For better managing your custom design website, there are two types of Content Management Systems that you can choose from: the paid CMS and the open source CMS that you can have for free.

There isn't necessarily any best CMS in the online world today, there are only popular Content Management Systems. Here are some of them:

• Drupal

Drupal would seem to be one of the more advanced open source CMS available for download today. Being open source, thousands of people contribute to its development, and you will find no trouble at all finding a web programmer who knows Drupal, or finding a community of programmers who can troubleshoot your Drupal CMS just in case.

• MamboServer

Mambo is another popular open source CMS that is free for downloading and extremely easy to set up. Its main edge is that its system is scalable and you can actually incorporate it into the whole spectrum of custom web site design - from the really simple sites to the large company-owned sites. You can use Mambo to manage your advertisements or syndicate your content, among other things.

• Open CMS

• Joomla!

• Typo3

Typo 3 is another of those open source systems, although it is designed more for enterprise-level applications like corporate intranet. It addresses issues like branding, version control and maintaining templates in an application.

In choosing which content management system to incorporate to your website, regardless if it's free or open source, one of the key things to keep consider are your custom web design needs, and nothing else.

Ten years ago you could include a hit counter on your website and announce proudly that your site was doing "very well" as soon as the number reached 100,000. The current process is not nearly as simple or straightforward. The internet works in complicated ways that have evolved to solve a number of small problems. Consequently, concrete statistics are often difficult to obtain. If you believe the number of online visitors is a reliable indicator to gauge the popularity of your site or the potential sales of your product, you should consider the following:

1. Hit - Every time a user requests a file on your site (a page, not a picture or link to another site) it counts as a hit.

2. File - When a file or page is actually sent to the user, it counts as a file. Files normally outnumber hits, but neither is very useful in measuring traffic. Any IP can request all of the files on your page several times in one hour without any actual involvement from the user.

3. Impressions - This is a concept that has existed in advertising for many decades. For example, a 2-page magazine advertisement counts as one "showing of a creative concept". This equates to one impression every time a reader sees it. If your web page contains five small banners, you could have 10,000 page views, but 50,000 impressions.

4. Page Views - Almost everyone believe this is the most important traffic statistic. This term simply refers to the number of times any particular page has been viewed. This metric can be useful. However, values can often be over-inflated and should always be considered in conjunction with unique visits.

5. Visits & Unique Visits - A visit is simply logged every time a remote IP requests one of your pages for the first time in a timeout period. A unique visit is usually defined as "one visit per IP per day", regardless of timeouts.

The above are all very important metrics, but understanding them properly is key. The best way to decide how your site's traffic is performing is by creating a formula. If you know what you are doing, you can develop your own formula. However, there are plenty of effective formulas currently available. A basic idea of how to evaluate your traffic involves reviewing monthly averages, unique visits and page views. This will give you an idea regarding how many individuals visit your site, how many pages they view, and how long they remain.

A basic formula from MarketingExperiments.com would be:

C = 4M + 3V + 2(I-F) - 2A

This formula shows that conversions are a product of motivation (M), value (V) and then the friction (F) elements minus the incentives (I). This will help you determine how many customers are likely to purchase your product. However, you need all the values first! You can purchase online analytic tools or download them for an upfront or monthly fee. All of them can return useful data to a webmaster.

If you are not an expert webmaster, or you do not understand many of the technical intricacies of web traffic, you should download Google Analytics. This is one of Google's new free products, and all you require is a GMail account and a web site. The program provides easy to read analytic data in a web-based form for your website. This can make it easy to determine which metrics would be most useful for analyzing your online traffic.

Michael Ehlert
RevUpYourWebBusiness.com

Anybody who wants to start a business looks for minimum investment & maximum returns, especially small businesses where capital is low.

The cheapest mode of marketing your business & letting people know about your products/services is internet. That's the reason why lots & lots of small business enterprises are now looking for internet marketing as a new potential area of business. Of course, to promote your business online, you need to have a powerful website.

A website is a virtual portal containing information about your company, products & services. You can either setup an online store & sell products thereon, or you can simply provide your contact information on your website, so that people can contact you for your services. In either case, it is very important that you design an attractive website so that users get drawn to it.

Attractive does not mean loads of graphics & colors. But it means a site that has balance of all. A good website has a decent layout, great information & is easily accessible. Too much graphics, flash & other such factors delay the downloading of the site, which can be frustrating to user. It also means it is difficult to promote it through search engines freely.

The best solution is to approach a professional company & make your goal clearer to them. For a little investment, you can get a great website ready to market. A properly designed website goes a long way to determine your online business. If you can increase your customer base online, you can then think of creating your brand offline as well. Once people start visiting your website & you offer them services/products online, you can built a base to your business wherein you can expand it offline as well.

Lot of companies provide complete package for small business website development, design & hosting. These services also extend to online promotion of your site like search engine optimization services. So, in short, you can hire a company that can manage your entire online business.

While choosing a company, you can either be specific about how you want your website designed, developed or hosted; or you can just provide them with your business idea. Of course, you should be prepared to offer your services/products once customers start pouring in.

So, if you are planning to start a small business then developing a website is the first step you should take.