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The Internet never sleeps, never takes holidays, never nods off, never closes it's eyes for a second. It works for you 24/7 and doesn't need battery backup.
Why Every Small Business Needs a Website
10 Reasons why you need one!
Your Competitor Has One
To stay on top of an ever-changing market, most small business owners try to keep tabs on their competitors. By doing so, they gain insight on market trends, come up with new strategies and stay up to date with what others offer. If your competitors have a website, it's a strong indication you should too.
Stay Open 24/7/365!
While some small businesses are open 24 hours a day, most business hours are limited to a more traditional workday schedule. With a website, customers can view your products and services long after your normal operating hours. If you sell products online, you can even accept orders from a different part of the world while you sleep!
Email - The Ultimate Contact and Networking Tool.
Has anyone ever asked for your business email address? Are you currently using a personal email address from your Internet service provider or a free email account for business contacts? You can raise the level of prestige and branding for your business with an email address that includes your company name or services. Personalized email accounts are always included when you set up a website. You can also set up multiple email addresses for different functions within your company, for example: sales@your-web-address.com, info@your-web-address.com, or yourname@your-web-address.com.
Survey Your Audience
When a visitor enters your website, they're expressing an interest in your products, services or information. But how can you find out exactly why they came or what they're looking for? To gain a better understanding of your customer base you can set up a survey to figure out exactly what potential customers are most interested in and also learn what new trends or features are on the horizon.
Sell Your Products and Services Online
You've probably seen or heard about online stores like Amazon.com or eBay.com. While these companies have huge infrastructures and massive marketing programs to drive their online business, it is possible to set up an online store in a much the same way, just more modestly. There are countless online stores that thrive doing the same type of selling but on a smaller scale. If you have a retail product that can be shipped via UPS or FedEx, you're a great candidate for an online store.
A Website Opens International Markets
A website can be accessed 24 hours a day from anywhere on Earth with an Internet connection. From the moment your site launches, you can do business all over the globe, any time of day. As an added service for international customers, you may want to offer a currency converter to help them understand prices in their local currency.
Attract New Business through Search Engines
A large amount of research today is done online. By having your website listed on the top search engines, it can be listed under the results for any number of queries. For example, if you're selling ski equipment and someone searches for "ski boots," your site could be the first selection listed under the results.
Give Detailed Contact Information to Prospective Clients
Anyone ever ask for directions to your business? Always telling people your hours or which product lines you carry? A website can deliver details about your business to anyone with an Internet connection. This frees up time to focus on business instead of answering frequently asked questions.
Interact with Customers
The best clients are repeat and referred customers. That said, there's no better way to keep customers coming back than keeping in touch with them. Through a website you can interact with clients via online newsletters, polls, chat rooms and special deals. When you keep in contact it shows customers you care, one of the best ways to keep them coming back.
Instant Validity
As a customer you want to know the person you buy from is legitimate and runs a reputable business. A well designed website creates a feeling you're a legitimate company and leads to increased sales.
Look Bigger Than You Really Are!
Even a one-person business can look like a multi-person or multi-department operation through a company website. A professional, well designed website presents a more appealing image than a larger competitor who's web presence appears weak or amateur.
Customers Expect It
In today's business world, the Internet is the fastest growing source for information. Without a web presence, your business risks never being found by prospective customers.
Start from as little as $990 AUD
Contact Baytree Design for a quote
Web site design
To stay on top of an ever-changing market, most small business owners try to keep tabs on their competitors. By doing so, they gain insight on market trends, come up with new strategies and stay up to date with what others offer. If your competitors have a website, it's a strong indication you should too.
Stay Open 24/7/365!
While some small businesses are open 24 hours a day, most business hours are limited to a more traditional workday schedule. With a website, customers can view your products and services long after your normal operating hours. If you sell products online, you can even accept orders from a different part of the world while you sleep!
Survey Your Audience
When a visitor enters your website, they're expressing an interest in your products, services or information. But how can you find out exactly why they came or what they're looking for? To gain a better understanding of your customer base you can set up a survey to figure out exactly what potential customers are most interested in and also learn what new trends or features are on the horizon.
Sell Your Products and Services Online
You've probably seen or heard about online stores like Amazon.com or eBay.com. While these companies have huge infrastructures and massive marketing programs to drive their online business, it is possible to set up an online store in a much the same way, just more modestly. There are countless online stores that thrive doing the same type of selling but on a smaller scale. If you have a retail product that can be shipped via courier or FedEx, Star, TNT etc, you're a great candidate for an online store.
Most businesses can have their own web site designed for under $999, excluding e-commerce. (Conditions apply)
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All you wanted to know
about Web type
but were afraid to ask
Joe Gillespie
We all get fed up seeing the same old fonts on Web pages but is there anything we can do about it?
It all comes down to the fact that some fonts come pre-installed by Windows and Mac OS by default. Of course, it depends on which version of Windows and Mac OS we are talking about because fonts sets change over time and there are still a lot of legacy systems in use out there.
The font base also depends on what browsers and programs are also installed because Microsoft Internet Explorer installs some fonts and some applications install fonts that won't be there if the reader doesn't have those programs.
Yes, there are a lot of 'ifs' and 'maybes'. The fact is that you can't assume that any particular font is available for your Web pages other than a few general styles – serif, sans serif, monospaced, cursive and fantasy.
Although some of these are pretty obvious, other are not, so I'll give you some examples.
Serif
Times New Roman, Georgia, Palatino, Trebuchet MS
Sans Serif
Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Geneva
Monospaced typewriter style
Courier New, Lucida Console, Monaco, Andale Mono
Cursive scripts and informals
Comic Sans, Brush Script, Zapfino, Marker Felt
Fantasy way out or fanciful designs
it's really pot luck with this one, there might not be one at all!
Although many of us think in terms of Windows fonts and Mac fonts, there are many other operating systems – Linux, UNIX, PalmOS, etc – which might not have even the common ones that first come to mind. That's why when we specify the type for a Web page in CSS, it goes something like this...
font family: <ideal>, <alternative>, <common>, <generic>
which translates into something like this:-
font family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
Here, Georgia is the 'ideal' font, the one the designer prefers (yes, it's okay to prefer a font!). "Times New Roman" and Times are the Windows and Mac names for the most common serif font. 'Serif', is the generic type style.
Note that when a font name is constructed from several words – like "Times New Roman" or "Tebuchet MS", it must be enclosed in quotes or it could be ignored.
For sans-serif syles, the specification would be more like this:-
font family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
Again, Verdana is the first choice, Arial and Helvetica are common alternatives and 'sans-serif' the generic style.
When you specify a font family like this, the browser will use the first font that it comes to in the list that is actually installed on the user's computer.
The last, the generic one in the family list, is the 'catchall' type style that will be used if none of the specified fonts are available. If that is not there, you will just get the default font, whatever that is. Don't worry; you will never be left high and dry with no font!
Safe choices
Now, having established these principles, there is nothing to stop you putting whatever fonts you like at the front of the list. Sure, they won't always be available but if your Web pages are targeted at a particular audience, the chances of them having a particular font installed are better.
To help you decide what you can use, I've compiled some lists of fonts that are installed by default on the various systems. Further down the page, I have links to visual references of all these fonts so that you can see what they look like.
The following fonts are installed on both Windows XP and Mac OS X Panther by default:-
Arial
Arial Italic
Arial Bold
Arial Bold Italic
Arial Black
Comic Sans MS
Comic Sans MS Bold
Courier New
Courier New Italic
Courier New Bold
Courier New Bold Italic
Georgia
Georgia Italic
Georgia Bold
Georgia Bold Italic
Times New Roman
Times New Roman Italic
Times New Roman Bold
Times New Roman Bold Italic
Trebuchet MS
Trebuchet MS Italic
Trebuchet MS Bold
Trebuchet MS Bold Italic
Verdana
Verdana Italic
Verdana Bold
Verdana Bold Italic
Webdings
MSIE 'Core' fonts
Microsoft Internet Explorer, with over 90% of the browser market, comes pre-installed on Windows and Mac OS 9.x definitely – and most likely on OSX too, so there is a high probability that following additional 'core' fonts will be available – along with some italic/bold variants. You have to be careful here because if you specify bold or italic for a font that doesn't have such variants, you might not get what you expect!
Andale Mono
Arial (regular, italic, bold, bold italic)
Arial Black
Comic Sans MS (regular, bold)
Courier New (regular, italic, bold, bold italic)
Georgia (regular, italic, bold, bold italic)
Impact
Times New Roman (regular, italic, bold, bold italic)
Trebuchet MS (regular, italic, bold, bold italic)
Verdana (regular, italic, bold, bold italic)
Webdings
The best fonts to use
The vast majority of fonts are designed for printing at several hundred dots per inch. That means that resolution is not an issue and they can be as intricate as the designer wishes.
As the Web became a viable medium for communication, some fonts were introduced that were designed to work at the lower resolution imposed by computer displays, typically a hundred pixels, or less, per inch. Screen fonts have to be sympathetic to the square pixel grid of the screen. Subtle curves don't work at all, curved and diagonal lines work some times and not others.
For Web pages, fonts designed for the screen will give better results than ones designed for print, but there's much less choice. Let's look at some.
Georgia
Designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft in 1996, Georgia was created to provide optimal readability on-screen
Being designed specifically for screen display, Georgia is a better font choice than the ubiquitous Times Roman, which was design for newspaper use, so...
font family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
Georgia is the first choice, if that is not available then "Times New Roman" will be used. Times is the Mac (previous to OSX) name for Times New Roman, and serif is the catchall for everything else.
Palatino
Not really considered to be a screen font, but Hermann Zapf's Palatino (designed in 1948) works remarkably well for a print font
Palatino is available on XP and on Macs that have Mac OS Classic installed but the name is slightly different. On Windows it's called "Palatino Linotype" on Mac, just "Palatino". On older versions of Windows, it is called "Book Antiqua". Even though it is a printer font, because of its squarish, pixel friendly shape, Palatino renders quite well on-screen, better so than Times, so it make a useful alternative serif font...
font family: "Palatino Linotype", “Book Antiqua”, Palatino, “Times New Roman”, Times, serif;
Sans Serif Fonts
Verdana
Also designed by Matthew Carter (1994), Verdana always appears larger and slightly more open than other fonts of the same pixel or point size. This page is set in Verdana.
For sans serif fonts, Verdana is also designed especially for screen display and should be used in preference to Arial or Helvetica...
font family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
If you are feeling adventurous, you can stick a few options on the font of those...
font family: "Franklin Gothic", Futura, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
Tahoma
Matthew Carter – again
Tahoma is similar in feel to Verdana but where Verdana is 'open' in character, Tahoma is more condensed and tight. Think of it as 'Verdana Condensed', although it's not exactly that.
Tahoma shares Verdana's large 'x' height, so will look bigger than most other fonts of the same font-size. Use it when you want to get more words into a given area without having to go down a size.
font family: Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif
Trebuchet MS
Designer: Vincent Connare (1996)
Trebuchet is also designed for screen use. Where print fonts are usually originally designed at a fairly large size, typically about six inches high, Trebuchet was first designed as a bitmap at a smaller size. At small sizes, there are less opportunities to make a type face really unique because you have to forgo the subtleties. Nevertheless, Trebuchet manages to get a lot of character into a very small space.
font family: "Trebuchet MS", "Lucida Sans", Arial, sans-serif
Optima
Designer: Hermann Zapf (1958)
There are fonts that fall somewhere in between serif and sans-serif but there isn't a specific category for them. Optima and Albertus have very subtle curves that end in vestigial serifs. Even at the relatively large size of the sample on the left, the 'serifs' are just smudgy edges. Such fonts don't work at small sizes at screen resolution. I've included them here purely to demonstrate that a good choice for a printed page can be a bad choice for the Web.
font family: Optima, Albertus, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
Monospaced Fonts
There are many variations of this classic typewriter font originally designed for IBM by Howard Kettler in 1955
Occasionally, you will want to use a monospaced font for citations or code snippets. With monospaced fonts, like those on typewriters, every character is the same width, so they line up vertically as well as horizontally. If you want to try your hand at ASCII art, you need the even spacing that monospaced fonts provide.
"Courier New" is the most common monospaced font but it is a bit light (when anti-aliased in its regular form anyway) to use at smaller sizes. Alternatives are "Lucida Console" (Windows), "American Typewriter" (OSX) and Monaco (Mac).
font family: "Lucida Console", "American Typewriter", "Courier New", Courier, monospace;
Cursive Fonts
Designer: Vincent Connare (1995)
Designer: Hermann Zapf (1998)
Cursive fonts range from informal handwriting fonts to fancy scripts. The most common one is Comic Sans which, as the name suggests, is like the handwriting you get in cartoon speech bubbles. Windows is a bit short of 'classy' scripts but have a look at "Palatino Linotype Italic" and its bolder counterpart – not strictly 'cursive' but give the required result.
On Mac OSX, there is a better selection of scripts - Apple Chancery, Brush Script, Chalkboard, Cochin Italic, Marker Felt, Papyrus and the very extravagant Zapfino.
The problem with specifying 'cursive' is that the 'feel' of a free handwriting font and that of a classy script are diametrically opposed. If you want to say 'high class' and the reader sees Comic Sans, you could have problems! Be careful with this one.
If you want to make sure that surfers see exactly the font you have used, to conform with a corporate image for instance, you will have to rasterize the type into a GIF or PNG file, or you could make it into a static .SWF (Flash) setting provided you don't need a transparent background.
When you do use 'images' of fonts, you should make sure that you provide an 'alt' attribute to the image tag so that the words appear in text form too – for accessibility and searching.
Size matters
Included with Mac OS X, Papyrus (Chris Costello, 1983) manages to be both informal and classy, but needs to be used large
An Adobe font designed by Carol Twombly, this one really has to be a GIF or PNG
The fonts I've mentioned so far are for body text – general reading matter. When you want a bit more punch, for a headline or banner ad for instance, you can use what typographers call 'display' or 'headline' fonts. Display faces are intended to be used in small amounts to give strength and contrast to a setting. Setting the body text of a page in Impact or Futura Extra Bold Condensed would be very tiring to the eyes.
For really "sock it to 'em" headlines, consider Arial Black, Impact or Tahoma Bold on Windows and Arial Black, Gill Sans Bold, Helvetica Neue Condensed Black, Optima Extra Black or Futura Extra Bold Condensed for Mac OSX.
As display faces are always used at larger sizes than body text, they can afford to be a bit more elaborate and characterful. They can be very bold, or very thin. It's probably not a good idea to use 'regular' weights. What we want is something that contrasts with the body type and the further away you get from that normal weight you go, the better.
Very small fonts
If all your text is 14 pixels high or more, most fonts will look okay but some fonts work better than others at smaller sizes.
As I've already mentioned, for general text matter, it is better to choose fonts that have been designed for screen display. Verdana and Georgia are good, Times and Arial not so!
When you go down to really small sizes, as you do on menu bars and buttons, even Verdana and Georgia have their limits. Anti-aliasing works great for larger fonts, but at small sizes, the whole text becomes blurred and visually fragmented. If anti-aliasing is turned off, the text will look jaggy and pixelated.
For best results at small type sizes, you should use fonts that are designed especially for that purpose. These 'pixel' fonts won't be installed on the user's machine so you have to make them into small GIF or PNG images, but if they are used sparingly and the images saved at low bit depths, their bytesize will be very small.
Pixel fonts do not use anti-aliasing so they remain sharp and crisp at tiny sizes but they are not scaleable and can only be used at their optimal 'designed' size.
Installed font reference
I've put together a visual reference of all the fonts commonly installed by Windows XP, Mac OSX and earlier and by Microsoft Internet Explorer. As it requires quite large bitmap images to display the letterforms, I've put them on separate pages.
Seeing what the fonts actually look like makes it easier to arrive at a choice of main fonts and close alternatives. As long as you stick with the font-family principle, you have nothing to lose and in many instances, will end up with a fresher looking page.
All samples are rendered at a size of 14 pixels, which is important because some of them look smaller or larger than you might expect. Here you can see the relative sizes. It is also pretty clear which fonts you should avoid for screen use!
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