Sunday, December 20, 2009
Free Flow Poetry Jam 2009 - Nate Brown Entertainment
If you are in or around Philadelphia, be sure to check out events hosted by NateBrown Entertainment!
NateBrown Entertainment Presents it's Free Flow Poetry Jam 2009. Live music and poetry to uplift the community
Learn more about NatBrown Ent. at http://www.natebrownentertainment.com/
info@natebrownentertainment.com
Located on the Black Business Bureau website at: http://www.1blackbusiness.com
Song - "Like Poetry" by Fertile Ground from the album Seasons Change, 2002
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Website Design Tip #6 - Proper Link Exchanges
Link exchanges are another form of internet / online networking. It simply entails exchanging links between two websites. While most large companies are unaffected by link exchanges, it presents a unique opportunity for growth by smaller businesses. As a webmaster [a person who designs and oversees a website], if you choose to participate in link exchanges you should participate with
1) High traffic Websites - Websites that have high daily or weekly visitors.
2) Business with similar content - (for example) A saloon business website should seek to link exchange with other saloons across town or websites that blog about hair care or hair care products.
Before committing to a link exchange, make sure the site you plan on linking with is creditable. Creditable sites are sites that:
1) Have relating / relevant content
2) Has crediable content - no "created" information. Solid facts and data
The Black Business Bureau provides FREE link exchanges / collaboration opportunities with businesses, organizations, and individuals.
Click Here for more information
Website Hosting Tip #2 -- Basic or Premium Hosting?
What website hosting plan is right for you?
Previously we discussed the fallacies of free website hosting, now we will discuss which hosting plan may be right for your website. For those that read and use our advice and are looking to pay an affordable price for your website hosting service; hopefully this section will provide some useful advice for determining which website hosting package you will need.
Terminology:
- Disk Space - The total amount of space allowed for your website file uploads.
- Bandwidth - Bandwidth refers to the amount of traffic (visitors) that is allowed to occur between your web site and the rest of the internet. The amount of bandwidth a hosting company can provide is determined by their network connections, both internal to their data center and external to the public internet
New Websites
New websites should seek a low cost plan with feasible space - about 250 - 500 Megabites (MB). Businesses offering services or selling products shouldn't seek to spend alot of money for hosting their website. Developing a few pages for information and possibly a blog (which will only require at most 10MB) is all that is normally needed.
A lot of website space is not needed initially because your site is new and developing, thus has low traffic (don't worry, traffic to your website will come!)
High Content Sites
If you plan to have a lot of content on your site such as pictures, videos, software files, etc... it may be a good idea to purchase a website hosting plan with plenty of space.
Nowadays with personalized social networks like ning (www.ning.com), various picture hosting sites (like Photobucket) and video hosting sites (like YouTube) saving space on your website server has become easy. However, if you are seeking to host pictures and videos on your own site, you should seek a hosting plan with approximately 500 MB - 2 GB (depending on how much dynamic content you have.)
Upgrades
Its important to note that many hosting companies enable you to upgrade your account. Even if you start with a low cost / low disk space hosting plan, as your site grows, you can easily upgrade your services to other hosting plans that fit your disk space and bandwidth needs.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Website Hosting Tip #1 -- FREE Website Hosting?
Website hosting is the process in which companies use supercomputers to upload your website (HTML files) to the internet.
Many companies offer a wide range of hosting plans and special features to attract people trying to upload their website. As a customer of their services, you should take some time to research different hosting plans.
FREE Website Hosting
When deciding to host your website the idea of “FREE Website Hosting” sounds very appealing. However, despite the label of “free,” there can be a tremendous cost.
The Cost of FREE Website Hosting
- Limited Space
Many free website hosting companies limit the amount of information a webmaster – (the person in charge of the website) can upload. With limited space, dynamic content such as videos, music, pictures, and/or a CSS Style sheet; which produces returning visitors and builds creditability (see Website Design Tip 5) is limited. This limited dynamic content makes your business look unprofessional or your organization unappealing.
- Advertisement Distraction
Many free website hosting services place their affiliate and advertisements across your site. Since webmasters don’t control the ad placements, a company could place an ad over an important text paragraph or image advertisement.
- Not Search Engine Searchable
The primary reason for internet marketing is to be listed on search engines so that potential customers will be able to find your services. With many free website hosting companies; especially website hosters that make your site a sub-domain:
Such as:
www.joesicecream.freewebhost.com
It is highly unlikely that your site will be indexed on notable search engines.
Some website hosting services that use a sub-domains can be found using popular search engines if they are a popular service provider (such as social network ning – (ning.com) or if the website files have dynamic content (videos, pictures, valuable text, etc.). Search engines like Google sometimes like to play favorites with their own products and enable blogspot blogs on their search engine results.
Using the Black Business Bureau sub-domain service, you can successfully get your website on popular search engines because we customize and manually upload websites and website file folders given to us by our customers.
Tip #5 -- Creating Content for Your Website
Creating valuable website content is very important for both new and existing websites, regardless of the purpose of your website. Creating useful articles and providing unique information to visitors is essential when trying to get your site noticed and indexed on search engines. It is important to note, if your site is an ecommerce store, unless your site is a mega retailer such as ebay.com or amazon.com, search engine bots will ignore your store. By developing content, search engine users will be able to find your store by searching keywords pertaining to content.
Many professional website developers would recommend that before a webmaster (the person that creates and/or manages the website) attempts to market their website, they should create content surrounding the information they will place on their website.
For Example:
If you own a hair care business and you wish to sell your hair care productions online; first create a few useful articles about hair care. Describe
1. What hair care products should be used based on hair type
2. The use of water vs oil based conditioners
3. Steps to maintaining healthy hair , etc…
By creating valuable content, your site or store not only builds traffic and returning visitors, but it also builds credibility. As visitors can see that they can trust your information, they will also feel safe in trusting your products.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Tip #3 -- Website Colors and Color Schemes
Now since you decided the structure of your website, and your text content, it’s time to decide your website colors. Website colors are just as important as designing your site and choosing text and image content. Below are a few images of the free website templates we have available to download; each site design and color scheme influences different moods and emotional responses by visitors. Website color scheme has been proven to stimulate appetites, provide energetic moods, and (most importantly for businesses) create an atmosphere of comfort and willingness to purchase an offered product.
Common Colors and the Affects
Red
Red is one of the most powerful and attention-getting colors. It has the ability to raise blood pressure (positively) and cause perspiration. Red reflects energy and can motivate an individual to take action. Depending on the sentence content, it can also symbolize warnings, violence, and aggression.
Pink
Pink is romantic, calming and feminine.
Orange
Orange is a vibrant color associated with autumn and Halloween (especially when depicted with black). Orange has been known to stimulate the appetite. It can also symbolize health.
Yellow
Yellow represents sunshine and warmth. It can signify hope, light and energy. Due to yellow’s brightness, it is not often used with website backgrounds nor text color. Yellow is normally included within images and banner advertisements.
Green
Green signifies health and growth (vegetation) and wealth (money). For business sites (such as the Black Business Bureau) green represents confidence and assuring of any offered product.
Blue
Blue is one of the most soothing colors and is associated with the sky and the sea. It is considered to be a "safe" color and signifies intelligence, reassurance, and trust. Blue has also been known to be an appetite suppressant (good for restaurants to know!).
Purple
Purple symbolizes creativity. Purple is spiritual and mysterious. Deep purple is associated with royalty and richness while lavender is associated with romance.
Black
Black can represent power, elegance, and sophistication, but sometimes in western cultures it can represent death, anger and sadness.
White
White represents cleanliness and purity in western culture, but it represents death in Eastern cultures. With websites, white provides an emotionless feeling. Usually sites with a lot of information will use white to give their information content more attention. Most websites will usually mix white with other colors to offset the dullness that white presents.
Grey
Grey is the combination of black and white. It is a conservative color. Grey can symbolize security, maturity and reliability, but it can also signify gloominess and sadness.
Brown
We like to classify brown as a "special" color. Brown represents credibility and stability; an earth color.
Colors All Around Us
Tip #2 -- Text Alignment on Your Website
Thanks for coming to read the Black Business Bureau’s second tip on website design and development. This time we’ll briefly address text alignment with websites, because even something as simple as word choice and text alignment makes huge differences in determining site traffic (the amount of visitors to your site) and returning visitors to your site.
1) Aligned Left:
Aligning your text to the left is usually common for most websites. There isn’t a special feature or reason to align your page content to the left other than simple appeal to your visitors.
This is a text aligned to the left
2) Aligned Right:
Right alignments are usually used for pictures. It is very rare to align your words to the right of your page, simply because people read from left to right. The only time a right alignment of text is used is for placing copyright information or mentioning your name to a particular service or product.
This is a text aligned to the right
3) Centered:
Centered alignments are common for attention getters. When a text is centered it is usually a title or a special announcement that you (the website developer) want your visitors to see.
For Example:
Take a look at the top of this page; notice the Black Business Bureau Website Development title as well as the topic of discussion (Tip 2 – Text Alignment)
This centered text is used to capture your attention…
Did it capture your attentions?
4) Justified:
Justified Alignments are used almost as frequent as a left aligned text. Justified aligned text gives a professional image to your website. BE CAREFUL, depending on the length of your text, justified text alignments can cause your words to be very far apart, which gives an amateur or unprofessional look to your site. In many occassions, justified text alignment looks very similar to left alignment.
For Example:
This text is justified; it almost looks like a left aligned text. The difference is that the words are spaced evenly whereas a left aligned text would clutter the words to the right side of the screen.
Now since we spoke about alignment, lets discuss actual fonts. With websites different browsers have different settings. Your website which may look great in web browsers like Firefox may look horrible in web browsers like Internet Explorer. For readable text in websites, you should stick with basic fonts such as:
· Times New Roman
· Arial
· Verdana
· Trebuchet MS
· Tahoma
· Microsoft Sans Serif
Fancy fonts should be used for word processors and other document processing software but not for websites. Here are a few examples of faulty text:
Times New Roman – Black Business Bureau
Algerian – Black Business Bureau
Edwardian Script ITC– Black Business Bureau
Arial – Black Business Bureau
Book Antiqua– Black Business Bureau
Verdana – Black Business Bureau
Trebuchet MS – Black Business Bureau
Tahoma – Black Business Bureau
Bookman Old Style – Black Business Bureau
FREE Website Editors Buy Dreamweaver 8
Tip 3 - Website Color Schemes
This information was proudly presented by
The Black Business Bureau's website development staff
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Website Tip #1 -- Site Design
Website Design Strategies Several websites are not prepared as they should be. Many sites are lacking necessary style, text alignment and formation. Sites with lacking features gives your business a lacking image.
Websites like:
does not impress your customers. It has an unprofessional look; moreover it gives an impression that you don't care enough about your own services to make your products worth using. We (the Black Business Bureau website staff) would not recommend advertising this website to anyone you wish to present your services to.
This is important to mention because several Black owned businesses have websites that look like this or of a similar quality.
The first step in website creation is deciding what you want your website to look like.
Simple right?
Sorry, not really.
But take a deep breath; it's not as hard as you might think!
But take a deep breath; it's not as hard as you might think!
Brain storm ideas about what you want your website to look like. Think about link location, banners, and most importantly content!
Draft your ideas on paper and write what you want your message to be on different web pages.
For Example:
If this was your home page, what would you want your opening message to be?
Make your messages original. Catchy sales pitches do not work well when trying to attrack customers to your site. People are more likely to revisit your site if they feel comfortable and believe that they are on a website created by a genuine person; not a salesman or corporate hustler. Businesses have a tough role because while the business home page should contain a professional message, certain links within your website should contain content which makes the business personable. Businesses like hair care saloons should have content which can help visitors see your hard working staff as well as some advice on hair care. In the example above (Marcus's Ice Cream Express Inc.) Marcus should include pictures of himself serving ice cream, the delight and responses of his customers, and even a professional picture of himself smiling, in his ice cream uniform (if applicable).
Brainstorm ideas about colors for your site and visuals such as pictures, videos, and even music! Make sure you have a clear idea about what you want your website to look like. Visualize it. See it; then start the process to create it. Have each draft page labeled what you want that page to be:
For Example:
Home Page -- (have your design and content for the home page)
Contact Page-- (have your design and content for the contact page)
About Us Page-- (have your design and content for the about us page)
Service Page-- (have your design and content for the service page)
If you need brainstorming ideas for developing your website, you have two options:
1) Check out the MILLIONS of websites on the internet. Use search engines to find other websites that share similar business, organization or even ideas. Check out their website; is there anything that you see that you like??? Include it in your hand drawn design!
2) The Black Business Bureau is finding website templates for our visitors that you can use. Choose a Free website template and start creating your website today!
This information was proudly presented by
The Black Business Bureau's website development staff
The Black Business Bureau's website development staff
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