Sao Noi Tieng Design

Use free easy to use website templates to Market Your New Product Online!

Starting a new online business is challenging enough without the additional strain of dealing with costly and complicated website updates. Instead, Free business website templatescan be an easy solution to what in the past has been a complex problem for many online stores.

Why Web Page Templates?

Even though a business website might be your sole source of business income, it can be hard and frustrating to try to make changes to your website yourself. You might be able to visualize the changes you would like to see happen, but getting a programmer or web designer to understand what you would like can be at times very challenging.

It’s situations like this that make free business website templates so attractive to business owners. If you have a new product or a new service that you would like to get out before the public, free business website templates are available that will give you the speed you need to get the product or service out to your niche market quickly.

This is because business website templates function as free landing pages for your website. You probably will not have time or finances to devote to building and maintaining a separate website for you new product or service, and this is why free easy to use website templates make an attractive solution for the small online business owner. One way it can work is to have your main business website be the place where customers first come to hear about the products and services that your company offers. They can then be directed to free landing pages, where they will learn about all of the special new deals that focus on your new products and services that you wish to promote in a competitive manner. Time is of the essence when you are competing with companies that offer similar products, so if you can be the first to get your new product or service out to an interested public, they will likely spend their money with you.

Web page templates make sense when you know your product or service very well, yet you might not have a clue about how to introduce it to your buying public. Free easy to use website templates have been designed by web designers that are also well versed in the marketing of new products. All of their business acumen and expertise go into the making of these business website templates, so that you will be certain to present your new product or service in the best light possible. And by using free business website templates, you know that you can stay within your frugal budget yet still get your new service or product the attention that it needs to bring in your target audience.

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When I get stressed about work, relationships, or bills, I relax by speaking with my friends. One of my favorite conversation topics is childhood memories and games. Listening to my friends speak about the things they enjoyed while they were children always reminds me of my own childhood. My imagination takes me back in time to a place where life was much more fun and so much easier. There weren’t any problems, reports, deadlines, clients, breakdowns, or taxes. Life was divided into school and no school, with only some homework that interrupted for a bit the cartoon shows and the games with your siblings, friends or cousins.

When I think about it, it makes me think of one of a song from one of Charlie Brown’s movies: “Maybe it’s some kind of magic, that only little kids can do.” It certainly felt that way. Santa came all the way from the North Pole each year, fatal wounds could be cured with a kiss from mom, and even if monsters and pirates lurked around the house, you could always defeat them with the help of dad. On the other hand, there were no taxes, no telephone, electricity and gas bills, no overdue debts, no mortgage payments, no dating messages to decipher, no budgets, no holding on line, no commissions to pay, no calories to be counted, no light food, no hangovers, no worrisome medical tests, etc.

Of course, there’s no point in trying to find a time travel machine and go back to the 70’s again, but it’s still relaxing to remember my childhood. Those were the days.

When I turned 7, my father decided to make an educated and literate child out of me. This meant substituting toys for books for the rest of my childhood. Although I eventually learned to love my books, at the time I felt the world was pretty much over. As any person who has kids knows, children learn to use their imagination to amuse themselves, using whatever they have at hand. In my case, that meant clothing. I would invite my friends over and we would play dress up games all the time. Although at first we only pretended to be mini versions of our mothers, my contact with books allowed me and my friends to eventually transform into princesses, courtesans, ballerinas, as well as child versions of Snow White, Wilma Flinstone, Cinderella and Smurfette. I like to think that it helped us stay close and develop our artistic abilities. The girl who selected our clothes grew up to be a fashion designer. Me? I’m a fiction writer.

Nowadays, things are different for little girls. They just connect to internet and go to a website that features dress up games. Cinderella and Snow White have been replaced by Hanna Montana and Sakura Card Captors. They dress up their new icons with dozens of virtual outfits, just by clicking the mouse pointer around the screen. They have it easier and they should. However, call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer it our way. It encouraged more relationship building between girls. I’m proud to say that a couple of the girls I used to play dress up games with are still a big part in my life, and they have helped me get over some of the most difficult events that have happened to me.

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Squeezing the most efficient performance from your web pages is important. The benefits are universal, whether the site is personal or large and professional. Reducing page weight can speed up the browsing experience, especially if your visitors are using dial-up internet access. Though broadband access is the future, the present still contains a great deal of dial-up users. Many sites, ecommerce sites especially, cannot afford to ignore this large section of the market. Sites with a large amount of unique traffic may also save on their total monthly traffic by slimming down their web pages. This article will cover the basics of on-page optimization in both text/code and graphics.

Graphics

Graphics are the usual suspect on heavy pages. Either as a result of a highly graphic design, or a few poorly optimized images, graphics can significantly extend the load-time of a web page. The first step in graphics optimization is very basic. Decide if the graphics are absolutely necessary and simply eliminate or move the ones that aren’t. Removing large graphics from the homepage to a separate gallery will likely increase the number of visitors who “hang around” to let the homepage load. Separating larger photos or art to a gallery also provides the opportunity to provide fair warning to users clicking on the gallery that it may take longer to load. In the case of graphical buttons, consider the use of text based, CSS-styled buttons instead. Sites that use a highly graphic design, a common theme in website “templates”, need to optimize their graphics as best as possible.

Graphics optimization first involves selecting the appropriate file type for your image. Though this topic alone is fodder for far more in depth analysis, I will touch on it briefly. Images come in 2 basic varieties, those that are photographic in nature, and those that are graphic in nature. Photographs have a large array of colors all jumbled together in what’s referred to as continuous tone. Graphics, such as business logos, are generally smooth, crisp and have large areas of the same color. Photographs are best compressed into “JPEGs”. The “Joint Photographic Expert Group” format can successfully compress large photos down to very manageable sizes. It is usually applied on a sliding “quality” scale between 1-100, 1 being the most compressed and lowest quality, 100 the least and highest quality. JPEG is a “lossy” compression algorithm, meaning it “destroys” image information when applied, so always keep a copy of the original file. Graphics and logos generally work best in the “GIF”, or more recently, the “PNG” format. These formats are more efficient than JPEGs at reducing the size of images with large areas of similar color, such as logos or graphical text.

A few general notes on other media are appropriate. Other types of media such as Flash or sound files also slow down a page. The first rule is always the same; consider whether they are absolutely necessary. If you are choosing to build the site entirely in Flash, then make sure the individual sections and elements are as well compressed as possible. In the case of music, I will admit to personal bias here and paraphrase a brilliant old saying, “Websites should be seen and not heard.” Simply, music playing in the background will not “enhance” any browsing experience.

Text and Code

The most weight to be trimmed on a page will come from graphical and media elements, but it is possible to shed a few extra bytes by looking at the text and code of a web page. In terms of actual text content, there may not be much to do here. A page’s content is key not only to the user’s understanding but also search engine ranking. Removing or better organizing content is only necessary in extreme situations, where more than page weight is an issue. An example might be a long, text heavy web page requiring a lengthy vertical scrolling to finish. Such a page is common on “infomercial” sites, and violates basic design tenants beyond those related to page weight.

Code is a different story. A website’s code can be made more efficient in a variety of fashions. First, via the use of CSS, all style elements of a web page can now be called via an external file. This same file can be called on all a site’s pages, providing for a uniform look and feel. Not only is this more efficient; it is also the official recommendation from the W3C. The same may be said of XHTML and the abandonment of “table” based layout. Tables, though effective for layout, produce more code than equivalent XHTML layouts using “div” tags. Where a minimum of 3 tags are required to create a “box” with content in a table, only 1 is needed using divisions. Using XHTML and CSS in combination can significantly reduce the amount of “on page” code required by a web page. A final, relatively insignificant trick is the removal of all “white space” from your code. Browsers don’t require it; it is primarily so authors can readily read and interpret the code. The savings are minimal at best, but for sites that receive an extreme amount of traffic, even a few saved bytes will add up over time.

Conclusions

Target images and media files first when seeking to reduce the weight of a page. They are the largest components of overall page weight and simply removing them can significantly reduce total weight. The images that remain should be optimally compressed into a format appropriate for their type, photos or graphics. Avoid huge blocks of text that cause unnecessary vertical scrolling. Organize the site more efficiently to spread the information across multiple pages. Adopt XHTML and CSS to reduce the size of the on-page code, and call the CSS externally. These tips should help reduce the size of your pages and speed their delivery to your viewers.

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