Let me start off by telling you my thoughts on the topic. When I started doing web design, I thought it was all about the design of the site. I was in love with graphics and color and “bling bling” if you will. I thought flash was the best and I wanted to make the best looking website ever. I looked at websites skin deep and that was it.

Now that I have had 6 years of practice and experience, I understand that my previous thoughts couldn’t get more wrong. Now I’m not saying design isn’t important, no one wants to visit and buy from an ugly website, but I feel that structure takes precedence over design.

When I say structure, I am talking about the guts of the site, the content. How many pages and how they are linked together to provide importance and relevance to your users. After all the purpose of a website is usually 1 of 2 things. To sell a product &/or service, OR to educate &/or entertain. If you are not striving for these then you are creating a pointless website that is basically a waste of time and effort.

In conclusion, your customer is way more likely to visit your site multiple times and even tell their friends about it if it provides them with something beneficial. Design just wont cut it in today’s online market. So don’t spend a tone of time trying to get the perfect design and feel for your website. Spend the majority of your time creating pages and filling them with unique and juicy content that will help your users.

The design of a website does nothing positive if the content that the site consists of in not what it should be. I wont lie, when I first started designing websites, it was solely because of the design aspect. I wanted to design the most unique, loud, and flashy websites that I could. Im sure everyone thinks just like I did when they are new to the internet and the way it works.

The truth is you can have a website that has basically no design at all, just a logo and a bunch of good content, and that site will out perform a site that looks like a million bucks but has little to no content. Websites, these days, are all about what is under the hood. How the site is structured and how much information you can put in it. I try to keep all my clients focused on the structure and the content of the website until we have it all laid out. Then I will start to talk design. If I do it the other way around then the design part takes forever and it clouds the vision of what is truly important.

In a nutshell, you have to worry less about the design and worry more about providing a blog that you keep up to date with valuable information. You need to also integrate your social media aspects to build your online network bigger. Provide a FAQ page to answer questions and an About page to give insight on the business, product, and/or services you provide.

You can look at a website just like you look at a book, or another person. Its not what is on the outside that counts. Its all about the guts, that is what makes everything truly stand out.

If you are a small business or an entrepreneur then you understand (or will soon understand) the importance of keeping your finances spot on. There are programs you can purchase like Quickbooks, but if you are on a tight budget then you MUST try Wave Accounting.

Its a free accounting and invoicing program that I personally feel is great for any small business or personal financing. You can keep track of paid and pending invoices that you have. You can keep track of your income vs your expenses via a very nice line and pie graph. The interface is very user friendly and you should have a hang of things in a few short minutes.

One great feature that you can use with Wave is connecting it to your bank account. It will then import your transactions and log them for you. With the invoices you can either create and email or save them as pdf to print.

Finally it is web based so you can view your stats (securely encrypted) from any computer or mobile device with an internet connection. I have had great success with this free program and I hope that you will do the same.

Get Wave Here: http://www.waveaccounting.com

Upon initial setup you create your business and add all your employees, including contact info and job title/description. You can assign certain employees to certain projects, you can also give your clients access to basecamp and give them certain permissions (view only).

In a project you can add messages, time lines, and to-do’s and it will automatically email all the employees that you assigned to that project. When they reply, you will get an email telling you what they said. Oh and did I mention that everything it time stamped, great for quality control.

You can attach all kinds of documents to each project including pdf’s, excel spreadsheet, word documents, images, and much more.

Depending on the plan that you get, you can have an unlimited amount of projects and up to 75gb’s of storage.

In my eyes the best part about basecamp (if your using it for clients) is that you can white label the program to appear like your internal system. Im sure you can see the benefits here.