Building your company’s first website can seem overwhelming at first.  It takes a bit of strategy and planning and really should be something you find blocks of time to work on during your work week or on the weekend. Be pro-active, not reactive.

Just keep in mind these simple rules and ask yourself the following questions to keep you on track:

• Do your have an online marketing plan?
• Do you have a logo, colors chosen and a corporate identity?
• Have you purchased a domain (URL), and a hosting plan? (It’s best to consult with a professional first)
• Do you have a basic outline of what will be on your website?
• Do you have copy written for your website pages or do you need the assistance of an professional copy writer?
• Do you have product photos, corporate headshots?
• Do you have collateral (brochures, flyers, etc.) available as downloads on your website?
• Research competitors near and far for ideas and figure out how you can make your unique selling proposition stand out.
• Create a clear and appealing call-to-action for your website (i.e. Call for free evaluation, 10% off first time order, etc.).
• Will your website require any special functionalty (i.e. ecommerce, shopping cart, flash animation, photo galleries, forms, etc.)?
• Do you have a professional company in mind to build your website (professionals companies know what they are doing, won’t close shop overnight and can help guide)

Focus on one piece at a time, and create a timeline for yourself for completion.

Here are some resources to help you out:

10 Tips to Planning Your Website

8 Simple Steps to Planning Your Website

Ecommerce & Shopping Cart Tips

Perkolate – Las Vegas Professional Website Design & Development

When looking into building a website in Las Vegas, or trying to further your website into something a bit more successful, finding ways to improve your search engine rankings is a very important concept. The first thing you should know to fully understand how to improve your search engine rankings is to know exactly what it is and how it is affected positively and negatively.

What are search engine rankings?

Search engine rankings are positive and negative marks given to your website by the search engine providers themselves, like google for example. A search engine ranking will either make your website higher or lower in search engine results pages – the difference from your website appearing on the first page or the hundreth.

What can I do to improve my search engine ranking?

Search engine rankings are influenced by many different concepts, strategies and tactics –  all built into how your website is structured, designed, and advertised, along with how all of the content is relevant into each other in the use of keywords and key phrases.

Some ways in which you can help improve your search engine ranking is to make sure your web address is simple, short, and supported by the most commonly used addresses such as dot com, which is the most popular on the internet today. If you are able to have relevant keywords as part of your title, that can help tremendously as well.

Another way to improve your ranking is to keep all content on your website relevant to either your website service, or the topics which your website focuses around, for example if your web name is dolphin, then dolphin should be a keyword which is used in all of your content to link relevancy of all web pages to your website. Even advertising pages which are not on your website should also still be relevant to the given topic.

When using keywords you need to watch your density of usage, you do not want to use too many or too few. Too many can get your website black listed as spam by a search engine, while too few will make your website hard to find on a search.

The best way to increase your search engine ranking in a short amount of time to gain maximum traffic, would be to invest some money into your website and hire a professional Las Vegas web design company. A professional web design company knows all the tricks to maximizing page ranking and getting your site to the top of the search engine using Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

There are many things to consider when starting a new business or company in Las Vegas and many things to consider if you want your business to be successful.  Business licenses, insurance, legal services, sourcing an office space, hiring and last but certainly not least, marketing materials to help market your new business.  Marketing is often an important factor that the beginning business person tends to overlook. Be aware that if you aren’t thinking about marketing from the beginning, your competitors throughout town already are.

Professionally designed and well-thought out marketing materials will give you instant credibility when searching for new customers and clients. Remember, your marketing materials are most likely a potential customers first impression for your new Las Vegas business, and as you know, first impressions are EVERYTHING.

Marketing Materials Your New Business Must Have:

Business Cards
A professionally designed business card, printed well, will be hugely important in helping establish credibility and market your company. Leave some sort of white space on the front or back of the card and make sure you can write on it with a pen without it smearing as potential customers sometimes write notes on your business card after meeting you.

Website
Many Las Vegas businesses often overlook the importance of a professional looking website, well written, well maintained. A website is as critical as having a business card. Potential clients will visit your website in researching your company. The key is to have it look and sound as professional as possible.

Stationery
Again, when corresponding with potential clients, a professional stationery including letterhead, envelopes and labels can really help your business credibility.

Brochure or Flyer
You also need some type of printed leave-behind when meeting with prospective clients. Some sort of trifold brochure or flyer that describes your company’s products and services and why they need to hire you to help them. Of course, they should be professionally designed.

All of the above marketing materials should be designed so that they all look like the come from the same company. This is known as corporate identity. A consistency across the board in using the same logo, fonts, colors and images creates a polished and professional corporate identity for your new Las Vegas business.

For more information or assistance with creating the above marketing materials, visit www.perkolate.com, my company’s website:

• Las Vegas Web Design Services
• Las Vegas Graphic Design Services
• Las Vegas Website Hosting and Domain Registration
• Las Vegas Marketing Services
• Las Vegas Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

I have been writing this free marketing blog in order to assist Las Vegas small businesses and Las Vegas companies with free articles, resources, tips and tricks for marketing their company or businesses. Just wanted to take a minute to shout out my own company, Perkolate Marketing and Design of Las Vegas, that can provide you with professional marketing, online marketing and design services in Las Vegas – just in case you can’t quite do everything yourself.

I started my company over 10 years ago in the heart of Silicon Valley (the internet epicenter back in the 1990′s) and have gained intensive in-depth knowledge about marketing, internet marketing and website design and development based on this experience to my Las Vegas Marketing and Design firm company, Perkolate.

If you have not already heard of Perkolate Marketing, please take a moment to review our website to find out more information on:

Las Vegas Marketing Services

Las Vegas Web Design and Website Master Services

Las Vegas Graphic Design Services

Las Vegas Powerpoint Presentations Design Services

Las Vegas Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Internet Marketing Services

Las Vegas Trade Show and Event Management

Las Vegas Pay-per-Click Advertising

Las Vegas Blog Design and Blog Marketing

Las Vegas Copywriting and Editing

Why should you hire a professional Las Vegas web design company?

There are some things in this the business world that you cannot live without. One of them is the fact that, if you wish to even survive on the Internet, you need to have a website for your Las Vegas business. Building a website could be a simple, especially considering the fact that so many resources are available on the Internet which will allow you to build a website for free or at a very low cost.

But is that what you really need? At the end of the day, your website is as important, if not more, than your business card, so wouldn’t you want a professionally custom designed website that completely fits your business and branding?

For this exact reason, you should be looking to hire a professional Las Vegas web design and development firm. Remember, building or designing a website from the scratch is no simple task, and is something that could add a few grey hairs!

Here are some reasons why you should hire a professional Las Vegas web design firm

• Technical knowledge – Writing website development on a piece of paper is one thing, and actually planning and executing one is another. 

• Content Integration along with the design of the site – The next time you see a website, observe howthe content is integrated and written. With each page, the content and links are strategically written and linked to one another. This is known as content integration, and requires an experienced web development company to do it professionally.

• Time is of essence – You may yet have a very good idea, and have an excellent network to launch a website for your company’s products or services, but do you really have the skills to develop a website, a professional marketing driven website? Even if you do, think of how much time you would be spending to design a website? By conservative estimates, all the development, coding and debugging would take you at least a week’s time. Would you rather develop your own website or free your time to do what YOU know how to do best?

• Cost-effective – Outsourcing this job of web development to a professional web development firm is always cost effective. This fact can be proven on two counts. Count 1 – Multiply the time to be spent by your company’s resources in building a website by the hourly cost. Count 2 – Add this time to the debugging and troubleshooting time for the website.

Think about these fact when considering hiring a local Las Vegas website design company? Remember, a local Las Vegas web design company knows the Las Vegas internet landscape and has the expertise to approach the design and development from a strategic perspective that is designed to help you gain website traffic and clients.

For more information, visit my company’s website (perkolate.com) for:

• Las Vegas Web & Graphic Design Services
• Las Vegas Website Development
• Las Vegas Marketing Services & Strategy
• Las Vegas SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Blogs are a great way to communicate with people in cyberspace and a good way to find potential business partners, new leads and PR in the Las Vegas community. If you don’t have the budget to have a professional company create and integrate a blog into your existing website, there are many free or mostly free options available that you can use to set up your own blog.  Just takes a little time and a slight learning curve and you could be writing your own blog to discuss topics relevant to your business, providing insider information and publishing tips and tricks.

Free and mostly free websites that offer free or low cost blogs:

• Blogger – Create your free blog
• Thoughts.com – FREE blogs
• Weebly – Create a free website and free blog
• Create a free blog at ClearBlogs – Your Web Blog hosting community
• WordPress.com – Get a Free Blog Here