Yahoo Small Business-Tips Every Business Website Builder Should Know

By | Small Business

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Equal parts art and science, establishing a business website requires a careful blend of esthetics, psychology and common sense. Happily, a good business website builder like the one provided by Yahoo Small Business takes all those factors into consideration. However, platforms such as these also give you the freedom to customize your website as you see fit. With that in mind, here are some tips every business website builder should know.

Get to Know Your Ideal Customer

Whatever your business, the design and functioning of your site should be predicated upon the answer to the following two questions: “Who is my ideal customer and what do they want?” You can then design your site specifically to appeal to that person, virtually guaranteeing your efforts will resonate with them.
If you’re selling clothes to teenagers, the tone of your site should be markedly different than if you’re pitching municipal infrastructure support. This might seem obvious, but too many business owners miss it.

Quality Is an Important Consideration

If you’re just starting out, rather than getting caught up in a lot of different functionalities that add complexity and expense to the project, focus on the basics and make them as good as they can possibly be. Compress images to ensure faster load times (less than three seconds is preferable). Employ responsive design so your site will display and perform optimally in a mobile environment. In other words, do everything you can to be certain each visitor’s experience on your site is both pleasant and informative. 


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Pictures Speak Volumes

Whatever you’re representing, find a way to competently depict it in pictures. Use high-quality photographs and label them so search engines can find them. Original images are always preferred—if your budget permits. When you’re dealing with a complicated topic, video is a strong ally in your quest to inform. If yours is a service-oriented or professional enterprise, use photos of your actual associates and employees to add legitimacy to the presentation. Your goal here is to help potential customers envision themselves interacting with your offerings in a positive manner.

Calls to Action Should be Hearty & Visible

A basic axiom in sales is “always be closing”. Every aspect of your site should be designed to promote your products or services. In other words, it should always be closing. Robust calls to action are of tremendous help in this regard. Offer visitors incentives for taking the desired action and encourage them with language such as: “Get $100 in gifts for booking your free consultation now!” Calls to action should be featured prominently, so your users won’t have to hunt around for them.
Keeping these tips every business website builder should know in mind when you design your site will give you the best shot at attracting a strong customer base. However, while the process is indeed equal parts art and science, it doesn’t have to be rocket science. Let Yahoo Small Business help you get started today with a free consultation!

Yahoo Small Business-Crafting Your Ecommerce Privacy Policy

By | Small Business

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Taking advantage of the best ecommerce platform – like those provided by Yahoo Small Business – is a great way to get your online business off to a strong start. But if you really want to win your customers’ hearts and minds, tell them how you’ll keep their data secure too. You’re going to be asking people to disclose financial information, after all. So, crafting your ecommerce privacy policy to demonstrate your dedication to protection is the smartest thing you can do for building consumer trust.

Here’s how to build an eCommerce privacy policy.

Respect and Safeguard Privacy

There are a few ways to respect consumer privacy and safeguard digital information:

• Promise to protect their disclosures against fraud and misappropriation.
• Respect their preferences regarding the use of their information and limit your data collection solely to what is absolutely required to conduct business.
• Be completely forthcoming about what information you collect and with whom it will be shared.
• Let them know how mistakes will be corrected, how their data is secured and how policy changes will be communicated.
• Finally, you should apprise users of the means available to them to present any concerns they may have.

Securing Their Data

If you’re asking for credit card information, bank account numbers or Social Security numbers (which you shouldn’t need at all), it is your responsibility to ensure storage and transmission of this data in the most secure manner possible.

About Emails…

In many cases, customers will opt-in to email communications without realizing they’ve done so. When they ask to unsubscribe, you’re required by law to enable them to do so. You can save yourself a lot of trouble if you make email opt-out options readily visible. This also establishes you as someone who can be counted upon to conduct business in an above-board fashion.
Too many sites make the opt-out process incredibly difficult or even invisible, as if that will discourage irritated people from doing so. Meanwhile, this irritates them even more. If you’re conducting business with good intentions, there’s no reason to hide your opt-out button. In fact, making it plainly visible says you’re someone who can be trusted.


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Protecting Children

If your site appeals to children younger than 13 in any way, you must comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Acknowledging this in your privacy policy will go a long way toward helping parents feel good about your intentions toward their families.

Honor Their Preferences

Strict adherence to your privacy policy is paramount if you want to retain customer confidence. While not doing so isn’t always a violation of the law per se, you can expect the Federal Trade Commission to come calling in certain cases if you do not.
Making every effort to keep your customers safe and happy is the best way to build a strong and loyal following. Crafting your ecommerce privacy policy along these lines—on one of the best ecommerce platforms available—will get your store off to a great start.
Looking to start your own ecommerce site? Check out what Yahoo Small Business has to offer.

If Hard-to-Get Loans Are the Problem, Who’s to Blame?

BY ADRIENNE BURKE | SMALL BUSINESS

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Who’s to blame for the slowdown in startups? Recent research shows entrepreneurship is stagnating, and a Senate hearing explored the consequences of an America without entrepreneurs.

A bank CEO points a finger at the Small Business Administration. Writing in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, M&T Bank CEO Robert Wilmers says that the U.S. agency tasked with helping small firms has “deviated from its core mission.”

Citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data that show the pace of new business formation is at its lowest in more than two decades, Wilmers says that “half as many small businesses receive loans from the agency’s 7(a) loan-guaranty programs today as did before the recession” and that SBA’s own records “reveal these loans support only two-thirds as many jobs as they did in 2007.”

Part of the problem is 528 pages of regulations that “make it difficult for smaller banks to participate in SBA’s loan programs,” and have contributed to “a 13% reduction in bank participation since 2012,” he says. Also, alternative lenders are on the rise.

Kabbage, Lending Club, Dealstruck, and SnapCap are among the expanding breed of non-bank lenders that offer higher-interest-rate loans online to business owners with fewer regulations than banks. Wilmers suggests that traditional banks like his are more reliable and knowledgeable when it comes to serving local businesses, and better equipped to make loans that suit a community’s needs. “Credit well-extended helps create viable small businesses, which means new jobs, filled by people who buy homes and cars, shop for groceries and clothing, go to movies and museums, pay taxes and give to charities,” Wilmers writes.

To fuel entrepreneurship, he says, the government should re-focus the SBA on lending through community banks.

Predictably, readers of the business publication tend to disagree. “We need dramatically less government, not ‘better’ government,” was the sentiment shared by one commenter and echoed by 30 others. Many complained about the lengthy and costly SBA loan application process, too.

Only one commenter, Natalie Jocovic, praised SBA’s work making loans to businesses through banks: She is an executive with SmartBiz, an online platform designed to streamline the SBA application process. “Online platforms are partnering with the SBA and virtualizing what happens when a small business owner walks into a bank,” she wrote. “With smaller loan sizes, a streamlined, dynamic online application, and stellar customer service, fintech startups like SmartBiz are delivering nicely on the SBA’s promise to help SMBs and add jobs. In fact, the companies that have received SBA funding through our platform planned to retain or add more than 10,000 jobs to the economy as a result of their loans.”

Could the banks, not the SBA, be the problem?

Easy On The Eyes: Building A Better Ecommerce Site

BY | SMALL BUSINESS

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If ever the old saying “You only get one chance to make a good first impression” was relevant, it’s in ecommerce. Online shoppers are judgmental regarding the look of a website; and they should be! Site design offers important clues about the veracity of a seller. Thus, the best ecommerce platform will always consider design.

Beauty Is More Than Skin Deep

You can have the most wondrous products ever created. But if you can’t get shoppers to stomach looking at your site for more than 50 milliseconds, they will never know. Studies have shown this is the amount of time it takes for a user to decide if they like a website. This determination is based on a number of factors.

Chief among them are:

1. 1. Colors
2. 2. Symmetry
3. 3. Type Style
4. 4. Amount of Copy

You’ll have an excellent chance of holding a user’s attention if you focus your design choices around those elements.

Smart Color Choices

Color and emotional response are closely related. For example, red attracts attention, generates excitement, and is symbolic of love, warmth, life, and blood. Green triggers thoughts of balance, action, good taste, health, money and harmony. Blue signifies honesty, quality, competence, loyalty, trust, and reliability.

Deeply saturated colors imply wealth and sophistication, while bright and simple colors are often related to children. Pastels tend to appeal to women, while darker colors attract men. Making color choices based upon the characteristics of your primary audience will increase the appeal of your site. You can seldom go wrong with white for backgrounds. Products and black type stand out well against it. That said, you can also make a powerful statement with white text and colorful images on a black background. Whatever you do though, avoid employing more than three main colors in your design.

Harmonious Arrangement of Elements

An organized design pleases the eye. Arranging elements on a page so viewers are led in a logical fashion soothes them. Further, thoughtful menu design improves navigability. Checkout buttons, search functions, calls to action and shopping carts should be readily visible and in accord with the overall design. Meanwhile, crisp logos, photography and familiar social icons infer professionalism.

Easily Discernible Type Styles

Rendering body copy in a simple, easily decipherable font is paramount to your success. It’s OK to go frilly with your name or logo, but product descriptions should be easy on the eyes. People will not struggle to read them. Instead, they will move on to a more accommodating site.

Optimal Copy Density

A delicate balance must be struck here. You want to supply enough information to answer questions. However, you have to avoid paralyzing the reader with too much. A good way to approach this is to provide strong bullet points on the product’s landing page. Include a call to action button, along with the option to click to a product page with in-depth information. This satisfies the customer who wants to make the purchase right away; while providing an option for more information for the customer doing research.

Smart design decisions such as these will keep users on your site longer, inspire trust and lead them to convert. Building a better shopping site is easy if you use the best ecommerce platform.

Happily, the best ecommerce platform templates, such as those by Yahoo Small Business already take these details into consideration. Check them out today!

Yahoo Small Business Presents: Live Sports Now On US Sports Net! and The Best Web Hosting Company you can choose

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Best Web Hosting Company you can choose

Don’t you want the very best web hosting provider that can be found to meet your business needs? There is so many business web hosting options available that it is often difficult to navigate through the many in order to find the one web hosting company that is best suited for your specific needs. When searching for your next website hosting company you must understand that there is a definable difference between cheap web hosting and affordable web hosting. Expert Soft IT hosting has much to offer when it comes to small business web hosting.

Service with Expert Soft IT includes both a free domain and marketing credits for advertisements. Don’t overlook the power of the winning combination presented with the easy web site building tool and low-cost web hosting of Expert Soft IT. It is a good idea to select a service like ESIT that can handle multiple needs such as virtual web hosting, NET hosting, Windows hosting, dedicated web hosting, and ASP web hosting. With Yahoo! Hosting you have the option of Windows or Linux web hosting for your small business. It is the builder that receives accolades by those that are inexperienced website builders. Yahoo is an excellent example of reliable web hosting but if you look around it compares well with other less expensive web hosting companies. When it comes to the ESIT Host you may very well be looking at one of the most popular low-cost web hosting services available. When you need affordable web hosting for your small business. ESIT web hosting has plenty of wonderful features to offer. See for yourself how ESIT web hosting can meet all of your customer service and technical support needs while filling all of your requirements for multiple domain web hosting, SSH access, and countless other Internet web hosting needs. You will also want to consider Host Monster Hosting while you are checking into suitable small business web hosting services for your business. It is true that Host Monster Hosting doesn’t have quite the reputation as ESIT hosting or Host Monster web hosting when it comes to providing easy to use tools but it meets their reputation for technical

Support, reliability, and customer service. Make sure that you devote a good deal of time when looking for Internet web hosting companies to making sure you choose a reliable web hosting company. It’s a shame that all discount web hosting services can’t seem to match the quality of service and features that we offer. Don’t purchase web hosting without taking the time to make sure you will be getting what you are paying for. Of the web hosting services mentioned here at least one of them should meet the needs of your small business quite nicely. Don’t take another step without carefully studying these web hosting packages to see which one will serve your business best. Expert IT web hosting provides some cheap hosting to run your small business. It is fact that which service you take .you must see who provide the best service according to your requirement.