When I first started building a few of my websites, I was using XsitePro and was happy with how easy it was to use. I soon later learned that they also had a companion product specifically designed for headers and banners called Xheader. Since it was free, I grabbed it and have been using it ever since to create banners and website headers. It is a perfect solution for people who don’t want to fuss with learning Photoshop or other complicated software. Read on for some details on why I found XHeader to be a great addition to any blogger or web-master’s toolkit.

Easy to Use

One of the first things I noticed about using XHeader was the user friendly interface. XHeader provides a great visual header creation system that lets you build your header without learning any esoteric graphics software techniques. Since XHeader is designed to focus on doing one thing (create a header) it is able to have a simple, straightforward interface that anyone can jump right in and use. The XHeader website offers a great tutorial for getting started, good for visual learners and it was then easy to start creating headers on my own.

Simple Layout

Part of XHeader’s ease of use comes from the easy to understand layout. When I started, I had no problem finding all the functions I may need to work on my header. From font selection to background color, it was easy to figure out how to quickly customize the look. Its also hard to make a mistake and accidentally “delete” something. You can create a header from scratch, or you can choose from a bunch of graphic templates that are organized by themes. Everything is arranged in a logical and consistent manner. Since the size of the header can be customized, you can even use it to create banners of any size including the 125 x 125 and 468 x 80 standard dimensions. Then save the image as a jpeg and paste it onto your website for an instant banner ad. Its not just for headers. The templates are designed as standard 750 pixel wide headers, but if you choose to start from scratch, you can create an image any size you want.

Professional Looking Results

I was amused when my friends commented who professional my latest websites looked. These headers make me look like a graphics expert. XHeader provides everything I needed for giving my website a solid and professional looking header, with the simplicity coming from focusing on only creating headers.

I was especially impressed with the images XHeader made available for me to use with my website. I went ahead and registered to get the 500 images package, and I wasn’t disappointed. There was a wide variety of professional looking header images available, enough to match any style of website design and content. With the image set XHeader offered, I had no problem making a professional looking header that fit in with my website.

Conclusions

I was impressed by XHeader, and I can solidly recommend the software to anyone looking for a way to create a professional looking website or blog header without being a Photoshop pro. XHeader gave me all the tools I needed to work on my header without bogging itself down with pointless extras that would complicate the interface. XHeader is solid software, and I’m amazed it’s being offered for free.

Get the xheader software for free by going here.

Providing a set of guidelines about how to go about building an online business from scratch can provide you with some insight about what actually is involved.  If you are a beginning marketer, here are some lessons for you to absorb. You may be excited about launching your lifelong product or invention to the millions of online users but have not given much thought to the mechanics of setting up an online presence.

If you are starting an online business from scratch, before you set up the mechanical infrastructure for your business, first utilize the critical thinking part of your brain by doing some research. On the other hand, don’t spend months and months researching this point.

Is your product or service something people need or want and not just you? Be very careful here. Just because you think Star Trek is the coolest sci-fi series ever conceived, does not mean you will sell millions and millions of “Mr. Spock” T-shirts and coffee mugs online.

Your idea or concept should be tested first by setting up a test website. You are testing to see how many people are out there who may be interested in your product or service.  Before you build a website that has lots of time and effort involved, build a simple one page website that is designed only to capture someone’s name and email.  This is known as a capture page or landing page.

In order to set up any website, whether it’s a permanent functional website with your products and other content or just a test site, you will need the following:

1)      Purchase a domain name.

2)      Hosting account where your domain name is hosted

3)      A website that is designed to capture your prospects name and email address tied to your domain name

4)      An autoresponder system (so that you can set up automatic deliver y of pre-written messages to prospects). Some hosting accounts have auto responder systems, but not all. You will need to find one that you can insert a lead capture form into your website so that the form captures names and stores them on the autoresponder system server.

Once you have these 4 components, you can test your product or concept by driving traffic to the website. First, you must get them to visit your website. Once there, they must find it compelling enough to give you their name and email. This is called a conversion. The point of the landing page is to get their name and email, no more, no less. Once you have their name, you can then begin your sales process which is set up via your autoresponder messages.

Getting visitors to your site AND submitting their email and names is the hardest part of the process.  Because you are starting your online business from scratch, you must market the existence of your site by using either free traffic sources such as article writing, video marketing, forums, Facebook, etc. or by paid traffic sources like PPC or Pay Per Click via Google Adwords, Yahoo or Microsoft advertising channels.

Paying for clicks by writing small ads targeting your audience and providing keywords that compel the searcher to click on your ad is how you can start to test your concept/product. Place a few test ads and monitor them over a period of days or at least to the point where you get 1000 clicks.

You can set a daily budget for your ads so that you control costs. Sometimes your ad will be so ineffective that you must raise your cost per click in order for the ad to show up enough to get clicks. A very low budget will take more time to reach 1000 clicks, but you can see how effective your ads perform this way.

Once you get at least 1000 clicks, how many submitted their name and email? You ideally want to expect a 1% – 5% conversion.  If you got a 10% conversion, just think how many names you could collect if your marketing yielded 1000 clicks per day or page views (coming from organic or natural search results). Paying for those clicks from an ad can add up and be costly to maintain over time, but if people ended up buying your product and your Return on Investment was good, you would probably maintain paying for traffic.

If nobody clicks on your ad, or enters their name on your website, you must look at the wording of the ad, the website design, layout and copy and of course, the product you are promoting. You could have professionally written copy boasting about the product, have slick graphics and all, but very few people interested. Your product may appeal only to a very small audience and just not enough to make the whole process worthwhile. This is what you must evaluate.

Tip: Don’t try to come up with the next “Pet Rock”, give people what they are already buying. Find something you know people want and need, or find a product that is already popular, but put your unique twist on it, and then test it. Once you do this once, you won’t be starting from scratch, you will have gained some insight and lessons to use in your next test.

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