3 Simple Ways To Dramatically Improve Your Website
|
|
Before you start worrying about marketing your website on the internet it always pays dividends to look at the website itself and get the fundamentals right before looking to shout about it from the virtual mountain-tops.
You may already have thought about the following 3 ways and some of you may already have them in place on your website. If so ? congratulations ? you're well on the way to having a website that will bring you more business. So here they are then ? the 3 Simple Ways To Dramatically Improve Your Website..
1. You're Fishing For Visitors ? You'll Need This To Hook Them.
Ever been surfing on a website that held your attention and then the phone rings? You take the call, take some notes, get distracted, visit another website and before you know it you've forgotten all about the website you were viewing. It happens all the time and if you don't have a Bookmarking tool on your website it will be happening with the people that come to your website. A Bookmarking tool is just a simple link or logo that your visitors can click on in order to bookmark your website or add it to their favourites. It is best to have the button located on the homepage but an even better option is to have a bookmarking button on every page so a visitor can actually bookmark each specific page of your website for safe-keeping. Look to the left of this article and you will see the bookmarking button we use ? click on it to see how it adds this specific page to your favourites ? nifty eh?
2. 'X' Marks The Spot.
Visitors come to your website and if you're lucky ? they like it and click beyond the homepage. Excellent. But they can't find what they're looking for. Uh oh, you could be in trouble. There's a lot of information on your website and Mr. Visitor doesn't have time to sift through it all to find what he's looking for. You'd better hope that he's either very patient or that you've provided him with a simple map to help him get to the 'treasure' he is looking for. A Site Map is an essential item ? particularly on larger websites.
There is nothing more frustrating than hunting around for something and wasting time when just a simple one pager that presents a summary of all the information on your website could be used. A Site Map should be reachable from all pages of your website in just one click and should have clickable links on it so that a visitor can zoom straight through to their desired location without having to hunt around. If you don't give them a map your visitors may become frustrated searching around for that desired piece of information and they may leave your website never to return.
3. Don't Make Your Visitors Have To Write An Email To Contact You
If you are inviting enquiries or contact from visitors to your website you need to provide them with a way of doing this that is as easy as possible for them. Just posting your email address on the website is not the best solution. Why? Because when they click on it they need to then create an email from scratch. Do you know how busy your visitors are? They hardly have time to read the content of your homepage ? never mind create an email from scratch. The solution? You need to use a simple form. A form enables you to standardise the responses that you receive and it also makes it very simple for your visitors to get in touch with you ? all they need to do is pop in their name, email address and tick a few boxes and that's it.
Making it easy for your visitors to contact you isn't the only reason that using a form is a great idea. Doing so means you can get some information back from each person that fills in the form. You can ask them how they discovered your website, which other websites they like to visit ? you can ask them anything! Anything that is going to help you learn more about them, more about who they are and more about what will make them buy from you. You think they would tell you all this if they were creating an email from scratch? No ? of course they wouldn't! That's why you need a form.
Mike Cheney, www.magnet4web.com (c)
About The Author
Are You Getting Your MagnetMail? - Mike Cheney's World-Famous Free Magic Mail To Make Your Website Magnetic, Get Yours Now: www.magnet4web.com/website_services/?page=magnetmail
|
|
|
Created & Maintained by Empower! CMS Web Sites
Host2Sell Web Hosting | Emarketing Workshops | Site SEO Review | FREE NewsletterHow To Make Your Site Attractive To Potential Link Partners
Every now and then, I receive a link exchange request from someone who wants a link from my directory (my high-ranking directory directly accessible from the index page), and in exchange, they're willing to link to my page from one of their zillions of link pages about 18 jumps away from the home page. Needless to say, the proffered page has a Google PageRank of 0, and chances are it's not even indexed by any search engines.What an enticing offer.If you want people to trade links with you, thus increasing your PageRank and traffic, you must offer them a valuable link in return. Not all links are created equally. Here are...(related: Web Design)
Integrating Advertising Into Your Web Design
If you are going to be placing ads on your website, you'll want to put some thought into how you'll integrate them. Poor integration of ads into your website will cause visitors t...(related: Web Design)
Web Design: How To Get Your Visitors To Stay
Remember the famous line from the movie Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come"? In the world of Internet marketing, you not only want them to come, you want them to stay.The Internet is fast-paced. Your visitors decide very quickly whether or not you have what they want. There are five strategies that will help you engage your visitors and encourage them to explore what you have to offer.Make Your Site About Your Visitors Not YouIn order to do this, you must clearly know your target audiences and what you anticipate they will be looking f...(related: Web Design)
Why Long Web Pages Are Better Than Short Ones
Many Internet sites that try to sell you something have very long pages. Why is that do you think? Well, it appears that long, scrolling, web pages lead to more sales than short pages. This article explains why you need long web pages.If you have surfed the web for things to buy you can hardly have missed some of the seemingly endless, long, scrolling web pages that only tell you the price somewhere near the bottom of the page. Some of these web pages have around 5,000 words on them - a good chapter o...(related: Web Design)
You Too Can Have Fun With Sepia Images!
If you are one of those who wonder how people come up with the cool looking sepia tone prints that you admire so much. If you are doubling up with jealousy over a sepia tone, here, we will give you tips on how you could achieve this sepia tone, too. Ready up your Photoshop software program, your PC and prepare to have fun with sepia! It's time that they envy you, too.First of all it is important for you to choose images that have some darks and lights ? it doesn't matter how colorful they are. Many images could go along with sepia tone, so you won't take forever finding an image. You can even have a...(related: Web Design)
How To Write An Effective Faq Page
Websites that have multiple pages usually have a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page. There are several good reasons why you should have one.
How To Create A Great Landing Page For Your Website
The landing page or entry page of your visitors is the most important page to your website. This page is likely to be your home page if you happen to be promoting your website url http://www.yourdomain.com more often than your other sub-directory pages as in http://www.yourdomain.com/sub-directory-page.Your visitor, who is a very busy individual, is not very likely to stay for more than a minute if you fail to capture his attention once he lands on your website. When your visitor lands on your page, he or she is likely to have the thought "What is in it for me?" You must be able to capture his or her attention on what is immediately visible before he or spends more time browsing your website.So what infor...(related: Web Design)
Immutable Laws Of Effective Navigation - Part 1
The first immutable law of effective navigation: It's gotta be readily available.Visitors should not have to hunt for your navigation or wonder where to find it. If you've done your job right, it will be right there when they are ready for it.The struggle in creating good navigation is to figure out what type of navigation the visitor is going to need, when he is going to need it, and where the most effective placement will be.Basically, you have to anticipate your visitors needs and have a solution ready.Here are four key areas where you can squeeze out the most effectiveness:1. Global navigation.Global navigation is a set of links to all the main areas of your site that is avai...(related: Web Design)
Nine Effective Tips For Improving Your Website?s Usability
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...(related: Web Design)
site-map - Copyright © 2006 Empower! Web Design | All Rights Reserved. | Web Design
Web Design - 7 Key Things To Avoid
A search for "web design" on Google returns more than 325 million results. So how do we start eliminating all these so called designers? Here are a few of the most common shortcomings.