How to prepare for building a small business website?

How to prepare for building a small business website?

There are a few critical things that you should be prepared before building a website. It doesn’t matter if you are going to do it yourself or you will have someone do it for you. Don’t expect that every website developer or designer knows what he or she should know. Sometimes they know it but they won’t do it because they know that you don’t know it. Furthermore, when it comes to website development, there are a whole lot more than just knowing how to create a website technically. I will cover more on the topic of “what a web design service firm should know” later on..on another article or video.

Get a website address or domain name. The best place that I know of is Godaddy.com. The cost is around $10 per year. Now the domain name is very important. It gotta be short, easy to remember, friendly to search engine keyword(s), etc. I will talk more about this in the next article on the topic of choosing the right domain name for your business. If it’s possible, it has some service keyword(s) to what you are doing. For example, if you are providing digital marketing services or solutions, then having a domain name like www.digitalmarketingsolutions.com would be great. If it’s possible, it reflects your business name like Microsoft is www.microsoft.com. The chance is that the domain you wanted is most likely has been purchased by someone or some firm. You will have to settle for the best that is available to you.

Develop a strategy to be found when people searched for your product(s) or service(s). This is one area that most people didn’t think much because they didn’t know much about it. Well, they will when they found out that their websites are just “dead fishes in the water”. For most businesses, the reason to have a website in the first place is to promote their business. And the biggest place to promote your business is through search engines such as Google, Bing or others. This means that if you operate a dog training service and people went on Google and searched for “dog training service near me” as an example and they didn’t find you. You failed. I will talk more about how you can optimize your website to be found on search engines in the next article. Please keep in mind that each article I wrote, it has to be kept under 700 words if possible because each of these articles will be made into a video and the video has to be less than 5 minutes. 

Create a content development strategy for your website. Meaning, if you are offering “dog training service”, then you want a website to talk about it. Talk about it here means that the keywords “dog training service” have to be weaved into the contents of your website both on texts and photos. So make sure that these keywords not only showed up on the title of the page but also through the pages. It sounds easy but when it comes to doing it; it’s not as easy as it sounds. Most people developed the contents first and then worry about the ability to be found later. This is putting the cart before the horse. 

Define long-term and short-term goals for your site. Do you have a plan to add more products or services to it later on? Will the current design accommodate future expansion? The list can do on and on. 

Define the functionalities of your website? What can people do when they get to your site? What type of users and what role they play? For example, if you are planning on creating a real estate listing website. There could be the site owner, the listing agents, the preferred lenders, the agent that represented the buyer and the agent that represented the seller. What can each of these people do when they get to your website? You have clearly defined the role of each, what each can see and what each can not see, what each can do and each can not do when they do it, how the do it. Man! The list can go on and on. But you can’t design the website and expect it to function as you wanted until you have all of these well defined. 

Set your budget and timeline. It’s best to be upfront with your web design vendor about your budget and timeline. Most good web design firms or vendors will tell you whether or not they can take on your project based on your time and money. If you don’t, they will assume that they can ask for more later on. And if you don’t open your wallet for what they are asking, then either they will do a sloppy job on it or worse; they walked away. You called your attorney and he said it’s not worth it because his legal fee is much more than what you will be able to cover. 

I hope that this article or video has helped you somewhat in answering the “How to get prepared for building a small business website?” question. I will be covering the following questions on my next articles or videos.

1. What a small or start-up business website should include?
2. How to create a website for your small or just started-up business DIYS?
3. Why choosing the right domain name is very critical to your SEO success?
4. Good design vs. Good SEO - which one is more important?
5. What Google used to rank your website?
6. Promising your client on a certain search engine ranking is a straight out lie! Why?

This article is contributed by Phillip Nguyen, the president and founder of Digital Marketing Solutions LLC based in Michigan U.S.A.

Share:

Read More

How to setup penny auction Server and Security

1. How to setup penny auction Server and Security Unlike hosting most of other “typical” websites, a penny auction website requires a much more resources and capacities server. Meaning a much bigger budget server built with all the securities both in software and hardware. Before we talk about how to securely set up a penny auction server, let us dive into what are some of the security risks that a penny auction site typically has to deal with. Human. This is the biggest threat. Because of the nature of how penny auction works, it facilitates frauds and other unethical acts. One of the most frequently used acts, is jamming the site with excessive bidding in the last few seconds. This either caused the site to freeze-up or slow to respond to other bidders. Meaning, you can set up a bunch of bidding accounts and waited for the last few seconds to attack / submit bidding all at once. The server is so busy in responding to all the requests, it couldn’t process other bidders and the timer is out or expired. This means that one of the fraud bidder’s account is the last bidder and the winner of the auction. There are other means to carry out this sort of attack but I am not going to publicly discuss it here because the last thing for this article to do is to show these scum on how to scam penny auction sites. There are many ways to counter this sort of attack. One thing that you can do for your site is to pick a penny auction software that has an anti jamming solution based on a unique IP address. If you have a bunch of bidders made the same request from the same IP address within seconds, this means that you have what I called a gang-up attack. If this happened, the system is smart enough to block all bidders coming from that IP address. Block IP based on location. Most of the auction sites are local. Meaning that you don’t need customers from overseas since the cost of shipping the item may not be possible. This means that the penny auction software you purchased should have the options for you to add geo location IP address and stop these bidders from entering your site. Hardware. Get a real server and has it managed by firm like IBM. These guys have tools to detect and defend you from these attacks. If budget allows, you should have a network of servers each doing its own job instead of having one does it all. For an example, one server to handle database, one to handle the web traffic, one to do the load balancing, one for the data, etc. However, the reality is that most penny auction site owners can’t afford to have a network of servers like I just talked about. There are a lot more to talk about server security for penny auction website but the limited length of this video does not allow me to do so. So I will talk more on this in the next video. For more info, please visit https://pennyauctionsoftware.com or send us an email to info@pennyauctionsoftware.com Good luck! Make sure you subscribe to this channel so that more of this topic can coming your way. Once again, if you need a company that has the experience to do this kind of task, check out cybermerce.com that is “C Y B E R M E R C E. COM”.

Share:

Read More

NEVER STARTED A WEBSITE PROJECT WITHOUT A TECHNICAL BLUEPRINT!

NEVER STARTED A WEBSITE PROJECT WITHOUT A TECHNICAL BLUEPRINT! 

TOPIC: WHY A TECHNICAL BLUEPRINT by Phillip Nguyen - Digital Marketing Solutions LLC's Chief Software Engineer & Founder.

There has been NO SILVER BULLET in website development in my 24 years of working in this field as a software engineer. However, there is one called, “The Technical Blueprint.” You can call this the “silver bullet” for the website development process because there is no other method or way to ensure the success of your website being delivered as defined, on-time, and on-budget!

WHY? Would you build a home without a blueprint? The answer is NO! So why would you allow your I.T. team or your subcontractor(s) to build a website without it? Building a website, an especially complex website, has numerous complexities because of the unknowns and intangibilities involved in building a website. Over half of software development and website projects are dead before arrival due to going over-budget and over-time, simply because people failed on their first step...having a well defined Technical Blueprint. You should never allow your website project to begin without a well defined technical blueprint! Doing so is risky unless it’s just a few simple pages and functionalities. So have a technical blueprint before you sign that dotted line. This is the only way to ensure the success of your website because it is the document that you hold your web developer responsible for.

COST. The typical cost of a well defined technical blueprint is roughly about 25% of the project’s overall development cost. Most people who are not familiar with “software development risks” are not comfortable with this cost and this process. They just want a quick estimate and an “EASY TO GET STARTED” roadmap without having to deal with all the details. However, if you choose to use the technical blueprint, this should not be considered as “EXTRA COST” to your project, but instead as part of the project cost. Whoever takes on the project after the technical blueprint is done should deduct this cost that you already paid on the total estimated project cost unless they reason that they don’t need a technical blueprint. If so, then you should run away from this developer as fast as you can.

DELIVERABLES. What should be included in the “Technical Blueprint” of your website project?

1. A project’s summary of goals and objectives.
2. A list of use cases (front end and back end).
3. A design proposal with requirement specifications.
4. A project timeline An estimation of the project’s minimum and maximum costs.
5. An action plan with implementation steps.
6. And last but not least, a service contract.

SUMMARY. With a typical website, especially a large scale project, the development process consists of following several steps. If your project has too many unknown factors and risks that were not sorted because you do not have a technical blueprint, then it’s more likely to fail. However, with a technical blueprint, you and your developer can stay on the same page, have the same understanding of how you envision this website, and have a plan to follow. Without it, it’s like walking through the jungle without a compass because you trusted your developer to hold your hand each step of the way.

1. Analysis - producing a technical blueprint.
2. Design - graphical mockups and illustrations of the site.
3. Coding - converting basic HTML to functional codes.
4. Testing - lab testing, client testing, and public testing of your website Training - developer trains client on how to operate the site.
5. Update - sealing the leak(s) after the boat is launched (and there will be leaks!) 
6. On-going Technical Support & Training

For more information, please visit the premier website design and development company, Digital Marketing Solutions LLC. An A+ rating by the Better Business Bureau since 2003.

Share:

Read More

How to subcontracting your search engine optimization works?

How to subcontracting your search engine optimization works by Phillip Nguyen, President of Digital Marketing Solutions LLC

INTRODUCTION.  From time to time, our team is so busy with other software development projects and we decided to outsource our SEO work to subcontractors. When our customers heard that we outsourced the work, they often got scared with all kind of suspicions. We completely understand the concerns. We would do the same if you are your shoes for good reasons. However, let us assure you that there is nothing to be scared or concerned about if you know how to find the right subcontractor(s), have the right terms and condition to protect yourself and knowing how to take control of it.

Let's start out with some interviewing questions, see below. If you need help understanding these questions, we can be reached at info@digitalmarketingsolutions.com

SEO CONTRACTORS INTERVIEW QUESTIONS:

1. How long have your company been in this business? 
2. How many staff do you have that specialize on SEO? 
3. Will be able to provide us a list of your happy customers? 
4. What software are you using to analyze or identify the SEO issues? 
5. What included in your SEO analysis report? 
6. What is the typical process or approach you will take to improve our site’s SEO ranking? 
7. Do you offer content writing for SEO and how much per article for about 500-700 words? 
8. Do you offer video production (quick video clips) and graphic design to accommodate those articles?
9. Where do you post these articles and what would happen to them if one day we are no longer doing business with you? What do you do to make sure that our SEO efforts are in compliance with the “best practice” recommended by a search engine such as Google? 
10. What, when, where and how can we track the ranking performance of our site? 
11. What is your minimum contract duration or how many months? 
12. What is the minimum monthly budget that you accept? 
13. How do you feel if we do not want you to have direct access to our site or server but just help guide us what we have to do? 
14. Do you make a promise to your clients of certain ranking result? 
15. If not, why not? Why is or are the key advantage(s) of us using your company over the others? 
16. Here is the domain name of our site, for an example,….www.auctionsoftwarepro.com 
17. Here are the keywords we want to improve our ranking on “online auction software, auction software scripts, auction software company” Our typical client profiles are…” auction companies that want to go online” This product is B2B ( business to business) 

A FEW THINGS THAT YOU MAY WANT TO INCLUDE IN YOUR SERVICE CONTRACT 

1. No long term commitment so that you can terminate the service and save your hard earned money if they didn’t deliver what they promised you. I recommended month to month and the option to terminated after 3 months if you see no improvement. 
2. You own the content. Any search engine article created on the behalf of your website is a “work for hired” and you own the content. Create a Google doc folder under your account and have them post these articles there so that you have control of it just in case you part way. 
3. Permanent link back. Whatever link back they created for you, make sure that it’s permanent or at least you have control of it somehow. This to prevent that if you ever parted way, they don’t deactivate these links and negatively affected your site’s ranking. 
4. White hat only. In the search engine optimization world, there is a white hat and black hat as it’s called. Make sure that whatever effort your subcontractor(s) do to improve the ranking of your site organically; they have to do it in an ethical way. Meaning there is no trick because there are plenty of tricks that people can use. Why? Because once Google or other search engines found out, they will penalize you for it and it will be very hard to reverse it. 
5. Report. In your contract, you should clearly state that need a monthly report or a report of every two weeks to see the ups and downs your site’s ranking. You can also verify these ranking by creating a Google analytic account and confirm it yourself. It’s really a five minutes work. 

That’s all, for now, folks and hope this helps! If you have any question, we can be reached at info@digitalmarketingsolutions.com.  You can download this article via this link https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PG6R72tKtxemPWERSPALA73FE58MtN4S/view?usp=sharing

Share:

Read More