Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites

The best business websites serve their readers with strong content, well-architected design, and a focus on usability, readability, and accessibility. This book covers the fundamental aspects of building a website that works for the company, not against it. It covers the essentials of strong copywriting, and then dedicates several chapters to designing user-centric About, Products and Services, and Support sections.

Your visitors come to your site because they are interested in your business and are therefore potential customers. This book covers taking advantage of that traffic by expanding the company's story through a corporate blog and using testimonials, case studies, and other third-party validation to reinforce the marketing message. With this knowledge, you will be able to create and maintain a highly professional, polished business site.

While a pleasing website is essential for any modern business, creating it is only a small piece of the online strategy. This book also discusses search engine optimization, using e-mail and RSS to communicate with customers and prospects, and advertising the corporate domain with paid search placement, online banners, text links, and more. The primary theme is using your corporate website to market the business effectively, from designing intelligent product pages to writing compelling e-mail newsletters. This book explores those ideas and offers compelling advice on how to take full advantage of the Web as a marketing medium.

"Business Websites" include any business site that aims to inform about and sell a service or product, requiring specialized design techniques to implement effectively.

The first to focus exclusively on corporate/business site design and marketing, this book is for any web designer who wants to find out how to better implement these kinds of sites, offering a better online presence for them, and their clients. The reader is taken through the planning, design, and implementation of corporate/business web sites using a series of concise, practical chapters.

The examples focus largely on CSS and HTML sites, but the principles are applicable to any site, regardless of the technology used, and some useful Flash examples are also provided where appropriate. Site accessibility (to people with disabilities) is also a big focus of this book.

Kevin has been working on the web for almost ten years, having started his career designing his first employer\'s website with Netscape and Notepad. He has spent the bulk of his design career working in-house as both a graphic designer and internal web developer. Coupled with years of freelance and agency work, Kevin has created dozens of websites for businesses of all sizes in an array of industries.