Increase Your Credibility With Web Site Awards
May 17, 2008
Web Site Awards are given from other sites to reward your site for a specific reason. They will usually give you an award graphic or text link to include on your site if you win. Awards are great to display on your Web site because they will give your business more credibility to your visitors and customers.
Some things your Web site could be awarded for are:
Web Design Content Load Time Web Features Ease of use Originality
If you think you have a chance to win one of these awards submit your Web site to the sites that give out web awards. Visit other peoples Web sites and see what awards they have won. Only register for awards that are related to the content of your Web site; this helps promote your site to your targeted audience.
Before you register to win an award, make sure your Web site is ready. Your sites content spelling and grammar should be correct. It should be easy to navigate through your Web site. Graphics should be related to the content on your page.
How To Attract People To Your Web Site and Leave Their Contact
May 8, 2008
If you have a website, you want your visitors to stay longer on your website and get more sales. Here are 10 ways you can do to improve it.
1. Give people a free subscription to your e-zine. Almost everyone is publishing a e-zine nowadays so it’s important to give something extra with the free subscription. You could offer a free gift or advertising when people subscribe.
2. Provide your visitors with free content. Your content will be more attractive to your visitors if it’s up-to-date or original. You could also offer people the option to reprint the content in their e-zine or web site.
3. Offer a free online directory. The directory could be full of interesting ebooks, e-zines, web sites etc. If people find your directory to be a valuable resource they will visit it over and over.
4. Give your visitors a free ebook. You could also include your own ad in the ebook and allow other people to give it away. If you don’t want to take the time to write one, you could ask other writers permission to use their articles.
Nine Effective Tips For Improving Your Website?s Usability
April 29, 2008
Web usability is perhaps the most important factor in any web design. This is the driving factor that keeps your visitors coming back to your website. Given below are a few points that you need to consider to increase your website’s usability.
Points to consider for improving web usability
1.) Give your visitor what he is looking for
A visitor means business; he is looking for information and will stay in your site only as long as he gets what he wants. So provide only relevant information on your homepage that is specific to your end users. Web logs are the best means of finding out which keyword your visitor used and for what purpose he could have visited your website.
2.) Tell your visitor what your site is all about
Often websites are crammed with information in no specific order making it hard to figure out what the site is all about! Your site should give information about what it can offer a visitor on an instant basis. You can do this by providing relevant information on the homepage. You can also provide links like ‘about us’ or ‘about this website’ for further clarification.
Love at First Site: Giving Your Website Visitors the right Impression
April 17, 2008
Think of the people who visit your site as blind dates. When you open the door, your blind date usually knows whether they are attracted to you within the first minute. How do they know? Easy. By how you look, what you say, and how you treat them. If you open the door wearing the same clothes you wore in 1987, say, “Wow, from my friend’s description, I thought you would be a lot better looking,” and sneeze in your dates face, not only will you never get a second date, your date will run for his/her life.
The same rules apply to your website. When people do a search for something they want to buy, they usually have many sites to choose from. If yours does not impress them right off the bat, it takes about five seconds for them to find another that does show them what they want to see. There are plenty of other fish in the sea. You are just one among many.
So what do people want to see, you ask? There are 3 standards of website excellence, and they are the same standards you would use to judge your blind date:
Other Ways to Look at Things
April 7, 2008
Many people today are tired of the Microsoft software that came pre-packaged with their operating system. Some have switched over to Apple’s Macintosh line, but for the most part we just put up with what we have. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) has come under a lot of fire as of late for several reasons. Hackers find IE easy to exploit.
These reasons, and many others, have sent Internet users searching for a new, less bug-prone browser. Several browsers have topped the market, and have become quite popular. So popular, in fact, that smart web designers use them in testing their new website functionality.
Opera (www.opera.com) has become my favorite of the ‘other browser’ market. With such subtle things such as mouse gestures, it won me over. The newest release works seamlessly with most plug-ins.
Mozilla (www.mozilla.org) and it’s slimmed-down partner Mozilla Firebird are also very popular. The browser reminds me of the old Netscape 6.0 but works great for most all web applications and websites. It won Best of 2003, Web Browser in a recent PC World contest.
Dont Make Your Website User-UNfriendly!
March 28, 2008
Web Design is a very subjective process. Your idea of what looks good may differ from the next person’s. While wild backgrounds and flashing text were once considered ‘cool’, unwritten standards have evolved into every web designers inventory.
In the following examples I intend to convey a few of those user-unfriendly examples to you. My purpose is only to get you thinking about the layout and performance of your website. If you have one of these examples on your site, and you like it, by all means - leave it there! These are just examples.
1. Page Counters Five years ago, every site had a page counter. They proudly displayed how popular a site had become. The problem is, as many site owners started to find out, is that these counters can be easily manipulated. They can start at any number (not just 1), and they can produce vastly over-inflated numbers. On the other hand, if your site is not a high-traffic area, do you really want customers to know that?
When Good Computers Go Bad
March 19, 2008
Remember the day that you got your new computer (or the hand-me down from Uncle Larry) and you pulled that shiny case out of the box? Once you finally had all of the cables properly mangled into an unmanageable ball, you powered on, the screen lit up and off you went. The PC was fast, programs loaded in the blink of an eye, and Internet surfing was a breeze. Those were the days.
But now your PC seems to need a walker and a dozen car batteries just to get enough energy to start. Now you can turn the PC on, go get some coffee, walk the dog, and wave hello to your local waste management person who is throwing your trash cans around like a toy. When you come back inside, if the computer is ready to go, you’re surprised. Then, once you click on something, the wait starts again.
So what happened? Where did you go wrong?
Moving Things Around
March 9, 2008
How often, men, have you come home to find the living room furniture in different places? Your wife said she was ready for something different, so she moved some things around. It may have been inconvenient at first, but deep inside it felt good to have things a little different at home. Maybe by moving the couch over there it made the room seem bigger. By moving the TV over on that wall gave the room a sense of coziness.
The same can be true for your website. If you are in a rut, and your website isn’t bringing in the results you thought it should, maybe a little ‘furniture moving’ is what you need.
Recently I moved a few things around on my home page. Instead of hitting the customers with an immediate web design and hosting blurb, I put something that caught the user’s eye. My newsletter. Now the first thing that a potential client sees on our home page is an offer for FREE tips and specials. Immediately the customer is ‘given’ something, instead of the same old here’s why we are the best. Since moving the newsletter link to the top, we’ve had a surge of subscribers, more than we’ve had in the last 6 months.
So Much About META Tags!
February 29, 2008
I’ve written about META tags in the past, and I thought I’d help you expand your search engine optimization efforts and increase your web hits.
Rule #1: META tags always go in between the HEAD tags on your website. Rule #2: NEVER include any line breaks in any META tag!
Most everyone knows the two basic META tags: keywords and description.
Keywords should be in a descending order of importance. Move your most important keywords to the front, and don’t repeat yourself (e.g. auto,parts,auto parts,Auto Parts). Keep the list short, to about 25 keywords. If you cater to more than one ethnic group of people, consider keywords in other languages. Lastly, eliminate spaces between the words. Make them “comma” instead of “comma space”.
Descriptions should also be kept short and to the point. Around 100-125 characters is about the max usable length. Make sure you use a few important keywords in your description, be informative but brief.
Web designers should include these tags as well:
These three tags may change if you are the owner of the company/website but not the creator. In that case, the first two lines would be about the company owner, while the third should be the creator or the creator’s web address.
Turn Benefits Into Sales with Streaming Media
February 18, 2008
The “Wow” factor that accompanied the introduction of streaming media on the Web has long passed, and the technology now has to prove itself to marketers. Its’ acceptance by advertisers, in conjunction with other rich media technologies, is on the upswing, but it’s still not widely used to enhance commercial sites.
Companies trying to do business on the Internet are bombarded with marketing advice. Go to your target market. Promote your brand. Develop a web “community.” Publish a Zine. All of it, good advice. But shopping carts are still being abandoned at an alarming rate, and conversion has become the most important web statistic.
In the absence of live salespeople, who know how to listen and focus in on the customers’ desires, businesses on the Web must use the technological tools available to replicate that human experience. Streaming is one of those tools.*
Streaming Media is a natural way to motivate purchasing. It can be integrated into your website as a means to help people get over that "hump" when they haven’t been able to see or touch a product. Use it to calm customers’ nerves, build their trust in your company, and to keep their excitement about your service alive.
