When a consumer visits your website you only have a few seconds to capture attention and interest. If your website fails to hook them and they leave your website, they may never come back! This could potentially cause you to loose prospects, lose customers, and lose profits.

Here are five things to remember when creating or upgrading your business website to make sure you present your business professionally and credibly, and make a great first impression:

• Just as you need to dress appropriately for a business meeting and put your best foot forward, your business website needs to also put its best foot forward with a clean, polished, professional appearance.

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We’re shaking things up over here at Bourn Creative! With Brian stepping in as CEO and Operations Manager and the addition of two new team members, Bourn Creative isn’t just about me and my expertise anymore!

We’re updating and upgrading all of our materials and will continue to do so over the next few months as we continue to build the business not only around our clients’ needs, requests, and desires, but around our growing team’s amazing talents and expertise!

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Every business must have a website. This is no longer negotiable. Whether you’re a solopreneur, entrepreneur, small business owner, or a global organization, a website is imperative to your success.

The yellow pages and phone books are no longer the main way consumers locate businesses. With computers, laptops, netbooks, mobile phones, and other web ready tools, the Internet has now replaced the yellow pages and most consumers now turn to the search engines to find what they need.

Consumers aren’t just searching for broad terms either. Consumers are searching for local businesses and resources just as much as global businesses.

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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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I just finished a conversation with a potential new client today and we were reviewing their not-so-successful landing pages. As I was making my recommendations and educating him a bit on how a landing page is supposed to work, I figured the information would make a great blog post too.

Here are three tips to improve your landing pages:

1. Focus on a Single Conversion Type

Before you even start to write, design, and layout your landing page, you need to decide what tool you are going to use to convert prospects into customers, or get your visitors to join your list and what action is going to be required of the user.

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Wordpress is one of the most popular blogging tools available online and it can be completely customized for your personal brand. But what most entrepreneurs and business don’t realize is that Wordpress is also a very powerful, easy-to-use Content Management System (CMS) that can be used to manage entire dynamic websites as well.

Whether you want a completely custom site designed and coded from scratch, or you want to customize a wordpress theme (template), Wordpress, provides all the benefits and flexibility of a standard website combined with the ultimate functionality and benefits of a blog.

Here are some of the reasons Wordpress is a great choice for your next website project

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The Bourn Creative Implementation Action Team is a team of experts all working for you to make your big vision a reality.

If you already have a marketing plan in place, I will use your plan as a guide to take action and get things done, moving you closer and closer to your goal. But, if you don’t have a plan for your online business marketing, I can work with you to create a customized, strategic marketing plan and then take action to implement each step of your plan.

Here’s the bottom line.

When you work with other consultants, you spend a lot of money and only get a piece of the puzzle locked into place. For example, a traditional marketing consultant will tell you what you need to do and maybe even write a plan for you, but then you’re left to your own devices to find someone to implement it, or worse, you are forced to use their web designer and pay marked-up rates! And, I’ll bet their web designer isn’t an Internet marketing implementation expert.

When you work with my team and I, you get the completed puzzle. Not only can I work with you to determine what tools and approach would be the best fit for you and your business, but I can help you:

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Every single time I meet with a prospect about designing a custom website or Wordpress blog for their business, the conversation always turns to the process that my team and I use and how it works.

I believe that reviewing the wordpress blog design and website design and development process is extremely important, not only to clarify the process, but to educate the prospect and set clear expectations.

Design is completely subjective. While your designer, whether it is myself or someone else, will do their very best to create designs that fit you, your business, and your needs perfectly, it is a creative process. Your first set of design drafts are exactly that – drafts. It is your designers first round of options created for you. The first designers you see are not the final designs. It is only the starting point.

When you receive your first draft website or blog design proofs, this is your opportunity to use your voice and offer input. Don’t be afraid to speak up if you don’t like something or want to change something. Your designer is there as a partner to help you create a website or blog you will love and they want to work with you and hear what you have to say.

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