

Generally speaking, xsitepro is for the user who:

A. Doesn't know html, or wants a solution for writing html that is quick and effective. With this software you will not need to know html, however there are limitations in its use.

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Why Should You Create a website?

A. What do you want when you create a website?

B. What to do to get what you want.

A. What do you want?

1. You may be in a non-profit organisation and want to post forthcoming events on the web. You don't want to have thousands of visitors to the site. But wait - do you want to create a website for new members from the web? I found a new barbershop singer through my website.

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This is the last part of a three part series dealing with guidelines in how to plan, present and develop your company’s website. In part one we explored the importance of having a professional website to represent your company online. In part two, we identified the quality approach of planning your company’s website.

Now in our last part of these series we will take a quick look into the website design, development & marketing aspects and your company’s image.

Company Brand

First step when looking into website design, development and marketing is concentrating in your company's logo. Your company logo should be the focus point of your website – remember: it is all about your company. Your marketing material should all look similar – business cards, printing materials, online PDF’s – all should deliver the same message and have the same connection.

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