Business websites are used for many purposes. Many serve as online versions of real-world stores, allowing visitors to shop for products or services directly from their devices.

But another type of website is designed to attract new customers. These web pages are known as lead generators.

Lead Generators

Lead generating websites will typically offer visitors something that they can use in their everyday life in exchange for customer information the business can use to sell products and services later, such as a phone number or email address.

Whatever the website offers must have perceived value to the prospective customer. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be a high-value item. In fact, it usually is something that has little or no cost to the business.

Top Quality Web Design Helps Attract New Customers – Free Giveaways

The free giveaway offered to customers in exchange for their information is often an information product. These include things like eBooks, audio recordings, digital files, and other items that can be sent and reproduced electronically at no additional cost to the business that owns the website.

For example, assume you own an electronics store in Fort Lauderdale and you want to build your pool of online customers. In this instance, you could create a short eBook about how to improve the speed of your laptop. Or you could create a video discussing how to optimize the sound system in any room.

Top Quality Web Design Helps Attract New Customers – No Additional Cost

Then you could offer one (or both) of these free giveaways to people on your lead generating website in exchange for their phone number or email address, or if they simply “Friend” your business on Facebook.

When people land on your lead generating website, see your offer, and opt-in to your giveaway, it costs your business nothing to send it to them electronically. But you receive a high-quality lead that you can use to promote your products and services in the future.

Thanks to the many all-inclusive web design apps out there, anybody can create and design their own highly effective website that is guaranteed to go viral, right?

Not so fast. Even though places like WordPress, Weebly, and Squarespace certainly make it easier to design websites, they don’t do everything … at least not everything you need.

Web sites need to do more than just exist. They also need to look great, be easy to navigate, and easy for people to share.

Language Barrier

One of the first obstacles most amateur web designers face has to do with language. Not English vs. Spanish or another language, but HTML and CSS, the two most popular programming languages in use today.

Effective web design requires knowing how to read, edit, and troubleshoot basic HTML. And to do more with your website, you need to know more.

Photo Editing

Introductory web design sites tout their “drag and drop” photo editing capabilities. But including highly effective photos that both appeal to visitors and drive traffic takes more than just dropping and dragging.

At the very least, you need to know how to crop, size, clean up, and adjust image quality. None of these things are brain surgery, but they are skills web designers use all day, every day.

5 Web Design Obstacles That Could Frustrate You – Making a Print

Wait, this one sounds easy. You just hit the “print” button, right?

Not really. Web design requires you to create and convert design elements so that they are print-ready for flyers to business cards, brochures to press releases.

Key skills including understanding printing resolutions for different media types and colors, working with typefaces and bleeds, and more.

5 Web Design Obstacles That Could Frustrate You – Trusting the Professionals

Learning these and other web design skills is a lot more complicated than the “EZ” websites would have you believe. If web design were really that easy, everybody would do it!

Fortunately, the web design professionals at “Lytron Lead Generation” already have the skills, experience, and knowledge to handle all of your web design needs.

“Cost of entry” is a concept that has killed millions of potential businesses before they were ever born.

It’s the idea that says starting up a new business — even something as simple as launching a web-based business — simply costs too much. And if you don’t have the initial capital, you can’t get into the game.

But technological advancements, increased competition for web-based services, and significantly lower start-up costs have essentially eliminated “cost of entry” as an obstacle for many potential business owners.

 One-Time Charges

True, you probably will need to pay somebody to create a highly effective website for you. But the cost of designing and launching your own website usually is a one-time charge.

The way many web maintenance businesses keep their clients paying is by requiring a monthly subscription fee for services they don’t need and can’t use. Once your website is up and running, you generally don’t need to keep paying the graphic artist or web designer who created it.

While there are some minor recurring charges, such as web hosting, these can cost as little as $5 per month. So what exactly are you paying for?

Maintaining Your Website – Maintenance Fees

If you ask many unscrupulous web page providers, the answer is often “maintenance fees”.

But think about it: What maintenance does a website actually need? If it was properly designed and fully functional in the first place, it should run flawlessly starting from the very first day.

Even if you do want to upgrade your website, the content management system you use, such as WordPress, often will let you implement updates yourself with the click of a button at little or no cost.

Maintaining Your Website – Ask Questions

If the company you pay to manage your business website tries to sell you a maintenance package, try this experiment: Ask them to provide for you in writing exactly what they will do for the money.

Then search Google for those exact same services. Odds are, you will find easy, simple to use instructions for doing everything they are offering on your own, and for free.

With today’s technology, website maintenance doesn’t need to be complicated or difficult. In many cases, you can do it yourself.

When creating a new website, one of the first decisions you need to make is what it’s going to be called. The domain name is going to be both the “official” name of your website on the internet as well as the address that people — or programs — are going to type in when they want to be directed to your web page.

So how does a website get a domain name that the rest of the world uses to find it?

Buying a Domain Name

Like anything else having to do with your business, if you want a domain name you have to buy it. Or more precisely, rent it.

In the same way that your home mailing address is different than anyone else’s, your domain name online also has to be unique.

Fortunately, the cost of registering a domain isn’t very high. It ranges from about $10 to $30 per year, depending on where you register it and how far in advance you are willing to pay. A domain name can be registered for one to ten years usually.

Where to Register Your Domain Name

When it comes to registering your domain name, there isn’t really any difference between any of the official registry sites. Typically, after your web address is registered, the place where you bought it doesn’t have much to do with maintaining it — other than possibly sending you a reminder when it’s due to expire.

There are many places that will register your web domain name. The most popular is probably GoDaddy.com, but there are many others.

Your best bet is to shop around. By spending just a few minutes comparing offers, you can save money on the cost and possibly negotiate additional services for the same money while you are at it. Many registries will give you a discount for registering more than one domain name, for example.

If you have never worked with web design or page creation before, all the technical terms related to coding can seem a little bit intimidating.

Like anything else, however, once you start to work with a design program, it becomes quite instinctual. To help you get started here’s a breakdown of some of the most basic terms you will encounter once you get started.

What Is HTML?

One of the first terms you are likely to encounter is HTML, which is an acronym for HyperText Markup Language.

In layman’s terms, HTML is what provides the basic structure of websites. HTML is a markup language, rather than a programming language. That means it uses tags to identify content.

HRML is enhanced and modified by other technologies, such as CSS and JavaScript.

What Is CSS?

Okay, then. So what is CSS?

CSS is basically a list of rules that can assign different properties to HTML tags. These rules can be applied to individual tags, multiple tags, entire documents, or multiple documents.

In other words, CSS is what you use to control presentation, formatting, and layout.

Website Development & Coding – What is JavaScript?

The last term you need to know is JavaScript. No, it’s not something you read for a film while drinking a cup of coffee.

Instead, JavaScript is used to control the behavior of different elements on your web page. It’s a programming language that was first introduced in 1995, making it a relative newcomer to page design.

Today, however, JavaScript is supported by every major web browser and is used on nearly every website on the internet. It’s the language that allows web developers design sites that are interactive with the people who use them.

Most of the interactive elements on the web pages you visit are powered by JavaScript.

Now that you are familiar with these three important terms, web design should be less intimidating for you!

Learning how to design attractive, effective web pages is just like learning any other new skill. It requires a basic understanding of the primary elements.

Once you learn the basics of good web design, you can build on this knowledge and, combined with your experience and practice, begin to create better and better pages that reach a wider and wider audience.

The basics of top-quality web design fall into four categories: Layout, f0nts and typography, color, and images.

Layout

Layout refers to where the different elements of your website are located on your web page.

People have certain expectations when they arrive on any web page. They want to be able to navigate your page intuitively. If you try to get too fancy or creative with your web page layout, it can backfire on you.

It’s better to stick with the basics and give your page visitors what they expect.

– Fonts and Typography

The type and size of the fonts you use on your web page are important. Make your text too large or too small and it can turn away visitors.

A good approach is to use standard fonts and standard sizes. If you aren’t sure what these are, visit the web page of your most successful competitor and use what they are using.

Top 4 Qualities of Effective Web Design – Color

The color of your web page generally needs to fit with your business or brand. If you have a logo, it’s usually smart to use those colors, or colors that are related or complement your standard colors.

Color is one of the most important factors in web design because it communicates with visitors on a non-verbal level.

Top 4 Qualities of Effective Web Design – Images

Images are arguably the most important element of your web page design. Try to choose images that are appealing but still communicate the purpose of your page.

Web designers use computer programming, or coding, to create web pages that look a certain way, or allow visitors to perform specific actions on the page.

When you commission “Lytron Lead Generation” or another web design firm to build your web page, web designers will take your ideas about the page should look like and what it should do and then use programming languages, or code, to translate your ideas onto the actual web pages.

Programming Languages –Your Browser’s Function

When somebody visits a web page online — whether it is on their home computer, their laptop, tablet, or even their phone — a computer program within their device known as their browser translates the code created by the web designer to produce the web pages that you see on your screen.

The code itself is simply a text file. It’s the browser that does the work of taking these tiny lines of code and building them into an actionable web page.

The browser uses HTML, CSS and other computer programs to build the page.

Programming Languages – JavaScript and Other Languages

In reality, HTML,  CSS, and other programs are not really languages. They simply manage page structure and style information. But web designers need to be able to master these programs first before moving onto actual programming languages such as JavaScript.

While HTML provides the basic structure of sites, and CSS controls a web page’s presentation, formatting, and layout, Javascript is what actually controls the behavior of all of the different elements on the page.

Today, web designers have more shortcuts than they had in the past. There are design platforms such as WordPress and others that will do much of the coding for you automatically.

But experienced web designers like the ones at “Lytron Lead Generation” know how to optimize even these advanced programs to enhance the look, feel, and functionality of your web pages.