Entries Tagged 'Website Design' ↓

Huge Mistake #1: Creating a Website with Flash — Did you know in a recent study, top internet marketers discovered that having a website created with Flash, actually decreased the response from prospects and customers by as much as 370 percent?

Here’s why: Your prospects and customers are most likely visiting your website using all types of different computers, connection speeds and internet configuration settings…

What may look great to one visitor may not even appear for another! You could very easily have shelled out hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have a website created using the Flash technology, only to find out that some of your visitors will never see it! (Not to mention the loading times can cause your visitor to close your site, never to return again.)

Huge Mistake #2: The “Internet Catalog” Approach — You see this everywhere. Good, honest and hardworking businessmen and women get online to sell their products or services, and have a site created for them that contains a link to just about everything they offer on one page. Their thinking goes along the lines of, “…well, I don’t want to leave anyone out. If they come to my site, I want to make sure I have what they’re looking for…” — This way of thinking could not be further from the truth.

Here’s why: There’s an ancient rule that goes back to the very beginning of direct-marketing on the internet, taught by the richest, most legendary and well-respected internet marketers of all time…

“When you give your prospects too many choices, they become confused and aren’t sure what to do next. Confused people never buy anything.”

Huge Mistake #3: Optimizing Your Sales Site for the Search Engines — You’ll see this taught in nearly every “internet marketing” course, manual or eBook out there… “You must optimize every page of your website for the search engines!” — In fact, this false teaching is accepted as ‘gospel truth’ so often that most web designers will offer to do this for you at no, or little extra cost…

What they don’t understand is that certain words and phrases must be either re-worded (to make it “keyword rich”) or taken out completely, just to be looked upon highly by the mighty search engines — and this could kill your sales, literally overnight.

Here’s why: When you or a hired web designer optimize your sales page (i.e. any web page designed to sell your products and services) to get a higher listing in the search engines, you’re going to have to sacrifice the pulling-power of your sales copy (i.e. written sales material) just to get those higher listings. Sure, this can bring you more traffic — but what good is all the traffic in the world, if your visitors arrive at your website and aren’t compelled enough to read why they should order your product?

For years, it has been taught that you should always try to find a “balance” of SEO (Search-Engine-Optimization) mixed with promotional copy designed to sell your products and services…

Wrong Again! — The truth is that you should never optimize your sales page for the Search Engines. Instead, you should create tiny “entry pages” for each keyword related to your product or service, (highly optimized for the Search Engines) and have them link to your main sales site! (We can show you exactly how to do this quickly and easily and get *massive* targeted traffic from the Search Engines - without ever *touching* your sales site!)

Huge Mistake #4: Having a “Graphics-Based” Website — Sure, graphics can certainly help us to visualize a particular situation or circumstance, product or service… But did you know that having a graphically-driven website can actually distract your visitor away from your sales message?

After all, your sales message (or “web copy”) is The #-1 most important factor in a website that makes money. If your visitors are paying more attention to your “professional graphics” than your sales message… you’ve just lost another sale.

Here’s why: You’ve got approximately seven seconds from the time your visitor arrives at your site, to the time they decide whether to buy your product, get more information or leave. If you’ve got a graphically-intensive website, your website will most likely still be loading past your seven-second time limit.

That’s a “customer-killer” in and of itself - however, the real reason lies within the fact that the bigger, brighter and more beautiful your graphics are, the more they will distract your visitor from your sales message. And if your visitor is distracted even for one second, it could mean the difference between getting a sale, and losing a customer.

Huge Mistake #5: Designing a Website with Zero Marketing Experience — Most web designers have no idea how to make money on the internet, with anything other than their design services. It’s not their fault - they simply have no or very little marketing and sales experience. After all, they’re just website designers…

However, having your website designed by someone with Zero internet marketing experience is like buying a street-car without an engine… it won’t go anywhere, and it’ll just waste your time and money!

For help on website design please visit www.onlinewebconsultants.com.

1. Web designers are marketers per se. Web sites are all about advertising products, ideas and services. Thus, a web designer has to understand the mindset of marketers in order to create a design that sell.

2. Read, read and read. We do not experience everything. Thus, our tendency is to learn from others. Reading web design books, newsletters and tips are pretty valuable since they can save you time and effort. Basically, books are more conclusive than newsletters and tips however, they are for free and mostly updated.

3. Narrow down your target market. You cannot please everybody same thing that you cannot be good at everything. Thus, this fact calls for the narrowing of your target market. Even in the interface of the so-called web design, a designer cannot claim that he is an expert at anything or everything about the needs of a website. It is better to pick a certain audience and try to be good at catching their attention, preference and choice. This practice allows you to be best at a given area thus developing expertise.

4. Answer your target audience’s needs. In order to answer the visitor’s needs, web designers must know what kind of visitors his site is welcoming. Do they belong to the younger generation or otherwise? What do they want from your site? Are these information, details and pleasures in your site in order to get their undivided attention and loyalty? Bear in mind that colors, font size, style of graphics, contents and the entirety of the site affects viewer’s decision and choice.

5. Know the basics of SEO and copywriting. Though Search Engine Optimization and copywriting are not directly related to designing, still, designers must have basic knowledge about them. This is because web designing is intertwined with marketing, use of keywords and visibility.

Aside from that, designers must also have knowledge of the programming basics. If not, the tendency is waste time or to create a mediocre or unsatisfactory design to the detriment of the sites.

6. The primacy of functionality. If ever you are faced to make a decision between a web site’s aesthetic form and its functionality, you have to be firm in upholding the latter. Not everything that is pretty is ‘saleable’. Besides, you don’t create web sites for the sake of making it nice-looking.

Above anything else, the site must be functional so as to cater to every visitor’s wants and needs. Appearance is a means to catch visitor’s attention nevertheless, it is not the end. If a designer prioritizes appearance alone without considering its primary consideration the web site’s marketability will suffer.

7. Know when to break the rules. Rules are only guidelines, if you feel that the rules are inappropriate for a certain creation follow your heart’s desire and venture on an experimental adventure.

Rob Sullivan

Many times, a site gets very large and its ability to rank well in competitive markets decreases in part because of the size of the site. While we in the business know that content is king, more often than not it is a combination of content and effective site structure which will ultimately help your pages rank.

In this article I look at how to most effectively structure your site to take advantage of this. I read this great article on layering on the SEOmoz Blog http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=789 and while it does a good job of explaining what content layering is, I feel it could be improved just a little bit.

I’m not saying it is wrong in any way. In fact the tactic outlined will be very effective for a small to medium sized site, however I have also found another way to organize your site which can be more effective if done properly.

In the article, it explains how you use layers to organize your site. Now we’re not talking about CSS layering or anything like that. It’s more of a site structure issue than anything.

According to the article, one can layer their site through the use of sub-folders. By creating layers of sub-folders and then placing all related content within that sub-folder you can layer your site to help specific sections of it rank higher.

This is a great way to organize a smaller site because it allows you to place topical pages together, and promote links within the pages to help improve overall positioning of these sections.

Further, it helps reduce the dilution factor often felt by sites that attempt to cover multiple topics in a flat file structure.

For example, if you sell widgets you could organize the sections by some common element, such as color. That way your site could be: http://widgetts.com/blue/page1.html and all blue widget pages would go into this sub-folder.

You’d then organize all other sub-folders in a similar style.

Like I said, I think this is a very effective strategy for a smaller or medium site. There would be a much greater chance of blue widgets ranking highly in a structure like this.

However, I feel that for larger sites there’s an even more effective way to organize your content.

Through the use of sub-domains one could further organize this content. This would make it even more relevant to search queries and more likely to rank. If one sold a larger variety of widgets yet still wanted to organize them by color then the structure of the site would be: http://blue.widgetts.com and all site content relating to blue widgets would appear within this sub-domain.

The reason I say sub-domains would be more effective is because search engines tend to treat a sub-domain as its own site. In other words, a search engine sees http://blue.widgetts.com and http://widgetts.com as essentially 2 different sites.

Keep in mind that such a strategy is of the most benefit to larger sites. If you don’t have a large site, or don’t foresee your site growing to become a large site then I wouldn’t recommend the sub-domain layering tactic.

This is because, as I’ve said, the search engines will treat your sub-domain as a unique site. So if you’ve only got

10 or 15 or even 50 pages in your sub-domain, chances are it won’t rank as competitively as it would have as a sub-folder of a larger site.

Now, to make your content even more competitive, why not combine these two strategies – use a sub-domain and sub-folders to provide you even more control in site organization as well as an even greater chance of ranking.

This is because the broader sub-domain can rank competitively for the broader terms while the sub-folder content can rank competitively for the less broad, more specific terms.

What you are doing by combining the two strategies is getting more bang for your buck. This is because you are covering more area on the web, allowing your site to rank for both broad and specific terms.

Then, with some good strategic interlinking you will be able to even further promote the broad areas of your site by linking all your internal pages to the pages above it.

While I’m not entirely dismissing the layered content theory presented above, I am saying consider your situation.

If your site is a smaller site, by all means use the layered content approach. If it’s larger then use the sub-domain approach.

Also remember that there could be multiple ways to organize the same content. For example, in addition to organizing your sub-domains or sub-folders by color in the widget example, also consider organizing them by features. This way, a chosen widget could be linked to from multiple related categories. Not only that but you’ve now bulked up your site with a bunch of additional pages. These new pages are required to help create the sub-domains and navigation required to drive visitors to the individual widget pages. This type of multi-category linking is common among many large sites. One good example is Ebay. It organizes its top auctions into sub-domains like antiques, art, autos and clothing. Then, within the categories the sub-folder structure is used to further segment the site.

When designing your website, remember to avoid useless and confusing features, however “cool” they may seem to be. Usually, keeping things simple and consistent are the best way to go. Here are five easy ways to improve your website and make it more appealing to your visitors.

Put your logo on every page of your site, and in the same location. Usually, the best place to put it is in the upper left corner of the page. Remember to make your logo clickable, linking to the main page of your site (an exception is the logo of the main page itself, since you are already there). The benefit of doing so is that if your visitors get lost they can always come back to a familiar location.

Don’ t use a splash screen. Splash screens are seen in many websites before they give you access to the main page. They are usually slow-loading Flash animations that only delay and frustrate users. Remember, when your users want animation, they can turn on the TV. When they go to your website, they usually want information, and they want it fast. Some sites that use splash screens now provide a “Skip the Introduction” link, which most users click anyway, further validating the uselessness of flash screens.

Avoid using heavy pictures. They unnecessarily delay the page upload process. It is OK to use graphics, but they have to be optimized for the web. Use only .gif and .jpg formats. If the pictures are too heavy, try using some of the on-line graphic optimizing tools. They can reduce the weight of your pictures by more than 50% with no noticeable decrease in quality. Another thing you can do is to use thumbnails (clickable miniature versions of a picture). If a user is interested in the picture, he can click on the thumbnail and wait until the full size picture is displayed.

Try not to use animated banners or fancy icons. Just because you can is not a good reason to load up your site with neon-colored, flashing-and-popping, Vegas-style graphics. They usually take away from the content of your site and distract users. Plus, it has been demonstrated that less and less users click on banners every day.

Don’t make your pages too long. People don’t like to read from a screen. Instead, try to use the advantages of hyperlinks to present a summary of the topic or article, with a link to the full article in another page (similar to what newspapers do in their main page, with the added benefit for web users that it is easier to click on a link than to turn a page). If what you have to say is too long, break the discussion in several parts, each of them with a link to where your visitor can continue reading.

Remember, the goal is to give your visitors fast access to your information, through an interface (website) that is visually appealing and easy to use.

Mario Sanchez publishes The Internet Digest (http://www.theinternetdigest.net) a website and newsletter that gives you useful advice on web design and Internet marketing, one free tip at a time.

Copyright 2006 Mark Nenadic

We�ve all run into them, the dreaded �404 File Not Found� error page. When you land there, there are a few things that you can do next. On average, what do you usually do first when you hit one of those pages:

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Author: Joel Walsh

A nostalgic look back at 90s web design, and a warning to anyone whose website is an accidental anachronism.

Remember the days when every PC was beige, every website had a little Netscape icon on the homepage, Geocities and Tripod hosted just about every single personal homepage, and “Google” was just a funny-sounding word?

The mid-late 1990s were the playful childhood of the worldwide web, a time of great expectations for the future and pretty low standards for the present. Those were the days when doing a web search meant poring through several pages of listings rather than glancing at the first three results–but at least relatively few of those websites were unabashedly profit-driven.

Hallmarks of 1990s Web Design

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Draw your own favicon or icon online for free using this entirely web-based, non-Java icon generator. All you need is a modern web browser like Firefox. The tool creates a 16×16 pixel icon in 16 colors with optional transparency.

Favicon Icon Drawing Program Online Free

Copyright 2005 Nathan Sire

Web site design has certainly, in the past decade, evolved tremendously. More clients now are demanding custom design, as opposed to the ‘cookie cutter’ sites of yesteryear.

Where once there existed a limit as to the types of fonts used, the types of coding languages used, and the styles themselves, there is now the possibility for more variety in Web site design than ever before. This has come about because of the advances in technology that did not exist even a few years ago, and it has opened up many creative avenues for Web site designers in the creation of custom designs.

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Copyright 2005 Sharon Housley

I’ve always been of the opinion that competition is a good thing. It encourages all of us to be better and make better products. While it might be true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, copying someone else’s work is simply wrong.

We recently came across a competitor using our sales copy. The competitor was using a web graph showing the traffic on one of our sites, along with our sales copy to promote their competing application. Digging a little further, I realized that their competing application was, in both form and function, identical to our application. The competing program contained identical screenshots, custom program icons and our help documentation. While the code of the program was, in fact, different, it was clear that our copyright had been violated.

We are not the first company to have our copyright violated and once the initial emotional reaction passed, we took action.

Dealing With Copyright or Trademark Violations:

Who, What and Where

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Author: Ray Yee

Your website is your tool for showing the online community an image of your Drop Ship retail business. Whether or not your business succeeds depends heavily on your website. If your website design is user-friendly, more visitors will purchase your products or subscribe to your newsletter. This will ensure that you are not wasting the time and money you spent attracting visitors to your website. It does not pay to drive large amounts of traffic to your website and have 99% of them leave due to poor content and navigation.

When designing your website, it is important that you switch from your own profit-oriented perspective to the prospective customers� perspective. First place yourself in your customers� shoes. After which, you should take some time to sit down and plan how your website should look like.

Below I will describe the factors that contribute to a successful sales-optimized website for a Drop Ship business.

1) The critical components of your homepage.

- Your title tag. It should describe your website effectively and concisely. For search engine optimization purposes, it is necessary to include your main keywords in your title, without it being unnecessarily long. For example, a good title would be �Renaissance Oil Paintings � Abstract Oil Paintings�.

- Your headline. Being one of the first few elements of your homepage that captures the attention of the visitor, it should clearly and concisely state what benefit your website can offer to the visitor. For example, your headline can tell your visitors how to earn extra income, how to lead a healthier lifestyle or how to save them time or money. In short, it should offer a solution to their problems, or address their needs. The headline should be placed strategically right at the top center of the page. You can also use the italics or bold functions to draw attention to your headline.

Internet surfers are not known for their patience. That is why it is crucial to capture their attention during the first few seconds of their stay at your website. Your headline plays the most important role, as it is usually the first thing that visitors see. Research has shown that you have about ten seconds to fully capture the attention of the visitors and compel them to read on, before they leave your site.

- Your content body. In your main body of your homepage, you have to describe in further detail the benefits your website or your products can offer to your visitors. Note that you provide the benefits, and not the features of the products you are selling. This is the basis of effective marketing: you tell the customers what is in it for them. You must also give strong directions to action in your content body and tell them the steps they need to take in order to benefit most from your website. For example, you can include links like �Click here now to discover why our oil paintings are among the best in Europe�, or �Sign up for our free newsletter now to get the latest tips and guides on good gardening practices.� Note that you have to be concise in your content body so that you can include the most attractive benefits near the top of the homepage, without the visitor having to scroll down.

- Your opt-in offer. Ask for your visitors� names and email addresses in your opt-in offer box. Email marketing is central to the success of your Drop Ship business. First-time visitors who leave your website without buying anything have a chance of signing up for your free newsletter. This allows you to keep in contact with them and send them promotions in future, and your effort and money in attracting them to your website would not be wasted. This feature should be placed somewhere near the top left or top right of your homepage because of its importance.

2) Professional look/atmosphere. Your website must not be full of graphics, banners or flashing advertisements. These only serve to distract your visitors from your main product offers. You should avoid flash animation as well. When formatting your text, use only a single type of font like Times New Roman, and two different colors at most. Page backgrounds should preferably be white or plain, and not be patterned or fanciful.

Another important factor to keep in mind is to minimize the time that your webpage takes to load. Since visitors are normally very impatient, they are likely to leave if a page is slow to load, hence the need to exclude large graphics or animation which slow down your loading speed.

3) Good content. Most online retailers sell products in a niche they have expertise in or which they are passionate about. For visitors to be convinced of your authority in the niche, you need to establish yourself as an expert in that area by providing useful, reliable content. Customers tend to trust retailers with strong background knowledge as they can recommend the best products for the customers� needs, or answer any queries well. Fly-by-night businesses, on the other hand, are just out to make money, and normally do not have the necessary expertise to earn the trust of customers. It is thus critical that you make a consistent effort to update your website regularly with the latest tips, resources or articles to serve your visitors well. At least even if visitors do not buy from your website on their first visit, they would continuously return to your website for useful information. After a period of time, when you have earned their trust, they would feel more compelled to buy your products. This form of marketing, which develops an online community, is a very cost-effective method as it costs next to nothing to supply the necessary information.

You can find free articles for reprint at: http://www.ezinearticles.com, http://www.ideamarketers.com, http://www.goarticles.com, http://www.freesticky.com, http://www.amazines.com.

If you would like to create a forum on your website, you can use this free forum software at http://www.phpbb.com. It is very easy to set up and only requires you to create a database with your web host, with some customization.

Of course, you can also go for the option of writing your own content on your website. When writing your content, remember to include your keywords evenly throughout the content for search engine optimization purposes.

4) Good navigation. This is another strong determinant of the success of your website. For a website to look �professional�, it has to be well organized into categories, and the pages must be linked to each other and to the homepage. Your navigation bars must be placed consistently at the same area on every page of your website. Navigation bars are most commonly placed on the left hand side of the page or at the top of the page. If you have numerous different categories on your navigation, it makes sense to place them on the left of the page. However, if you have only about five to seven options, you can place your navigation bars at the top of the page.

Use text links for your webpages on your navigation bars instead of graphic links. One factor that search engines like Google use to determine the relevance of your webpages is by the inclusion of keywords in the text links to that page.

It is also crucial that you name your navigation accurately and descriptively. Visitors would instantly know which link to click on to find what they want. If your website is cluttered with many obscure links, visitors would feel lost and leave your site immediately.

Organize your content well so that your visitors can navigate your site easily. They should be able to find what they want with the least number of clicks possible. Research has shown that for any extra click that visitors have to take to reach their goal, the number of visitors leaving your site can reach as high as 50%!

When deciding what to include in your navigation bar, first place yourself in your customers� shoes. Think about what they would be most interested in when they visit your site, and place these links near the top of the page. Other links, which are secondary in importance for the visitor should be placed nearer the bottom of the page.

5) The standard pages. Like every other online business, your Drop Ship business website should also include some important pages that serve the customer.

- Testimonials. This page is considered as a �must-have� for many online businesses. When you display the testimonials of other customers on your website, your credibility is established. Testimonials are like votes or ratings for your business that shows the real value of what you offer. The better the comments from customers, the better your website would appear to prospective customers. You can choose to place a separate testimonials page, or you can select a few of the best testimonials and place them on your homepage.

- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). After you have described your benefits in detail, visitors would still have several queries about your products. It is thus useful to create an FAQ page to write down the answers to what your customers are most likely to ask. When visitors have questions, they can simply visit your FAQ page, instead of sending you their queries by email. This saves you a lot of trouble for answering individual emails. Remember that most customers are not willing to make purchases when their doubts are still unanswered.

- Contact Us. Having this page boosts your reliability as a business. Remember to include your email address, mailing address and telephone numbers on this page.

- About Us. Describe what your team and your business aims to do.

- Privacy Policy. Customers value their privacy highly on the internet. When they submit their personal information like email address or mailing address on your website, fears about privacy may arise. You thus need to include a privacy policy to reassure your customers that their personal information will not be abused or given to any other third party. Remember to place links to your privacy policy on your order pages and also your opt-in offers.

HTML editors like Macromedia Dreamweaver are useful for those unfamiliar with HTML. Dreamweaver can be found at: http://www.macromedia.com/dreamweaver.

In conclusion, whether or not your website generates sales determines heavily on the design and navigation ease. You should definitely spend more time planning on your web design and navigation well before plunging into constructing it.

*You are welcome to reprint this article as long as you include the Author�s resource box with the article.

About the author: About the Author: Ray Yee is the founder and president of Dropshipperscentral, a website which provides a wealth of informative articles, tips and resources on everything you�ll ever need to know about setting up a Drop Ship Business and marketing it. Click here for the Wholesale Drop Ship Directory from http://www.dropshipperscentral.com