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Monthly Archives: September 2011
How To Make Your Small Business Website Successful
Effective Web Design
Website design has many moving parts to be effective in promoting your business, sell your products or services, and inform your target. The big question for small businesses, is “What will make my website effective?”. The answer… It takes planting many seeds in order for your online presence to grow, and your website to be successful.
Clean Design, Easy To Navigate
The first seed you plant needs to be a clean, easy to navigate website. You can send all of the traffic you want to your website. However, if your website is not well designed, your website will not convert. So the bottom line… you have wasted your time and money on a website that provides bad results (if any).
Design With A Purpose
Plant tomato plant seeds to grow tomatoes. If you are selling fresh tomatoes, do not put an image of an elephant on the front of your home page, with purple polka dots. Just because you love elephants, and think polka dots are the most beautiful design in the world, they don’t sell tomatoes. Make sure the look and feel of your website projects the product or services you offer.
Watch Your Images
Here is something that you may not know about finding images for your website. Let’s say you go on a “free” stock image site, or even a site that you “buy” images for website images. Well, what you may not know is that those images may be licensed photos and provided to you illegally (intentionally or not). If that is the case, there are companies out there that scan your site for licensed images, and then without notice or warning send you a bill for thousands of dollars. Is this really legal? I do not know, but I would love to find out.
Legal or not, this actually happened to me. I bought a particular image, just like all of the other images I buy, and one day I got a bill in the mail for $4400. Someone had a licensed image, changed the image by cropping it out, added a drop shadow and basically “made” it their own, and sold the image through a third party. Obviously I was unaware that this was the case or I would not have bought it.
I called the company about the bill, and immediately removed the photo. I was trying to figure out how to get my money back for the image I bought, because I buy photos from so many different sites and order CDs. The company that had billed me continued to inform me, that removing the photo was not enough. I had to pay for the usage that they “assumed” I owed, and said that I still had to pay the $4400 because I was the end user. I was told that in order to get my money back for their charge, I would have to locate the company I bought the image from, and go after them legally.
The company tried to bargain down the rate for this photo to get me to pay. I am currently researching my legal rights. How was I to know someone passed off an image as their own “royalty free” image? So now what? Should I just never buy an image again, because someone else may do this, too? This is just wrong, and could happen to anyone so beware.