A study I recently read stated that an average person only gives a website 10 seconds before deciding if a site is worth their time, which means you have less than ten seconds to:

1. Attract the viewer
2. Declare your message
3. Get them to take action

With so much noise on the web today, and the natural ADD nature of most web surfers, your worst enemy is the browser back button. After someone lands on your website from a search engine, status update, marketing promotion, Tweet, or email link, you have a very short window of opportunity to keep them on your site, so let’s cover each step.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 12, 2010 | CONTACT: Jennifer Bourn, Bourn Creative
916-788-1740 | jennifer(at)bourncreative.com

Jennifer Bourn of Bourn Creative One of Only Five Experts for Week-Long Startup Business Teleseminar Series

APRIL 12, 2010 – SACRAMENTO, CA – Web design and online marketing expert, Jennifer Bourn of Bourn Creative, helps her clients harness the power of the Internet and use it to their advantage. Bourn will be featured in a week-long telesummit hosted by the Startup Biz Coach, Randi Pierce.

For five amazing days, five fabulous and successful women entrepreneurs will share their secrets for success, overcoming hard-learned lessons and how you can avoid them, as well as the breakthroughs that opened the floodgates that led to more clients, more freedom and more income.

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Search engine optimization or SEO is one of the top three most important components of your business website success. You can read about the other two components of successful business websites, good design and quality content, in the blog post Search Engine Optimization: The Two Most Important Things Your Website Needs.

The web design, website content, and SEO make up a trifecta of search engine results page power.

Search engine optimization is a process not a single event. With that fact in mind, your search engine optimization or SEO efforts should begin before the design and content development of your website and continue for the life of your website.

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My six year old daughter loves the sitcom iCarly on Nickelodeon. It’s a show about three kids – Carly, Sam and Freddie – who run a web show called iCarly. So, the entire show is centered around their web show and publishing online content.

I have to admit that as far as kid shows are concerned, I am totally hooked. I even found myself (yes, I am admitting this) watching it the other day when I was home alone!

A couple days ago we were snuggled up watching iCarly before bed and I almost wet my pants! In the episode, Carly and Sam were filming the intro to their live web show and when they were driving people to the iCarly website, they said…

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 21, 2010 | CONTACT: Jennifer Bourn, Bourn Creative
916-788-1740 | jennifer(at)bourncreative.com

Jennifer Bourn of Bourn Creative Helps Women Entrepreneurs Gain Valuable Resources for Business

Sacramento, CA – The Alliance of Online Entrepreneurs (AOE), founded by online business development expert, Brenda Rivas, is a community that empowers women to embrace their knowledge, passion and desired lifestyle and leverage those elements into profitable online businesses. Web design and Internet marketing consultant, Jennifer Bourn of Sacramento, CA, has been chosen to serve as one of only twelve on the AOE Expert Panel for 2010 where she will advise and train the membership of women entrepreneurs in Internet marketing.

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A website is a basic business requirement. Second only to establishing your brand, creating your website is the most important task you must accomplish when starting a business.

What bothers me the most is that most smart business owners blindly turn to a graphic designer or web designer to design them a site that makes them “look cool” to their competitors.

Here’s the problem with that approach: Your competitors aren’t going to buy from you or hire you.

Website design isn’t about your designer adding another edgy piece to their portfolio that pushes the boundaries and makes them look cool to other designers.

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We can talk search engine optimization strategies and organic search engine optimization techniques all day, but one thing will always remain the same.

The two most important things to help you get found more often online and stand out from the rest of the sites in your niche are, in this order:

1. Good content
2. Good design

Good content that is user focused, information rich and valuable is the most important part of your website. Good content that is updated regularly is even more important.

The search engines first and foremost want to see that you are providing information of value on a regular basis. Consistently adding new content to your website shows the search engines that your site deserves to show up in the results because people need access to your newly updated content.

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To take your business to the next level, you need a professional website design or professional blog design and it needs to be developed by an experienced website designer who understands what you are trying to achieve and how you want to use your website.

You can call it anything you want, but ultimately when you break down every business to it’s core, you are engaging in commerce and trading a commodity for payment. Yes you may be aspiring to make a difference in the world, or help other business owners just like you achieve greater levels of success, or you may even be in business to create social change. But ultimately, you as a business owner must do one thing to make it all happen. You have to sell your products, services, and ideas for a profit.

To Make a Profit, Your Target Market Must Know That You Exist.

Your target market must be able to find you and learn more about what you have to offer and how it can help them solve their problems or achieve their goals. Only then will they be able purchase from you.

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A frequently updated website, blog, or weblog with high-quality, relevant, personal, value-added content is the key to a high search engine page ranking. A website that is updated consistently with fresh content means you’ll be found by your prospects and customers much more often online, both in the search results, and through referral links.

In fact, while search engine optimization efforts do accelerate your results and help drive more traffic to your website, many entrepreneurs and business owners are seeing an increase in website traffic and search engine page rankings as a result of simply adding a blog to their existing website, or upgrading their existing website to include a blog and a complete content management system, such as WordPress (which is what this site is built on).

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What are Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)?

Style sheets are a way to define and style the look of website pages. Style sheets allow web developers to separate the content code and design code. This allows the HTML to be used for the markup (programming) of the content and not the website design and layout. It also helps reduce code duplication.

The “cascading” part is where things start to get interesting.

The best way to explain CSS is to visualize a waterfall. Imagine the water is cascading down over the all sorts of rocks, both big and small on its way to the bottom. Along the way, several rocks help guide the water, but only the ones at the very bottom determine how it flows into the lake or river.

When multiple inter-connected style sheets are used instead of a single style sheet they are referred to as cascading style sheets. This means the information flows freely from one style sheet to another.

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