5 Important Rules in Website Design
Feb 13, 2009 Web Design
When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.
1) Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.
2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.
3) Have a simple and clear navigation
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.
4) Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!
5) Avoid using audio on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.
Ways To Improve Sales Through Your Website
Feb 13, 2009 Web Design
Anyone who has been marketing online knows that the lifeblood of a business is the traffic of a site. More visitors equal more sales. However, here are some ways that you can tweak your sites with to improve sales without the need to get more visitors.
The first method is to weave in your personal touch in your sales message. Nobody wants to be sold to by a total stranger, but many people will buy what their close friends recommend to them. If you can convince your audience that you are a personal friend who has their best interest at heart, they will be convinced to buy your products. Remember to speak to an individual in your salesletter, not to your whole audience.
The second method is to publish testimonials and comments from your customers. A good idea would be to publish both good and bad comments; that way prospects will be really convinced that these testimonials are real. When prospects see testimonials on your website, they will have the confidence to buy from you because human beings follow the herd mentality; when others have bought and proven it authentic, they will jump on the bandwagon and buy too.
Use visual representations for the problems and solutions that your product offers. Not everyone will read your text copy from the head to the tail, but most people will pay attention to images on your website.
Offer quality bonuses to accompany the product. When you offer bonuses that complement your product, your prospects will feel it’s a very good deal and it would be stupid to miss it. Be sure to state the monetary value of your bonuses so that people will be even more compelled to grab your good bargain.
Lastly, ask for the sale! Many people entice their prospects with the benefits of their product, sell to them with stories of how it has solved many problems, even offered killer bonuses but forget to ask for the sale. Give a clear instruction on how to buy your product (e.g. “click the button to buy now!”).
The Importance of a Sitemap
Feb 13, 2009 Web Design
A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.
1) Navigation purposes
A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.
2) Conveying your site’s theme
When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.
3) Site optimization purposes
When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.
4) Organization and relevance
A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.
From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone.
The Importance of A Good Design
Feb 13, 2009 Web Design
Your website is the hub of your online business; it is the virtual representation of your company whether your company exists physically or not. When you are doing business online, people cannot see you physically like how they could if they were dealing with an offline company. Hence, people do judge you by your covers. This is where a good design comes in.
Imagine if you are running an offline company. Would you allow your salespersons to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they are dealing with your customers? By making your staff wear professionally, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. This works simply because first impressions matter.
Similarly, the same case is with your website. If your website is put together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute “quick fix”, you are literally shouting to your visitors that you are not professional and you do not care for quality.
On the opposite, if you have a totally professional looking website layout, you are giving your visitors the perception that you have given meticulous attention to every detail and you care about professionalism. You are organised, focused and you really mean business.
On the other hand, you should also have anything related to your company well designed. From business cards to letterheads to promotional brochures, every little bit matters. This is because as you grow your business, these items become the face of your business. Once again, think of the “salesperson dressed shabbily” anology, and you will get my point.
Search Engine Friendly Pages
Feb 13, 2009 Web Design
There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.
Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.
If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.
Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.
Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.
Stop using wrong HTML tags like to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.
Paying for Affiliate Tracking Software: Is It Worth the Buy?
Feb 13, 2009 Internet, Tutorials, Web Advertising, Web Design, Web Promotion
Paying for Affiliate Tracking Software: Is It Worth the Buy?
If you are an online business owner who wishes to make more money, you are not alone. There are millions of others out there, just like you. To make more money, you will have to do a number of different things. Unfortunately, there are many business owners who think that there is nothing more that they can do. This is simply not true. If you are a small business owner who sells products or services online, you can help to increase your sales by starting your own affiliate program.
Affiliate programs are programs that are designed to not only generate more income for business owners, but everyday individuals as well. An affiliate program generates a partnership between website owners and business owners, just like you. This is done by creating a commission based program. That program requires website owners to place advertisements for your business on their online website. Each time that those ads help to generate a sale, the website owner will be paid a commission. By creating your own affiliate program, you are able to decide what that commission well be.
If starting your own affiliate program sounds like an amazing opportunity, it is likely that you have a few more questions. One of those questions likely involves the tracking of sales. There are many business owners who have no idea how they would go about determining which affiliate website owner helped to generate each sale. The good news is that you do not have to. There are a number of programs out there that will do this for you. Those programs are often referred to as affiliate tracking software.
Affiliate tracking software works by connecting your website, the website of your affiliate partner, your websites checkout system, and the banners and links that you provided your affiliate with. With all of those computerized combinations, an affiliate tracking software program is able to determine exactly which website your customers came from. If it is one of your affiliate partners, the software program will record that sale and the amount of it for you. Depending on the software program that you purchase, it will then be your responsibility to pay your affiliate partner the amount of money that they are owed.
Now that you are aware of the importance of affiliate tracking software, you will now have to find a software program. Online, there are a large number of individuals and companies who have designed their own software, which is available for sale. The problem that you may find is that many of these programs cost a fairly large amount of money. In fact, some charge so much money that you may be wondering if they are worth the buy.
When it comes to determining whether or not an affiliate tracking software program is worth the buy, you will have to examine a number of different programs. These software programs are created by different people, in different ways. That means that no two affiliate tracking software programs are the same. Each software program is likely to have its own unique features and extra services. You will need to examine these features and compare them to other software programs. This comparison should help you determine whether or not a particular tracking software program is worth the buy.
Personally comparing a number of different affiliate tracking software programs is, perhaps, the best way to find the software that best fits your needs; however, it is not your only option. Affiliate programs are used by a large number of online business owners. Many of these business owners would be more than willing to provide you with inside information, positive software feedback, as well as negative feedback. You can easily connect with a number of these business owners through online message boards.
Whether you rely on recommendations from others or not, it is still advised that you perform your own software examinations. These examinations are vital the purchasing of a well developed and useful affiliate tracking software program, which in turn, may help your business grow.
Tags: affiliate, business, how to, make money, profit, promotion, tutorial, Web Promotion
Reducing Load Time Through Image Optimization
Feb 13, 2009 Internet, Tutorials, Web Advertising, Web Design, Web Promotion
Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web’s population is still running on good old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you’re designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website.
Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.
You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.
If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the “quality” of the JPEG image — normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image’s file size.
On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format — the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!
Tags: affiliate, business, how to, make money, profit, promotion, tutorial, Web Promotion
Online Retail Store Owners: Increase Your Sales with Affiliate
Feb 12, 2009 Internet, Tutorials, Web Advertising, Web Design, Web Promotion
Online Retail Store Owners: Increase Your Sales with Affiliate Tracking Software
Running an online retail stores can be a profitable business venture; however, it is one that does not come easy. With a large amount of online competition, many business owners are finding it difficult to make a substantial amount of income from their online store, especially small business owners. If this situation sounds alto familiar, you should not give up. Instead, you are urged to look at other ways to increase your online sales. That can easily be done with an affiliate tracking software program.
If you are wondering what affiliate tracking software is, you are not alone. There are many business owners who are unsure exactly what it is, even though many of them are actually using it. To understand how your business can benefit from this software, you must first learn what it is and what it is used for. Affiliate tracking software is vital to the success of an affiliate program. Essentially it is the affiliate program that helps to increase your businesss sales; however, that increase is not possible without affiliate tracking software.
The main goal of an affiliate tracking software program is to help you, the business owner, understand where your sales are coming form. This is extremely important, especially if you have more than one affiliate. An affiliate is defined as a website owner, webmaster, or web publisher. Once you start your own affiliate program, it is likely that you will work with a number of these individuals. You will work with them by giving them links and banner to your online store. With special software, the affiliate tracking software, those links and banners will be coded and monitored. The software program will then, easily, be able to determine which one of your affiliates helped your business generate a sale.
A large number of business owners already participate in an affiliate program. Most of them have seen success; however, it is important to remember that you will not be guaranteed results. Of course, it is important to remember that any business strategy takes risks. If you are interested in determining firsthand whether or not your business can benefit from an affiliate program, you are advised to get searching. That search should be for the affiliate tracking software program that best fits your needs.
When searching for affiliate tracking software, it is likely that you will come across a number of different software programs. There are hundred of available programs for you to choose from, but not all of them are the same. Before deciding on an affiliate tracking software, you are advised to examine all of your available options. This can easily be done by comparing a number of affiliate programs, side by side. You can either do your own comparison or you can easily find similar comparisons already done online. These comparisons can be found with a standard internet search.
In addition to the services and features included with each software program, it may also be a good idea to examine how much that software costs. A number of affiliate tracking software sellers charge a flat rate for using their software program. That flat rate will generally be enough until the software program is updated or goes out-of-date. On the other side of the fence, there are software sellers who charge a monthly fee for using their affiliate tracking software. If you are interested in just testing the waters, these may be a wise choice for you and your business. In most cases, if you decide that your affiliate program is not in the best interest of your business, you should be able to cancel your subscription to the software program. This cancellation often allows you a way out, without having to lose any money.
By taking the time to research and properly examine a number of different affiliate tracking software programs, you and your business may be able to see a substantial increase in sales. Many times, business owners are not only able to pay for their software, but also see a steady rise in profits.
Tags: affiliate, business, how to, make money, profit, promotion, tutorial, Web Promotion
Pros and Cons of Flash-based Sites
Feb 12, 2009 Internet, Tutorials, Web Advertising, Web Design, Web Promotion
Flash-based sites have been a craze since the past few years, and as Macromedia compiles more and more great features into Flash, we can only predict there will be more and more flash sites around the Internet. However, Flash based sites have been disputed to be bloated and unnecessary. Where exactly do we draw the line? Here’s a simple breakdown.
The good:
Interactivity
Flash’s Actionscript opens up a vast field of possibilities. Programmers and designers have used Flash to create interactve features ranging from very lively feedback forms to attractive Flash-based games. This whole new level of interactivity will always leave visitors coming back for more.
A standardized site
With Flash, you do not have to worry about cross-browser compatibility. No more woes over how a certain css code displays differently in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. When you position your site elements in Flash, they will always appear as they are as long as the user has Flash Player installed.
Better expression through animation
In Flash, one can make use of its animating features to convey a message in a much more efficient and effective way. Flash is a lightweight option for animation because it is vector based (and hence smaller file sizes) as opposed to real “movie files” that are raster based and hence much larger in size.
The bad and the ugly:
The Flash player
People have to download the Flash player in advance before they can view Flash movies, so by using Flash your visitor range will decrease considerably because not everyone will be willing to download the Flash player just to view your site. You’ll also have to put in additional work in redirecting the user to the Flash download page if he or she doesn’t have the player installed.
Site optimization
If your content was presented in Flash, most search engines wouldn’t be able to index your content. Hence, you will not be able to rank well in search engines and there will be less traffic heading to your site.
Loading time
Users have to wait longer than usual to load Flash content compared to regular text and images, and some visitors might just lose their patience and click the Back button. The longer your Flash takes to load, the more you risk losing visitors.
The best way to go is to use Flash only when you absolutely need the interactivity and motion that comes with it. Otherwise, use a mixture of Flash and HTML or use pure text if your site is purely to present simple textual and graphical information.
Tags: affiliate, business, how to, make money, profit, promotion, tutorial, Web Promotion
Mistakes To Avoid When Using Web Templates
Feb 12, 2009 Internet, Tutorials, Web Advertising, Web Design, Web Promotion
Website templates are very affordable and they save you a lot of effort and time when you want to create a new layout for your website. However, a lot of people make mistakes in the process of choosing and using a web template and end up with something that was unlike the image they had in mind. Here are some guidelines to help you avoid those mistakes.
The first obvious mistake you should be aware of is using a template that is very popular. If many people use the same template, your website will not appear unique at all and your credibility as a solid, different website will be tarnished. In other words, you will appear generic just like your next-door neighbours.
To whole point of using a web template is to save time and effort. You just change the title and appropriate details and you’re done. The biggest mistake one makes is to customize the template beyond recognisation. While that may be good in the sense that you’re creating a unique graphic, you’re defying the very purpose of using a web template — saving time and effort.
However, on the opposite side, if a template you purchase is suitable but some changes must be made to suit your site’s theme, then you will have to take some time to make the changes. For example, you can find a very nice template that suits your hobby site except the original designer has put an image of stamps in the header. You can find images of garden plants and spades to replace the stamps for your gardening hobby site. However, do only make the necessary changes and don’t redesign the whole template.
In some circumstances, some people simply make the wrong choice of templates. This is a very subjective issue but you have to be careful in selecting templates to suit your audience. Do not choose templates just because they are pretty, choose them because they serve your purpose.
Tags: affiliate, business, how to, make money, profit, promotion, tutorial, Web Promotion
