Three Common Mistakes When Designing A Web Site
I like to compare our society to the Mazda’s ‘Zoom Zoom’ slogan. Everyone today is just zoom zooming all over the place. So, who wants to read your long drawn out explanation of well…anything? Or scroll left to right? Or even read out of date material? No one. Described below are reasons why and solutions to the problem.
Yes, You Can Have To Much Information
When creating your site keep it simple. No need for paragraph after paragraph, simple short sentences will do just fine. Use creative eye catchers such as:
• Customized bullets make things easy to read, reduce space and draw attention
• Numbers (1, 2, 3) do too, they lead the reader to what they want to know
Our zoom zoom society wants their information quick and easy. Lists with subheadings are extremely popular, as well as links to another page explaining a topic. Even if it explains something minor it stands alone, is easy to access, and quick to read. This keeps the scroll bar longer and the page shorter. The viewer’s eye easily gets lost in all that information and no one wants to scroll forever.
Click, Click is easier and less frustrating than skimming.
Pictures, video’s and other graphics distract when they are everywhere. They draw attention away, not too. Highlight what is important with a graphic. If that is simply your logo on every page that surely is enough.
Yes, Horizontal Scrolling Is Bad
Standard Web pages usually for Dreamweaver default are 600 (h) x 480 (w) or 640 (h) x 480 (w) and Flash defaults are 1024 (h) x 768 (w) or 550 (h) x 400 (w). These are measured in pixels, the unit of measure used for the screen. When staying inside these lines you eliminate horizontal scrolling. Website viewers already scroll vertically and don’t want to scroll horizontally. Again in our zoom zoom society that just wastes time.
If you have horizontal scrolling it is guaranteed that less than half of your viewers are choosing not to scroll over. So stay inside the lines.
Yes, Your Site Can Go Out of Date
Have you ever seen a Website that says, Last Updated: January 2007? Or How about, Last Updated: January 2004? You’ve probably seen something similar. In the Web world outdated means three to five months. Updates are important because they prove to your viewers that you care about their interest. Keep their interest by maintaining and updating your site. Don’t get carried away not everything standard has to be updated, but a few minor additions or deletions are always good.
These three features gone wrong can discourage viewers and down ratings. If you have too much information, horizontal scrolling and / or out of date information you can fix it in a flash. You can also simply avoid them completely.
Written by Ricco Richardson
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If you get what you pay for, anything free must not be worth much. This is as true for free Web hosting services as any other commodity. A free Web host may or may not provide the required level of reliability. Therefore extreme caution must be taken when choosing a free Web host.
There are several restrictions likely to appear. These include:
1. Advertisements, potentially those of competing Web sites, may be placed upon any site they host. This is a common source of revenue for a free host. These advertisements prove to be an irritant for many customers who may not like their browsing experience to be affected by these ads.
2. There may be little to no support with a free hosting plan. Sometimes only a FAQ page is offered as support. There may be no chance for change or correction of problems even when a complaint is filed.
3. The host may suffer frequent server breakdowns. There may be insufficient bandwidth to support the Web site’s needs. There may be no scalability. There may be thousands of other Web sites competing for the same server resources. This “death of a thousand paper cuts” result in hosts that look good at first glance, but fail miserably in practice.
4. Few free Web hosts offer significant storage space or even restrict the type of files allowed for use. For example, files typically that use a lot of bandwidth (like MP3 files) may not be allowed. This can cripple the utility of many Web sites.
5. Free Web hosts may also require the use of a sub-domain, which makes the ID much longer than it would have been if the Web site used its own domain name. The vast increase in URL length for the site can result in many potential customers forgetting, misspelling, or otherwise failing to reach the site quickly and efficiently.
These are not insignificant disadvantages. The Internet is a very competitive and unforgiving environment. Visitors can be very fickle and are unlikely to return to a Web site that suffers from frequent technical problems, is cluttered with obtrusive banner advertisements, or which otherwise encumbers their navigation. Because the Internet makes most tasks very easy, this ease of use is expected. Complications are typically greeted with simple avoidance, as there is almost certainly an easier way to accomplish any given task.
Generally speaking, a free host should be avoided if the desire is to set up a business Web site. The resultant loss in terms of customers lost can be much higher than the actual gain to be had through Web presence. A sub-standard site is often the sign of a sub-standard business.
Free Web hosts are, however, a safe choice if the Web site is an information Web site or a personal Web site. Even then the goal should be for this to be a limited period. For a Web site to grow, money will have to be invested eventually.
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One of the keys to a profitable web site is analyzing your hits to visitor ratio. What does it mean if you have a low hit to visitor ratio? This article provides the answer
No Depth
An effective means for analyzing web site traffic is to look at the number of hits per visitor for a time period. To do this, you simply divide the number of hits by the number of visitors for the time period in question. Time periods can be a day, week, month or quarter of a year. Don’t look at any time smaller than a day as the data may not create an accurate picture of the traffic.
Assume you have the best damn dang hair net site on the net. You have over 1,000 hair nets of every variation, color, material and weave. For those of you not “in the know”, a hair net is one of those things people working in fast food places have to wear. I have no idea why, but I am sure there was a lawsuit once that makes complete and total sense.
Anyway, a site with over 1,000 hair nets should have a massive number of pages. Logically, every visitor to the site should click through more than a few pages while looking for the perfect specimen. Unfortunately, you find the server stats tell a different story.
In reviewing server stats, you learn that on average the site receives 5,000 visitors a day and 10,000 hits. Dividing hits by visitors, you discover to your dismay each visitor is looking at only two pages on average. This information is supported by the fact you’re only averaging a few sales a day. Aye, Carumba!
There are a few possible reasons for this poor performance:
1. Slow Site: A site with 1,000 products is going to require a very careful database design. I would guess 70 percent of database sites are fatally slow. By fatally, I mean they load so slowly that most dial-up users can’t navigate in the site. We are talking 30 to 40 second page load times. If you have this problem, you are immediately losing the 45 percent of people using dial-up.
2. Click Fraud: If you are running a PPC campaign, you must track the clicks in the campaign. A low hit to visitor ratio can often mean your PPC ads are being artificially clicked as such clickers rarely venture into the internal pages of a site.
3. Poor Advertising: This one is purely your fault. Your advertising must focus on keywords that are relevant to your site. If you are selling hair nets, don’t place ads under “hair styling.” If you do, people will click your ad, see hair nets and immediately leave. Know your limitations!
There can be a variety of reasons for low hit to visitor ratios. More often than not, slow load times are the answer. If the site is fast, then you need to dig deeper so you can figure out a way to make your visitors do the same.
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You’ve spent a good deal of time creating an awesome website with very enticing advertising copy that is very successful in getting your customers to click the “Buy Me” button. However, after examining your websites logs you’ve come to notice a very ugly pattern – your customers are abandoning your website after they decide to buy your product (after they click the “Buy Me” button). This is called shopping cart abandonment, because it is usually the purchasing process within your shopping cart that scares the customer away.
Let’s go over 5 ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment:
1. Be crystal clear as to what needs to be done: Complex shopping carts are a sure way to scare away potential customers. Make sure the instructions on what needs to be filled out are simple, easy to read, and easy to edit. Also, if the checkout process is multi-paged, make sure the button or link to get to the next page is clearly displayed.
2. Add a progress meter: The typical purchasing process for a given product on a website is multi-step (multi-page). While it is good to keep these steps to as few as possible, it’s even better to let your customer know what step they are on. A progress meter simply tells the customer what step they are in within your purchasing process. You’ve probably seen them in action on some of your favorite websites. It could be a graphical meter or a simple text-based indicator. A progress meter is absolutely necessary to help reduce shopping cart abandonment.
3. Show the product (or products) in the shopping cart: This can be a small picture, or a very brief (but specific) description of the product. Make sure the picture or description of the product contains a popup link that shows all the details and benefits the product has to offer. Remember, as customers fill out the purchase form they need to see what they are actually buying – so they know exactly what their purchase consists of – and you’ll also find that many just need to reread the benefits before they continue with their purchase.
4. Provide the shipping & handling costs upfront: It’s a good idea to include the S&H costs in the first step of the check out process – or even better, include the costs in the product description page. Even though they were well aware of the S&H costs, potential customers get quite annoyed when they spend 10 minutes of their time typing all their checkout information to find that the total cost just shot up $15 for S&H on the last step.
5. Add some comfort logos: Do you belong to the BBB? If so, display the BBB logo on the website. Another good logo is the Hacker Safe logo (www.scanalert.com) indicating that your website is Hacker Safe certified. Simple Verisign and credit card logos are also beneficial in adding more comfort to the process.
There you have it… five good ways to help put the brakes on your shopping cart abandonment rate.
Sincerely,
Michael Ellis
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Focusing on a nook to the exclusion of everything else is a tremendous way to make money.
The Advantage of Going After A Nook On The Web
When we talk about a nook, we are merely focusing on a specific area of a service or product sector. Think of nooks and crannies in a room. A simple, but clear, example of a nook would be Lasik eye surgery. It is a nook within the larger field of eye care and much larger field of medical services. The key to making money in your particular area is to focus on a specific nook that provides either a large volume of business or small volume with lucrative profit margins.
One of the biggest nook advantages is the ability to quickly become a dominant player in the area in question. By definition, there is almost always a limited pool of competitors in the market area, either for the area itself or the geographic limitation. Assume you are offering Lasik eye services. There are a limited number of medical professionals in your area offering the same thing. This means you have an outstanding opportunity to become the dominant personality. You can go get appearances on the local television and radio shows, publish articles in the paper and so on. News outlets are desperate for such quality content.
On the web, the same concept applies with a slightly different orientation. You want to focus on your nook to the exclusion of everything else. This sounds simple, but can be difficult to implement. There is an incredible temptation to expand a site beyond the nook in question. The motivation, of course, is greed. We all tend to think that if we offer tour services to London, our clientele would obviously be interested in buying soccer shirts for the professional teams in London. Wrong. Define your nook and stick to it. Even if you sell a few shirts, you risk distracting your prospects from purchasing a tour.
The web also provides unique advantages found in no other business medium. One of the dominant ways to market any business is to write content for periodicals. I am talking about informative articles, not advertisements. If you wrote an article for the local paper and they included it in their Sunday edition, how would you be viewed? It would be a lot more effective than an advertisement and, over time, you would become a trusted source for most readers. Whenever they thought of your area of expertise, they would come to you or your business. Talk about a goldmine!
On the web, you can take this example to the extreme. There are numerous sites known as article directories. These sites collect articles for an interesting audience. Websites, blogs and online newsletters need content all of the time. They use article directories to find the content. You should submit articles to the directories under the category applicable to your business. If you make the articles informative, you will quickly become a credible source and they will use your articles again and again. It is like being published in your local paper and a few hundred papers in other cities.
In summary, find your nook or cranny and stick to it.
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