Designing a Winning Web Site That Makes Sales for YOU!
Copyright 2005 Michael Tansey
Would you buy meat from a grocery store that left the bad meat in with the good meat or wasn't clean? Would you buy a car from a sales lot that had totaled automobiles on the front lot? I wouldn't and neither would you. Your website is your grocery store; your car lot. You must have an atmosphere that is pleasing to buyers. One that tells that buyer that you are not an amateur, but instead a trained, seasoned professional. Your site is a direct reflection of your product and that is why having a well designed website can make or break your sales.
The first thing to keep in mind when designing your website, is "surfability". Take a few minutes to look around at several web pages. What makes them appealing? Were there some that you closed out of immediately? Why? Take notes and do your research. Keep in mind that when a person visits your site they have a goal in mind. They are either seeking information or shopping for a product. Give the person what they want without having to search for it. Be sure that all the information on your site is relevant to your product. Make the buyer think that they need your product to solve their problem.
Your main page serves a very specific purpose. It should be an avenue by which the customer can shop your site. It should be easy to view and load very quickly. This is your first impression and we all know that first impressions can either close the deal or loose the deal. Make it simple. It is best to have links that are easily viewable by the reader that will navigate them to where they want to be. Tables are often a great choice when deciding on a way to design the main page of your site. Your main page should load very quickly, chances are if it takes the page more than ten seconds to load even on a 56k modem, the customer will click away to save time, hoping to find the information or product elsewhere. To increase the loading speed of your main page you should avoid large graphics or excessive graphics. Too many banners or special effects can cause a page to load slowly as well.
To make your web site more appealing to the eyes, you should stick to mild colors. If your site is a content site where the user will be doing a lot of reading, it is best to stick to black and white. Color can be added when using tables, as a way to brighten up the page, but remember to keep the overall look of the page professional and appealing to the audience that will be visiting most often. Since screen resolutions vary among monitors, it is a good idea to set the pixels to a standard 800x600. You may also choose to set the tables in your web page to span a percentage of the page rather than a set number of inches. This will be sure to accommodate all screen sizes. You should remember that a lot of Internet users will not use the same browser as you, and therefore you should be sure that your site looks as good on other browsers as it does on your own. You can do this by downloading several browsers through which to look at your page.
Be aware of the fact that the overall look of your website is a way to make money. The appearance of the site, if designed properly, can be an excellent marketing strategy for your product or service.
About the Author
Mike Tansey has been online since 2004. He can help YOU start your own profitable business on the Internet within the next 24 hours...
visit: http://www.Profit-Unlimited.net/pips.html
So how long does it Really take to build a top notch niche website?
Copyright 2005 Ryan Blake
Well follow these steps bellow and you could have one up and running in no time
A niche website doesn't have to be fancy and have all the bells and whistles which so many websites have now a days. For all that fancy stuff makes the page generate slowly and if a possible customer has to wait then there's no ways he's gona stay.
He'll just move on to the next page in line.
For a niche website to be a success it needs these two characteristics.
· It needs to load quickly so that the customer can see what you have to offer.
· It needs to be Search Engine friendly.
Below is a list of websites where you can quickly generate traffic hungry websites in no time. So go check them out.
http://www.smartoptinpages.com/
http://www.trafficequalizer.com/
http://www.directorygenerator.com/
http://www.traffichurricane.com/
All these programs work in basically three easy steps:
1. You import a list of keywords.
2. You fill in a little bit of easy information.
3. And the program automatically creates thousands of optimized pages for the search engines to devour!
There are two that I actually prefer over the rest and they are the top 2 but you can make your own decision on that.
There is one thing that is VITALLY IMPORTANT and that is to make your template as different from the default as possible NO MATTER what kind of page generator software you are using, for a lot of people are real lazy and will just cut and paste and then you're simply wasting your time for the key is diversity.
The search engines are getting wise to these type of sites and the further you can distance yourself from the standard 'out of the box' site the better off you will be.
Here are a couple great places to find custom templates:
http://www.trafficequalizertemplates.com/
http://www.directorygeneratortemplate.com/
http://www.whereismysite.com/
Now that you have a unique template the next MOST IMPORTANT step is to make your web pages irresistible to the "Search Engines".
While page generation is a fabulous way to get thousands of pages up fast - how do you automate the process and yet give the search engines exactly what they are looking for? You give them current, fresh & relevant content? You can do this an more with a piece of code you get from http://www.articleburner.com/.
Just insert this code on the template before you generate your pages - and a specially programmed server would automatically place a keyword relevant article on that page BEFORE the search engine has crawled it!
Here are 3 reasons why this works so well.
1. It makes your pages rank higher.
2. It makes your pages more user friendly to the surfer and more clickable.
3. It makes your pages irresistibly fit the needs of the search engines.
Here are a few great programs that help you add tons of fresh content to your sites:
http://www.articleequalizer.com/
http://www.articlebot.com/
And there's one more piece of code you will want to paste into your template before you generate those 1000's of pages...
That piece of code is available at http://www.rssrandomizer.com/
RSS is a great way to make your site "unfingerprintable" because without RSS Randomizer on your site, finding and banning your machine generated site is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel for "Search Engines!"
Here are a couple great programs that help you add RSS listings to your sites:
http://www.rssequalizer.com/
http://www.autonewsbuilder.com/
So go check it out and best of luck.
About the Author
Well I hope that you gained some valuable tips from this Article and while you're here I would like to tell you about a wonderful place I discovered where you can learn all you could ever want about Internet marketing and so make a success of all your future campaigns.
Here's a link to join there mailing list and receive cutting edge, up to date tips on how to make every campaign a success.
http://tinyurl.com/dt4rb
Woes of a Big Site: And How to Prepare Your Site for Growth
I often read posts in forums and discussion lists by newcomers asking how their site can become big and well-known. Well, naturally this is every webmaster's dream - who ever creates a site hoping it will become obscure? However, what many newcomers fail to appreciate is that big and well-known sites face a number of problems. Problems which my other site, Affiliated-Business.com, has begun to face as a result of its rising popularity and size. This article mentions a few of those problems and some things that can be done to pre-empt them (which alas I did not do).
1. Traffic (Bandwidth) Problems
It's interesting how everyone faces traffic problems. The small site faces traffic problems - few people visit them. When the site increases in popularity, it too faces traffic problems, albeit a different kind: the expensive kind.
When a site is starting out, the typical data transfer (sometimes loosely, and incorrectly, called "bandwidth") allocation of (say) 5GB seems generous and a distant target that looks impossible to hit. But wait till it becomes popular. Suddenly that 5GB looks very skimpy, and you'll be frantically searching your web host's documentation for how they charge for "overages" (the amount by which you exceed your allocation).
One of thefreecountry.com's previous web hosts had a rather pathetic traffic "overage" policy. If the site exceeded its traffic allocation, it would be shut-down for a month. (Gee, how did I miss that in the fine print?) To prevent that, the owner has to pre-pay for additional blocks of data transfer. The trouble is, the host had no system of warning you in advance when you were nearing your limit, which meant that the webmaster had to monitor the traffic of the site closely. To add insult to injury, the additional data transfer you had to pre-pay for came only in blocks of 10GB. Let's face it: when you initially exceed the "bandwidth" limit, it is unlikely that you'll exceed by 10GB. The initial "overage" is likely to be at most 1 to 2GB (unless of course you had just embarked on an aggressive advertising campaign).
My recommendation: when scouting for web hosts - think ahead. Check out the "bandwidth" or data transfer policy. It should bill you according to the amount you actually exceed and you should not be required to have to pre-pay it. And read the fine print in all their policy statements carefully. Oh yes. For reasons mentioned in my article on " How to Choose a Web Host ", it is probably best to stay clear of hosts that advertise "unlimited bandwidth". If you have not read that article.
2. Too Many Pages to Update
When I first designed thefreecountry.com , I did not plan for it to be the large site it is today. As such, I made no provision for keeping certain common features found on every page in a single location. Instead, things like the navigation menu, logo, etc, were inserted into every single page.
This was fine when Affiliated-Business.com was small. But it became a nightmare to maintain as the site grew. Just imagine - each time I wanted to change the design of the site, I had to manually go through the two hundred odd pages to modify them. I could not even use the search and replace feature of my editor to simplify my task - the changes often span multiple lines and are interspersed with page-specific information.
My suggestion is that even if you think your site is a small site in terms of number of pages, plan for its eventual growth. Put common design elements of your pages in a central location. There are many ways to do this: using Server Side Includes (SSI), using frames, dynamically generating it from a template, etc.
Don't think this will not happen to you. When I started the predecessor of Affiliated-Business.com in 1996, I only had 3 pages. Today it's a monster. True it is not as big as those sites with thousands of pages (shudder) - but I can tell you from experience that once you hit a three digit number for the number of pages, updating the design of the site isn't quite so enjoyable anymore.
3. Reliability
Usually when a site is new, the owners consider it little more than a hobby horse. As such they tend to simply find a cheap web host to dump it on, since in its infancy, the site is unlikely to generate much income anyway. This is what I did originally with thefreecountry.com.
It would have been fine except that I kept Affiliated-Business.com on the cheap web host far longer than I should have.
Cheap web hosts seldom have the margin they need to hire good, competent help. Now I don't mean technical support that responds to you fast. Anyone can do that - even that cheap host I was on. Their responses each time however display their ignorance. When I say competent help, I mean the kind that knows the server hardware, the various software that run on it, security issues, and how to fix software and hardware problems. You need that kind of competent help so that they can pre-empt (as far as possible) potential problems as well as handle any true crisis that arise (eg fixing new security holes in BIND or Sendmail, etc, or troubleshooting hardware problems).
When your site grows and gains more visitors, the "uptime" of the site becomes increasingly important. If the server goes "down" for a couple of hours when your site is new, you have lost at most a few visitors. But when your site is well established, every hour that your site is down loses you thousands of visitors (and the income associated with them).
If, like me, you placed your site on a cheap host when you started out, you should keep an eye out for good, reputable web hosts so that when your site grows, you'll know where to move it to. Such hosts may cost slightly more than a budget web host, but the stability you get is well worth the extra expense, especially when your site has a lot of traffic.
Unfortunately though, keeping up to date with the web hosting scene is not a one-time affair. If you have been following the changes in my " Which Web Hosts Do You Recommend? " FAQ page you would have seen that good hosts do turn bad over time. This usually happens when they get too big, and have to hire additional help that do not have the commitment and competence of the original owner.
The verdict: budget hosts are fine when your site is small. But always be prepared to move. And you definitely should move when your site grows bigger and becomes a viable commercial venture.
(For the curious, thefreecountry.com is no longer hosted at the cheap web host I mentioned.)
Planning for Growth
This article is really about planning for growth. The best time to do that is when your site is young. The changes that you need to make to prepare for the future will be smaller when it is young. Don't wait till your site is too big. I had to learn the hard way from hindsight. You don't have to.
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