Entries Tagged 'Website Design' ↓

The Top 8 Website Sins Part Two

Author: Niall Roche

Sin #5 Poor Spelling And Grammar We all make mistakes when we write things down or type things out. Nobody is 100% perfect but a huge number of website owners completely ignore the basics of spelling and grammar.

If you’re selling a product or service online and your website is littered with spelling and grammar mistakes you’re losing sales. Plain and simple. You don’t need a masters degree in English but poor spelling puts people off. From a visitors point of view if you couldn’t be bothered spellchecking your website then how good can your product really be?

Here’s 4 tips for proofreading your website.

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Originally posted 2005-04-17 11:31:27. Republished by Old Post Promoter

10 COMMANDMENTS OF WEBSITE ACCESSIBILITY

Author: Chris P. Bohn

We keep hearing about something called ‘accessibility’ for websites. So what is it all about huh?

Well, it is all about webmasters making sure that they give any disabled visitors who come to their site an equivalent experience to that which a non-disabled person would have. So, if your site has garish rainbow coloured text and is full of puerile nonsense, then you must inflict your garbage on disabled visitors (who probably have enough problems already) as well as the rest of us.

How can you make sure your site is accessible?

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Originally posted 2005-05-07 15:11:35. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Author: Randy Justason

I’m sure you’ve all heard the saying ‘Build it and they will come’. Although that may have been true a few years ago, now we must work, and work hard, to get visitors to our websites.

You can’t always control who visits, however, you can have some control over who stays.

Here are a few website no-no’s that I have come accross that made me leave without even clicking past the first page.

1. Slow loading pages – For those of us still on dial-up internet access this is one of the primary reasons for not hanging around.

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Originally posted 2005-04-04 12:28:32. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Seven Things to Look for When Hiring a Web Designer

Author: Mitone Griffith

Whether you�re hiring a designer who has created 10 sites or 1000 sites for other businesses, there are 10 things every website should do for you.

1. Be wary of companies who charge by the hour and don�t put on a cap! There isn�t a regulated industry standard in fees. So websites can easily end up costing you a small fortune. Ask for a flat fee if possible�you�ll know exactly what you�re paying up front. It�s common to pay for 50% down, and in certain cases, when working with businesses online; you may need to pay the whole flat fee down. This is perfectly acceptable. You wouldn�t order books from Amazon and wait to pay for them when they got there!

2. Try to get a turnaround time in writing. It is up to you to bring as much information as possible to your designer. This will make the design process go much faster. You can�t just go and say �make a website for me� and expect your designer to know what to put on your website! The more you bring to the table, the faster your designer can work. And the faster you respond to proofs, the faster your site will be active and live! Depending on your designer�s workload, it could take anywhere from 1 week to 3 weeks to finish the design of your site.

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Originally posted 2005-04-11 10:40:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Author: John Calder � 2004, John Calder http://www.TheEzine.net

You can find guides and tips on good web site design everywhere. In 1998, Vincent Flanders co-authored a book with a unique twist. It was called “Web Pages That Suck”, and Mr. Flanders followed that with a similar co-authored book in 2002. In that spirit, we’d like to offer you our top five tips on diabolical design – how to create web pages that look like h-, well, you know.

1. Use javascript and Flash. Lots and lots of it. Make sure you ignore the fact that my browser isn’t 100% compatible. If you can, try to crash my browser. It’s not always 100% compatible, and I really like the color in that little Windows error box anyway.

2. I like a lot of gratuitous graphics too. Include lots of large files that take a while to download, especially over dialup. A long while. It would be an especially nice touch if you can have some heavy zig-zag and grid backgrounds, something that blends in with your text for that nice, unified look. And whatever you do, don’t forget the little animated GIF files! They’re cute, and especially distracting, so I’d like a lot of those too, please, all around your page.

3. If I do manage to get to one of your pages, please be certain that you’ve fixed the font sizes with CSS. Make them, oh, about 8 or 9 pixels high, bolded. That should do it – well, except use lots of different colors and font styles, just to prove to me you can. While you’re in the CSS file anyway, try to get rid of some of that extra white space by adjusting the line height (the space between lines of text) so that it’s only 1/2 it’s normal space. There’s no use in my having to scroll down the page – make sure it’s all above the fold, OK?

4. Wait a minute – I forgot about the links. Can you use your CSS skills to turn off the underlines in your links, plus make them the same color as the rest of your text? They stand out too much if you don’t do that. But, when I hover my mouse over them, I want you to give me a further display of some cool CSS tricks by making the link text turn to italic and get a LOT bigger. Enough to make the other text on the page move around a bit. I’ve never seen anything like that before.

5. Now to some good stuff – your colors. Be daring here. Forget about the old dark-on-light and light-on-dark basics. Try something like black text on a dark green background. Or maybe purple on red? Either way, just be different. And I don’t see any reason to stick with complementary or contrasting colors. Nah, give the old color wheel a spin & see what turns up. Pick ‘em and use ‘em in 1-2-3 order, it won’t matter. If you’re using tables, it’s nice to change the background color of every single cell. That will prove to me the level of tireless effort you’ve put into your site just for me.

Bonus tip: If you will put menus and other navigation elements in different places on each page, and not be clear on where a click will take me, that will make me look over each page more thoroughly, and I will want to click on all those links, just because I want to know where they lead. Really I will.

By the way, we hope you know that these tips were all in good fun, and very sarcastic. If you didn’t know that, please buy Mr. Flanders’ book, or any good book on design. Your visitors’ eyes will thank you!

About the author: John Calder is the owner/editor of The Ezine Dot Net. Subscribe Today and get real information YOU can use to help build your online business today! http://www.TheEzine.Net RSS feeds are available.

(You may reprint this article in full in your newsletter and/or web site)

Originally posted 2005-03-29 16:46:19. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Author: Joel Strellner

So you have a product, service or information that you feel the whole world should know about. But you aren’t quite sure how to tell them? Fortunately, for you it’s the 21st century and we have the internet.

By using this short article as a reference we will have you creating your own website in a matter of hours.

The first thing you will need is a website. There are many options for getting a website, some expensive and some are even free. Depending on whether you are selling a product, service or providing information will determine which option you should choose. Personally, I recommend that if you intend on making any profit from your website that you hire a web design company or (often far cheaper) a web design freelancer. If you just want to share some information online then you will be fine doing the design yourself.

If you are on a tight budget, then you may wish to use the do-it-yourself methods described below instead of hiring a web design company. However, once you do make any profit you should invest the money into a professionally created web site design.

Methods for creating a website

If you are unfamiliar with HTML, you will have to use either an online website creator or what is called a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor. The former option is available with almost all online hosting companies so I won’t go too much into detail on them. However, I do recommend SiteStudio as one of the best in this category. SiteStudio is available through nearly every web hosting company that uses H-Sphere. H-Sphere is a full featured web hosting control panel (I will go further in detail in the choosing a web hosting company section).

The later option will give you a lot more flexibility; however it will cost some money. The flexibility that you will get will far outweigh the cost in some of the software packages listed below. Some of the largest benefits include the ability to easily modify your website, have a unique web-site tailored to your design requirements, you created it!, and if you do a good job there really isn’t a need for hiring a web designer at a later date to redo your website.

Here are some of the most popular WYSIWYG editors:

- Macromedia Dreamweaver MX – Adobe GoLive CS – Microsoft Frontpage

I recommend that you avoid Microsoft Frontpage, while it is easy to use and fairly popular, it isn’t standards compliant. If you are going to learn how to create a website you should learn how to do it right.

Choosing a domain name

One of the hardest things you will have to decide, yet almost more important than any of the others is choosing a domain name. A domain name is what people will type in the address bar of their browser to get to your website. For example, google.com, yahoo.com, amazon.com, and ebay.com are all domain names. If you will be selling a product, service or if the site is business related try to stick to a .com or .net top level domain (tld) extension.

When choosing a hosting company avoid choosing a company that offers free domain registration with hosting (or do not accept the free domain registration) because what they often don’t tell you is that you can’t transfer the domain to another hosting company or even that the next years fee due will be a hefty one.

Domains are typically renewed yearly and the pricing ranges from around $8.00 to $35.00 each year. The cheaper domain services typically don’t offer as many features as the more expensive ones.

I recommend the following companies for domain registration:

- Register.com – Expensive, but a well featured control panel. – GoDaddy.com – Cheap, yet full featured. – Enom.com – Also a cheaper alternative.

I recommend that you avoid Network Solutions, while they are large and have a big budget they are often criticized for doing shady things.

Choosing a web hosting company

Now days hosting has become a commodity item. There are literally tens of thousands of hosting companies, most offering exactly the same features and most of them perfectly fine for your new website.

When choosing a hosting company you should try to compare features, not necessarily price. The end result is to have a website online with your product, service or information for everyone to see right? Often the cheaper hosting companies lack the redundancy required to ensure that your website is available 24/7. If this is a business venture you do not want to miss any potential customer due to the dreaded 404 error page. However, if you are just going to be providing information you could choose a cheaper host as you don’t intend on making a profit.

Some of the features you should consider when comparing hosting companies are:

- Disk Space – This is the physical amount of space that the host allocates to you for the files that you upload to the server. – Bandwidth – Bandwidth is the amount of space that you have available to transfer files from your website to another end-user of your websites computer. – Windows, Linux or BSD? – While a user of Windows XP may think it is preferable to use a windows host, in actuality it really doesn’t matter. In-fact a hosting company that uses windows as a hosting platform sacrifices themselves a little bit on reliability. Choose a Linux or BSD hosting provider, they are typically much more reliable and often cheaper too. – Email accounts – If you’re online you probably already know what an email account is, make sure you get some with your hosting account. – Control Panel – Make sure that they offer a control panel. CPanel and H-Sphere are both popular ones with hosting companies. H-Sphere hosts will typically be more reliable because it distributes your website to various application specific servers. Cpanel hosts typically have everything on one server, so if your websites down your email is too. – Finally, if you chose to use an online website creator above for cost or usability reasons; make sure that the host has an online website creator.

Avoid hosting companies who offer unlimited in any of the above categories. I recommend and personally use MegaHosters (http://www.megahosters.com).

If you build it, they will not come – how to promote your new site

One of the biggest errors many people make is the thought that all you have to do is build a website and people will come. This is completely wrong and if you follow this thought it won’t be long before you give up on your new website.

You have to promote it, then promote it some more and once you think your done doing it twice over, promote it again.

Think of it like this, a website is like a business placed a half-mile off the freeway, while you may occasionally get visitors (2-3 times month from type-in traffic) you will never be successful unless you can move your business closer to the freeway, promotion does this. Every time you promote your business you move it a few feet closer to the freeway.

Since there are literally dozens of ways to promote your new website I will not go in detail on them here, but I will provide a brief list of some of the more common methods.

- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising – a very quick way to get targeted visitors from search engines to your website. – Forums – Forums are a place that you can go and write with other people about various subjects. Chose one similar to your website and participate often. Make sure not to directly post about your site; but if you provide good information in your posts people will visit your website. (How will people know what your website is if you don’t tell them about it? Put a link and a short descriptive text in what is called a signature). – Search Engines – submit your site to search engines (Manually, one at a time. Never use the submission tools that submit your site to dozens, or even hundreds of search engines. Search engines forbid automated submission tools and may even ban you from their index – very bad.). – If you’re a business put your website address (or URL) on everything that anyone can see (e.g. your car, letters, email signatures, business cards, invoices, packaging, clothing, etc.). – Reciprocal links – find other website that would compliment yours and offer them a link on your website in exchange for one on theirs. – If you have employees, hold a contest with them to see who can get your website address shown in the most prominent place.

Avoid the following when trying to promote your site as they will never help (never).

- FFA – Free for all link exchanges – Spamming in any form – Sending unsolicited emails, posting unrelated messages about your business in forums, Usenet, or in IRC.

In closing, this overview of how to create a website leaves out many important details to consider; primarily on the different promotional methods and on some additional alternatives for each of the sections. However, it was intended to only address the essential portions of creating a website.

This article should have helped you to create a website, buy a domain name and promote the website, all of which are essential to the success of your website.

Remember you have to promote your website, then promote it some more and once you think your done doing it twice over, promote it again. It is the only sure-fire way to ensure that your website isn’t like many of the other millions of websites that are closed each year because of lack of visitors/sales.

About the author: Joel Strellner is a freelance web designer and php programmer located in Sacramento, CA. You can visit his website at http://www.joelstrellner.com< /a>. This article and many more are available there too.

Originally posted 2005-03-30 16:59:45. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Author: Leah West

Before you go and spend big money on a professional website designer, or start designing yourself, read through this article and make sure that you or your designer knows how to design a website that the search engines will like.

Being a web designer myself, I know firsthand what they teach you in college about being a good designer. While I learned all of the important design concepts like color theory, the importance of graphics and white space, ect ect, I came away knowing nothing about how to actually design a site to get ranked in the search engines.

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Originally posted 2005-04-07 20:39:16. Republished by Old Post Promoter

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.

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.