With Small Business Saturday squeezing in between Black Friday and Cyber Monday this month, small business community has three monumental shopping days to cash in on. Have any solid plan to get an upper hand over competition and tap a significant bulk of holiday shoppers this holiday season? No? Check it out right here!

1. Make Your Marketing Sound Different To Prospects
   
   Do marketing messages that are clear, understandable, and precise and make sure your prospects receive them via effective means – email, postcard etc.
    
2. Offer Premium Support And Service
   
   Bundle a favorable guarantee policy or perhaps an extended support (if your product requires) to reassure buyers about their purchase.
    
3. Reward Your Most Active Customers
   
   Your most rewarding customers should be entitled to certain privileges. Find out who they are and send them attractively tailored offers like discount or gift with a purchase or free shipping or product upgrades.
    
4. Offer A Bait Only To Those Who Respond
   
   Thinking in terms of conversion, it seems better to target your special offers to those who are genuinely interested in them. Inform prospects of a special deal and place a link to click on if they are interested in it. Make the offer available to the 50 early birds who clicked on it (or first 100, or some other figure of your choice) and deal with them only.
    
5. Go Big With Your Ad Campaign
   
   Doubling-down on your ad campaigns at Facebook, Google etc. can hit the sales up dramatically. Sharing attractive ads and offers with friends is quite a usual thing to do around this period. Use targeted phrases including Black Friday or Cyber Monday with words like “sales,” “offers” added to nail these target searchers.
    
6. Follow Up
   
   Do it both for those who purchased and those who didn’t. It’s like building a bridge to get to those who didn’t respond and strengthening the bridge that’s already built to follow customers. Try to build more trust with your existing customers. For prospects, invite them to sign up and keep the door open to discuss any offering later. Offering a helpful guide as to what your customers could expect from your industry is also a good way to generate an appeal among your prospects.
    
7. Check Out For Killer Bargains Your Audience Can Be Directed To
   
   Know your audience and share deals that matter to them. BFAds.net is a good source to check out the bargains happening during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
    
8. Be A Part Of Social Media Activity
   
   Using your specials for Black Friday or Small Business Saturday in hashtags on Twitter and having a Facebook deal such as asking fans to “Like” your Facebook Page to reveal a special offer can help you monetize your social media audience.
    
9. Complement Your Product And Service With “Happy-To-Assist” Digital Goods
   
   Packaging a useful training guide or free videos etc. along with your product is a good way you can help your new customers with the product usage and make them trust your expertise.

Soon the world will have a glimpse of the kind of impact Android OS and Google Chrome web browser will have on television. Google TV is on its way to be in the spotlight. Google’s followers are keenly awaiting the arrival of this brilliant technology that will not only allow them to view every channel that usually runs on TV but will additionally let them watch websites, and this could all be controlled with the click of a phone.

In order to gear up for the new designing niche for the websites compatible to Google TV, one must be fully aware of the full-blown horizons and exploitable potential of the TV environment. Here are a few great tips to help designers deliver the best on the new web-TV platform:

Important aspects related to television viewing

• It is a social, living room device, often viewed in group (with family and friends)
• It is watched with higher attention and concentration. The users don’t like to get interrupted while watching it. It ideally should provide a stress-free viewing experience.
• The user sits at a distance and operates it with simple, easy commands from a remote control.
• The screen is wider, interface more viable, and colors with high vibrancy and contrast.
• Audio is an integral part of TV-viewing experience.

What matters to TV users?

Text communication: Remember, here too content is the king. But here, you have to be really quick in getting visitors to your content. Focus should be laid on creating a content that engages and interests the viewers instantly. Larger texts that allow easy visibility and readability (around 21pt on 720p and 28pt on 1080p) and smaller paragraphs (spanning no more than 90 words) can provide an optimal reading experience.

Simplicity or ease of use: TV is primarily meant to entertain the users and hence offers a platform that’s tremendously adaptive to the consumer’s needs and wants. Keep the concept and design very simple if you want success on this platform. For this, it is important that you keep only what’s really vital to the interface in terms of content, controls, and interactions and eliminate anything that’s nonessential. Make the navigation simple, keeping a single visible mode of navigation or one information hierarchy will make it easier and much convenient to use. Keep clear-cut primary actions, accessible in one click. Design the page in such a way that it limits vertical scrolling to the extent possible.

Screen, color, and flash: TV and computer screens are considerably different. You have to adapt to a wider screen display of TV. Make interface elements slightly larger. Designing for TV screen resolutions of 280x720 and 1920x1080, it is important that you keep in mind the dimensions for the elements of display. If an image is lesser size than the television screen dimensions, it will be scaled to fit to the screen, which would slightly affect the clarity. It is also critical to keep in mind the safe central display area that televisions have. If you want to ensure that all the interface elements are seen, keep flexible layouts with at least a 10 percent margin at each resolution. Higher contrast and saturation levels of TV screen require you to change a bit with the use of solid colors. Be conscious that bright white, red, and orange shades lead to distortion. It is imperative that you test your web pages for display quality with different display modes and color settings of TV. Google TV has a 720p and 1080p flash video playing capability. If you want a smooth video-watching experience for the users, make sure that your web page runs only one instance of media player at a time. If an ad with video streaming or a flash banner can’t be avoided, at least have it set in such a way that it unloads or stops while the primary video runs.

Audio: There is an important addition of “sound” for incorporation into a website. The need is to look for different ways on how music or sound can be linked with the matter of your interface. It’s important, however, that any audio streaming that’s a part of your website should be soothing, non-disruptive to its listeners, preferably set low by default. Also, as sound is a preference of high importance for television viewers, you should provide them an easy way to mute it.

Hope you find this valuable in the preparatory stage before you finally plunge into Google TV compatible website development!

The concept of mingling web and television is no more a fantasy with Google TV. Looking at the reviews and responses it has generated in a short time since Google unveiled its debut plans, it seems to be much promising, and with this, starts a new age of website development for TV optimization.

The world’s favorite websites will now be tweaked and perfected for the television. It can be expected that a whole array of existing websites will undergo enhancement for optimal viewing experience on TV. With something like “Google TV websites” a reality, new websites exclusively for Google TV will be built. This is similar to what happened when website development channelized to create mobile-compatible websites and applications. This is also going to dramatically influence the Android market, as developers will be able to create and sell Android apps for Google TV.

It has been proven time and again that there is much scope with the newer developments within the broad web development paradigm. Designers and developers are gearing up once again for this new open platform. Anyone who wishes to participate in the development of Google TV websites and Google TV apps can remain updated with what happens in the Google TV application development scenario by getting registered for the Google TV updates on Google’s official website.

There is a plenty of buzz, rumors, and updates on Google TV to keep up our excitement level till we actually find out in the early 2011, most likely, what Google TV will showcase.

Every entrepreneur has to do two tasks at a time – one, to learn more efficient ways to progress fast in the business and second, to promote his business well for winning the attention of prospective customers and preventing them to turn to others. For the best business experience in terms of these two, he has to gauge what exactly he requires for the different needs that arise per se: a strong web presence, a responsive web application, a desktop application, and whatever. At such junctures, many business doers realize that web development and software application development may not be the same. Knowledge will only do good to you, better than getting a software made to work on your business infrastructure when you actually needed a web service. Let me differentiate the two for you: the software development and the web development.

Software development can be a part of web development, but web development is not always so. When you need a website or a web segment to run on it, you are looking for website development services. But, if you want a program that runs only on your PC or all the interconnected computers in your organization, you might be on your way to a desktop application or software. So, while a desktop software runs off the web, a web-based software application is intended to run in the web environment.

Most application development companies work on both the types of technologies. Here, you should know that technologies used in web-based activities often get replaced by something superior and more effective than the earlier one. Hence, you couldn't always stick to one that had been done once. As such, the role of a professional application and web developer could come in real handy for you. With his domain expertise, he could give you all the necessary support-based services for all types of your projects.

On the other hand, many business applications are better suited to be run on individual desktops, as they are clearly technologically defined and programmed to a specific purpose and also security concerns and legacy issue come to resolution. This kind of software development is without a subscription fee over the life of the software use. It’s made once and purchased outright. Coming to the use of software in a web-based environment, there are a few common procedures like monitoring of online lead generation, customer conversion rates etc. for which a business would require web-based software programs.

Whether applications running on the web or offline and backend apps, both are handled by the professional software application development firms. They would always try to understand the business nature of the concerned firm before they work on any type of development strategy for it. You need not get worried about the quality of work produced by them. Just be clear on your needs and in telling them about the same.

Any website has a crucial element to be taken care of in its build-up phase which is its information architecture. If the data or content of a website is organized in a search engine friendly way, the results will be very positive from an online perspective.

Designing a site’s architecture for high ranking may be the SEO objective, but a bigger objective than that is to make it soundly usable and customer converting. The latter two have much to do with the logics of customers regarding the extent of website use.

Site structure for search:

There is a need to generate “link equity” for your site. For this, there are two types of links: on-site links, notably those in the site’s tool bar or navigation bars, and inbound links pointing at your home page. But, it is important to determine how much to link and when.

A site that is well-structured tends to focus on a single overall major theme, and from that theme branches out different pages that are continually more focused, specific, and relevant to the overarching topic of the site.

What is more, search engine crawlers will primarily tend to crawl links that are at most three or four clicks away from your homepage. Thus, you should strive to keep your most important content within those 3-4 tiers.

SEO-friendly URL structures:

Getting a site layout wherein the location of individual pages is logical and intelligible to both visitors and search engines is often best accomplished by sticking to static URLs. This will have advantages such as reduction or elimination of crawling problems associated with dynamic, parameterized URLs. You need to have a URL that’s more communicable, which means short and memorable. Also, if your most relevant keywords have been incorporated into your URL and directory structure, it will help search engines to know what your page is about, bolded keywords in the SERPs will result in potentially more clicks, and search engine ranking of a page will be benefited as your most important keywords will be included in the link anchor text. Another thing to take care is to prevent the accidental creation of infinite spaces and curb and eliminate duplicate content.

The extensive and interesting field of information architecture spans the internet and SEO to a great extent, and understanding its importance is very important to serve the actual purpose of a website, i.e. marketing and/or sales.