In a perfect world, any small business owner with a great idea and strong work ethic would be able to obtain a loan to help their business. Unfortunately, the reality is that it takes more than these two elements for a small business to receive a loan. Because banks are always concerned about minimizing the amount of risk involved in making a loan (especially given the current economic climate), they take multiple factors into account when they are determining whether or not to approve a loan for a small business owner.

Although there is not a template that every bank follows when they are evaluating a small business loan application, there are definitely major factors that almost every lending source will take into consideration. To maximize your chances of being approved for a loan, it’s important to fully understand what a bank will be looking at during their evaluation.

Business Plan: When it comes to your business plan, accuracy and details carry a lot of weight. If you can use your business plan to show exactly what all of your loan will be used for, along with showing the true impact that this will have on your business, you will have a much better chance of getting approved for a loan than someone who simply throws together a set of generalized estimates.

Invest Capital: By investing your own assets into your small business, you are showing the bank that you are confident that your business is going to succeed. Because investing your own capital demonstrates that you are taking the first step, many banks will be willing to follow by providing you with a loan.

Offer Collateral: Along the same lines as investing capital, putting up collateral shows the bank that you are serious about your business, and that they can be confident that their loan will be repaid. While many small business owners think that offering collateral puts them in a situation where the bank is going to come after their assets as soon as they miss a payment, in reality, this is simply a sign of trust, and the bank is going to be more interested in working with you than coming after any of your assets.

Build a Relationship: If you do get approved for a business loan, it’s very important for you to focus on building a strong relationship with your bank. Even if you only receive a small loan, properly managing it can lead to receiving a larger loan from your bank down the road. When it comes to building a quality relationship with your bank, honesty can go a long way. For example, if you know you’re going to miss a payment, be honest with your bank about what’s going on, and explain to them how you plan to fix this situation.

Although there are a wide variety of offline guerrilla marketing techniques that can be very useful in promoting your business, today I want to focus solely on a handful of online guerrilla marketing techniques. To give you the best return on the time you invest, I’ve compiled a list of the four best online guerrilla marketing techniques. Regardless of the products or services your business offers, by taking advantage of the following techniques, you will be able to attract new customers and increase your sales.

Let Your Customers Market You: Nothing is better for business than a happy customer, so make sure you utilize your customers to the fullest. In addition to adding a “Tell a Friend” feature to your website, if you allow customers to make orders online, you can provide them with a “Tell a Friend” link directly in their order confirmation email.

Give Something Valuable Away for Free: The best way to get someone to buy something is to give them something free first. So, think about something that would benefit your target market (or that they would enjoy), and then create it for them. From a report to a simple online tool to a t-shirt, the possibilities are truly endless. Keep in mind that just because something is valuable does not mean that it has to be expensive. For example, a report may only take a few hours to write, but if it is packed with useful information, you have created something that has a lot of value with just a small investment of time!

Create a Buzz About Your Business: Although there are different ways to create a buzz about your business, one of the easiest ways is by following Step Two and then promoting that special offer. From contacting bloggers to only giving something away to a limited number of people, if you can get a few passionate people talking, the buzz will quickly spread to others.

Utilize Your Email Address and Signature: Most small business owners send a lot of emails every single day. Therefore, you should use your emails to market yourself. In addition to creating a professional email address (yourname@yourdomain.com), you should add a signature to all of your emails. If you followed Step Two, you can combine it with this step and create an email signature like the following:

Your Name
Download/Get a Free (Insert Viral Content Here)
from (Insert Company Name & Slogan)
www.yourdomain.com

Even though it costs nothing, it allows you to spread your marketing message every time you click “Send.”

When it comes to blogging, it’s important to understand that it is not some kind of magical secret that will instantly triple the revenue of your small business. However, when done properly, blogging can be a very useful tool in helping you harness the power of the Internet to attract new customers.

So, how do you get started with blogging for your small business? The first step is creating a blog. You should already have a website for your business (if you don’t, before you think about blogging, get a website set up), so you can add a blog directly to your website. You will have to discuss your options with your webmaster, but one of the most popular free blogging platforms is WordPress, which your webmaster should be able to add to your website.

Once you have created a blog, it is time to start writing. When it comes to blogging, there are no set rules about how you should write or what you should write about. However, there are some general guidelines that will help you move in the right direction. The most important thing you can do when you are writing posts for your blog is to be honest and real. While sales copy on websites does not necessarily have to be personalized, your blogging style should show your personality. The whole point of small business blogging is to create a one-on-one relationship with your customers and potential customers, so if your writing is dry and hides your personality, it is going to be much harder to accomplish that goal.

In terms of what you should write about, there are once again no concrete rules, but you should always focus on creating content that will appeal to your target audience. This can take time to figure out, but the more comfortable you get writing for your audience, the easier it will be to come up with content that they enjoy.

In addition to writing your own posts, you should start reading and commenting on other blogs within your industry. Participating in this kind of activity is the easiest way to attract new readers for your own blog. When you leave an interesting comment on a relevant blogger, visitors will take notice of you, and follow the link attached to the comment to your own blog. Additionally, when you come across a good post from a relevant blog, don’t be afraid to link to it from one of your future posts.

By blogging for your small business and participating on relevant blogs, you will begin to build a community which will continue to grow over time.

As a web designer, RSS feeds can be seen as a two-way street. You can, and should, produce RSS feeds for your own web site content. At the same time, you also have the ability to take the RSS feeds of other and insert their content into your own web sites. This is a great way to keep your site and web design constantly fresh with new and auto-updating content.

The hardest part of RSS is creating the feed. It has almost become standard for any blog design to include easy access to RSS subscription links so while this part is the hardest it is also the most important. Many of the popular content management systems have automatic RSS creation included within them. This makes the job of the web designer to add RSS to his site much easier. If that option isn’t available it is still relatively easy to construct your own RSS feed as long as you, or someone you can hire, has a beginner’s level knowledge of programming.

The great aspect of RSS is that people are publishing their content in a format that is built to be used by others. Integrating an RSS feed into a web design is much simpler than building your own feed. There are a lot of widgets, scripts and small programs that will let you take any publicly available RSS feed and integrate it seamlessly into your web design. By doing this you help the original authors of the content get links and exposure for their work while at the same time keeping your site constantly updated with new content. This is a win-win situation for everyone involved.

RSS is becoming a standard for web content publishers and while the adoption rate by the common Internet consumer hasn’t matched in intensity it is only a matter of time before the format becomes part of everyday life. There is no need to wait for that day to come though. You can start adding RSS feeds and integrating content from other RSS feeds into your web design today.

Of course, while it seems easy the results aren’t always what you would expect them to be. This is why relying on social bookmarking sites for traffic and backlinks is not always the best idea.

The traffic from social bookmarking sites is notoriously of low quality. It is not uncommon for a link that makes it to the front page of digg.com to result in a flow of thousands upon thousands of visitors to your site. While that might sound great the truth is that most of those visitors only stay for a few seconds, rarely visit other pages on your site and are essentially wastes of bandwidth. This is why many sites that unexpectedly see rushes of traffic from sites like digg.com end up having server crashes, which then makes their site inaccessible to visitors who are actually of high quality.

The other big flaw with relying on social bookmarking sites comes with backlinks. Many of these sites specifically tag all of the links that are stored and shared with a “nofollow” tag. The “nofollow” tag was developed by the major search engines, like Google, as a means to prevent people from gaming their search results. What that means is that the search engines will not recognize any link tagged as “nofollow” which effectively makes the value of the link zero.

If you are looking for a potential quick fix of traffic then social bookmarking might be useful for you. Just beware of the consequences when taking the time to submit your sites. The traffic might not be what you expected and the backlinks you get might have no value in the eyes of the search engines.

The added bonus of using a separate CSS file is in bandwidth and load times. Most modern browsers will cache any files with a .css extension. This is a nice bonus because it means the visitors to your site will have less to download and make your site appear faster. If you make a change to the CSS file, the browser will be smart enough to recognize the difference and reload the cached copy it has on file. This way you never have to worry about people seeing an older version of your site’s design.

CSS can even be used to style other sites you don’t control as well. Some browserds have extensions that have been developed to allow you to overwrite a websites style with a CSS file on your local machine. This is especially common with some of the more popular web applications like free email services from the major providers.

Cascading Style Sheets are practically a must for any serious web design professional. There is no excuse to not use CSS in your site designs especially when you consider all of the obvious benefits involved. CSS makes your life easier by increasing the speed and efficiency in which you can update your site’s appearance.

Developed in 2005 by The World Company, a news organization based in Lawrence, Kansas, Django was used the backbone for several large news sites before it was released to the public. It is frequently compared to another web framework called Ruby on Rails. The comparison is apt as both stress a “Don’t Repeat Yourself” programming philosophy using model-view-controller techniques.

Django sets itself apart from other web frameworks, aside from its choice of Python as its programming language, with some of its built-in features that come available right at installation. Django has an incredibly innovated admin interface that is automatically generated based on the structure of the database it is connected to. This admin interface instantly gives users an easy way to create, update, read and deleted information stored in the database.

Another great Django feature is its built-in user template system that lets web designers create their templates without having to know any Python code. All of the templates that run a Django powered site are coded exclusively in HTML which is great in a team setting where the web designers are not usually expected to know how to program. More features of Django include a built-in user authentication and administration interface, a means to automatically generate RSS and Atom feeds, a full-blown commenting system, automatic Sitemap generation and a caching framework to help fight server load.

Django has a proven reputation for running very large web sites that receive high amounts of traffic thanks to its creation by The World Company. While the framework itself is open source, it has also been used to launch a success commercial package known as Ellington that is used in the newspaper industry. With client as large as the Las Vegas Sun and The Washington Post it is clear Django is more than capable.

Web development is changing every day thanks to frameworks like Django. Django is especially significant thanks to its use of Python, which is a language that has struggled over the years to earn a foothold in the industry. Python is a highly readable and easy to use language so it is important that frameworks like Django exist to help spread adoption of the language.

Before describing Ruby on Rails it is key to understand its foundation: the programming language Ruby. Invented in Japan during the 1990s, Ruby is an objected-oriented programming language that was designed to be used in general programming applications. The emphasis by the language’s original designers was to create something flexible and fun for other programmers to use on their projects. Ruby’s level of popularity was moderate at best until the release of Ruby on Rails by David Heinemeier Hansson in 2004.

Ruby on Rails, the web application framework built to be used with Ruby, is designed with the same principles as Ruby itself. Ruby on Rails centers on the idea of building complex websites in as fast and efficient way as humanly possible. This is accomplished thanks to Ruby on Rails’ set of standard database and programming specifications. Classes and objects in the code are tied directly to corresponding tables in the database.

There is a now infamous technology demo of Ruby on Rails in which David Heinemeier Hansson builds a simple blogging application in less than ten minutes. This speed is what using the Ruby on Rails framework is all about. The framework handles the tedious tasks such as updating rows in a database or deleting records automatically. This leaves the non-standard tasks to the developer, which is the entire goal.

Of course, as with all things in computer science, Ruby on Rail is not without its own controversy. It grew such a cult like following so quickly in the web development industry that it was only natural detractors would appear on the scene as well. The people who question Ruby on Rails’ usefulness cite concerns over stability and the fact that, while Rails is supposed to be incredibly flexible, there do not appear to be many innovative or commercially successful web sites built on it.

Ruby on Rails is still such a new technology that over time these concerns will be solved and addressed. If any web developers are looking for a change of pace, or a new way to build web sites, they might want to learn Ruby and give Rails a try. The speed increase for deploying web sites might make you leave your old tools and techniques behind.

The first thing you want to do to ensure at least basic search engine optimization for your web site is to make sure you’re using clean HTML markup. You want to make sure your site is as easy for the search engines to crawl and index and cluttered markup will severely lessen those changes. The best way to get clean markup is to validate your HTML every time you make a change to make sure it is error free and always separate your design styles with Cascading Style Sheets.

One thing many web designers seem to forget is the important of a page’s title. This is set using the http://www.askgraphics.com/resources/understanding-browser-safe-colors/ http://www.askgraphics.com/resources/understanding-browser-safe-colors/#comments Mon, 15 Sep 2008 10:58:18 +0000 admin http://www.askgraphics.com/resources/?p=13 In the world of printing, there are endless arrays and shades of colors available to graphic designers. Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to many in web design, that is not truly the case when it comes to the web. While all of the colors of the rainbow can be used in a web design there are no guarantees that those colors will appear as the web designer wished if the colors aren’t considered to be a part of what are known as “browser safe colors.”

The browser safe colors have been known by a variety of different names over the years but some of the more popular are the color cube, the 6×6x6 cube or even the Netscape palette (which should give you an idea of how old this concept really is). The 216 colors that make of the color cube were established during a time when many computers on the web could only handle 8-bit color displays. This limited the palette to only 256 different colors, which is why the list of browser safe colors was established to insure backwards compatibility with older displays.

Browser safe colors are sometimes referred to as the 6×6x6 cube because the 216 colors that are considered safe are made up of 6 different shades of red, green and blue. There’s some mildly intense mathematics behind all of this that only a computer scientist could probably love. For anyone familiar with RGB or Hexadecimal settings in relation to color selection you will notice that all of the colors called browser safe contain combinations of 0, 51, 102, 153, 204 or 255 in RGB and 00, 33, 66, 99, cc or FF in Hexadecimal.

As time moves on, the important of browser safe colors becomes less and less significant in the grand scheme of things. In more modern times, it is very difficult to run across many displays that don’t have support for more than 256 colors. The only possible exception to that rule would be some brands of handheld and mobile devices but even that is changing rapidly.

It is still important to make your web design efforts as accessible as possible to as many people and devices as you can. Using colors that are considered browser safe is simply one way to help make that possible. It is at the web designer’s discretion if he wants to limit himself to the 216 colors defined as safe by Netscape years ago. If not for the concerns over accessibility, at least as an interesting exercise or challenge in web design. Sometimes limiting your choices makes it easier to come up with a great color scheme and design.