Web Design & Internet Marketing: a Practical Business Approach

So you’re an Outlook, MacMail, or Entourage user and you are struggling with how to deal with email at home or when you are out of the office traveling. Yes you might have webmail tied to your hosting platform but does it have spam and virus filtering built in?

What if your hosting providers server blows up? They all do at some point due to a spam attack or other act of god. What do you do for back up? Can you get mail elsewhere? Send mail?

The answer is state of the art, reliable, professional and free. It’s called Gmail (Google’s email). Set yourself up in 3 easy steps:

1. If you don’t have an account do your self a favor and head on over to gmail.com and sign up.
2. Then tell your webmaster to mirror all your email to your Gmail account. This means every piece of mail you receive will still end up in your Outlook AND a copy will be sent to your Gmail account.
   When you go home or hit the road and don’t want to lug your laptop you can access your mail from your Gmail.com account
3. Professional ninja technique: set up your default ’send as’ as your main email address. So when you send an email from Gmail the recipient will see that it came from you@yourbusiness.com, NOT Gmail. You can do this under ‘Settings’ and ask your webmaster for help if needed.

So to wrap it up you can have your desktop Outlook to get all your email and have a webmail backup with spam an virus protection when you need it. In fact you might like Gmail so much you might just dump Outlook like I did :)

Feel free to comment!

(Watch the 3:40 minute video below) One of the most difficult things in building a website or re-designing a website for your business is the design. You can go looney tunes (official description) with design decisions and spend yourself silly in the process. I can’t tell you how many times a design firm has created what they thought was a masterpiece of design only to have it shot down by the client, and have to start from scratch.

You can go about design a few different ways:

1. Get a free template (freecsstemplates.org, WordPress, Drupal, etc)
2. Buy a template (MonsterTemplate.com)
3. Customize an above template
4. Design from scratch

They are all valid ways to go depending on budget, but if it’s a business you are promoting your entire budget might be $2000 - $5000… and spending $1000 - $2000 on design is pretty easy to do.

Remember you also have to spend some money on things like search engine optimization, email news, content creation, call to action items, etc.

Go with the value proposition (#3 above): customize a premade template. If you hire a pro to work with an existing design they will brand it and make it yours. Watch the video below that illustrates how our company transforms a template into a finished website design that looks custom (and please feel free to leave a comment!):

Listen to the audio track:

 

 Custom web design on the cheap [3:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (241)