The competition on the grown is now getting tougher especially for SME. And now it is more crucial than ever for SME to have their online presence. While developing website for SME, we’d discover many SME website that seem to have missed a few fundamentals of good website for SME. So before you dive into online branding and join the social web, make sure you’ve covered the basics:

1. ROLL UP YOUR SLEEVES
   If you own a small business and are planning to launch a website,  you want to be able to make minor updates on your own. If you are using a web designer, this is something he or she will need to take into account. The aim is for you to be able to make simple changes: add a new staff member to your “team” page, change prices, or fine-tune a product description. Same thing applies if you already have a website: find someone to show you which software to use, and how to make textual changes. HTML isn’t scary, and anyone can learn the basics in a few hours.
2. KEEP YOUR SITE UP-TO-DATE & SWEAT THE DETAILS
   This follows from the above: if you need to involve (and pay) someone every time you want to make a change to your site, you’ll waste time and money, and might even avoid updates just to save money. Which means your website will soon look out-of-date. If customers can spot that you haven’t updated your site in months or even years, you’re hurting your brand. If it’s 2009 and the copyright line on your website still reads © 2008, that’s as much a sign of neglect as dusty shelves in a grocery store.
3. AVOID THE FLASH TRAP
   Yes, a Flash-based site can look stunning. But if your visitors just want to find out if your salon is open on Sunday, a glitzy intro is an annoying waste of time. If you’re convinced that animated graphics are the best way to show off your product, make it optional: let your visitors decide if and when they want the full tour.
4. TEXT NEEDS TO BE SEARCHABLE
   This is something we still see too often: text in jpegs and gifs. The bulk of text on your website needs to be in text format. If you can highlight the text with your mouse, you’re fine. If not, it’s likely that the text is inside an image, where it’s generally hidden from search engines. And if you’re looking to get traffic to your website, you don’t want to play hide-and-seek with Google.
5. DON’T MAKE THEM GUESS
   Be crystal clear about what you do and what you offer. What are you selling? What does your product do? This is information that needs to be visible on your homepage, and a first-time visitor needs to be able to ‘get it’ as quickly as possible. Use short sentences and illustrative images to get the point across. And make sure that important details are easy for customers and potential customers to find, with as few clicks as possible: how to contact you, where they can find you, when you’re open, etc.

Done? Then it’s time to start marketing your website!.

Internet marketing is a very broad subject. If you understand how broad offline marketing and sales is, it is the same for online or internet marketing. Therefore, in order for your online marketing campaign to be successful, there must be a group of marketers that truly focus on doing it. It is complex and the methods are variety. Fortunately there are few distinguished techniques for you to start. While the others, they can be implemented later accordingly.

1) WEBSITE - Why having a properly designed website is very important to optimize your online marketing?

The purpose of marketing is to create leads.  Once you have leads, then it is up to the sales team to close the deal. Among the leads, there are people whom you can close them right on the spot. For others, there must be some leads nurturing effort before they are convinced to engage on your products or services.

The campaign that you make to get people to visit your website is called marketing. It can be via both ways; online and offline or just one at a time. Once the visitors are at the home page, your website is taking the role of a salesman. Therefore, it is not wrong to say that your products’ website is your online sales men. That factor alone is a very good reason for you to invest for a well designed website.

Now, you’ve understood the function of your website. Let’s get to understand in brief about what are the visitors’ expectations and behaviours about any website:

• People come to web sites to satisfy goals, to do tasks, to get answers to questions.
• They come for information, for the content that they think (or hope) is there
• Answers a question or helps them complete a task
• Information is easy to find and easy to understand
• They expect the content to be accurate, up to date, and credible
• They don’t read much, especially before they get to the page that has the information they want.
• Even on information pages, they skim and scan before they start to read.
• They want to read only enough to meet their needs.

Let’s discuss about the vital points to consider….opps! I’m sorry. I have to catch an appointment now. We’ll continue later, ok?

With the revoutionary Google Earth software, everyone can now see the entire earth as if he’s looking down from a satellite, all through a computer screen. Below are 5 interesting images that people have captured using Google Earth.

1. Firefox Logo. This Firefox crop circle sprouted up in a corn field in Oregon, but its origins are no mystery. In 2006, the Oregon State University Linux Users group created the giant logo — spanning more than 45,000 square feet — to celebrate the Web browser’s 50 millionth download.

2. Cruise Missile. Google Earth has plenty of examples of planes, helicopters, even hot air balloons, caught in flight, but this cruise missile, thought to be fired during military training exercises in the Utah USA mountains, might be the most unlikely capture yet. If it is, in fact, a cruise missile. Many dispute the image and say it’s merely an airplane. You be the judge, but if you look closely, the “missile” appears to have wings.  

3. Blood River. This blood-red lake outside of Iraq’s Sadr City garnered a fair share of macabre speculation when it was discovered in 2007. One tipster told that he was “told by a friend” that slaughterhouses in Iraq sometimes dump blood in canals. No one has offered an official explanation, but it’s more likely the color comes from sewage, pollution or a water treatment process.

4. Music Guy. It looks disconcertingly like a face from above, but this formation in Alberta, Canada is entirely natural. Dubbed the Badlands Guardian, the “face” is actually a valley eroded into the clay. Some say the man looks like he’s wearing earphones; that’s merely a road and an oil well. Even the Badlands Guardian, it seems, isn’t immune to exploratory drilling.

5. Nazi Swastika. When builders of the Coronado Naval Amphibious Base in San Diego planned this complex in 1967, satellite imagery was probably the furthest thing from their minds. But in 2007 Google Earth sleuths found that four unconnected buildings on the base formed an unfortunate shape when viewed from above: a swastika. The Navy says it’s spending more than $600,000 to mask the shape. “We don’t want to be associated with something as symbolic and hateful as a swastika,” a spokesman said.