The Importance of Blog Design
Blogs have increased popularity over the past few years. Many people have started to create their personal blogs to express their thoughts and feelings. Internet companies have also started their blogs to inform consumers on the latest product news and reviews. Read more
Generating Revenue With Good Planning
For anything to work well, care must be taken to make firm, workable plans to execute it and the same goes for website designs. With a well thought out website design, you will be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you. In fact, may websites turn into online wasteland because they are not well planned and do not get a single visitor. Gradually, the webmaster will not be motivated to update it anymore and it turns into wasted cyberspace. Read more
4 Crucial Things You Need To Do To Build your List
Online marketing may have developed a sudden surge these past few years, but many in the know how have felt its rise even from way then. As more internet based businesses are put up, the need to develop new marketing skills and knowledge based on this new medium have arisen. More and more marketing strategies are being discovered and developed to cope with the changing face of business the business world. Read more
5 Ways to Keep Visitors Coming Back
A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Read more
Tearing Down A Website To Make It Better
This is not a typical SEO case, but there are some situations when a site is really bad enough, meaning on how it was built, you need to really break its root in order to rebuild it to a better performing website. The result is better search engine crawl-ability, visibility and conversions. Read more
When Is the Right Time to Redesign Your Website?
If you have a website for a few years, chances are you often wonder whether it is the right time to do a total redesign of your website or not. Well, here are some points to consider before you go diving in head first: Read more
Don’t Make These Website Template Mistakes
Website templates can be quite cheap compared to a custom design and it may also save you a lot of time and effort if you don’t have the skills to do it yourself. Although it’s a “cookie-cutter” design and you are limited to how much you can change it, it is still a very good option for those who do not yet have the money or expertise to do the website design themselves.
To help these folks out, we are going to list some mistakes we’ve noticed others make when designing their website with a template.
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 neighbors.
The 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 recognition. 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 contrary, 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. Just be sure to 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.
When a client wants to use a template for their site, it is usually because they like the layout of the template and all they want done is a redesign of the images to fit their theme/business. This is what you should be doing when you purchase a template. Just make sure you have the tools and the expertise to do it, because the results can be more than devastating despite how happy you’ll feel because you’ve done it yourself.
Self-fulfillment and satisfaction is a big thing, but if it ends up hurting your business, what good is it?
This article was written by TexasSEO.com – Texas SEO is a Dallas-based web marketing and consulting company. We can help you improve your on-site and off-site optimization so that your website not only looks good to visitors but rank well for the keywords you need. Let us increase your business by first giving you a free analysis.
Web Design Elements To Avoid
As a web designer, you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience. It doesn’t matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world — if your website is poorly done you won’t be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.
When we say a “good design”, we’re not only talking about a good graphical design. A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components which contribute to a good website design — accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design.
Hence, we have highlighted some features of the worst web designs we’ve come across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it’s high time to take serious action!
1) Background music
Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, we would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and every time a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again.
Visitors will simply run away from your site. Moreover, they just add to the visitors burden when viewing your site — users who are still on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your website as it is meant to be viewed.
2) Extra large/small text size
As we’ve said, there is more to web design than purely graphics — user accessibility is one big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it’s illegible you won’t be selling anything!
3) Disoriented Images
What we mean by this is there is absolutely no structure. We’re almost halfway through 2009 and we still see websites that have images all over their page as if they were randomly placed. This causes the website to lose a lot of credibility even if the business is legitimate.
In conclusion to this article, let us remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it’s meant to do effectively. Don’t let some minor mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally!
This article was written by Dallas’ TexasSEO.com – Texas SEO is a Dallas-based web marketing and consulting company. We can help you improve your on-site and off-site optimization so that your website not only looks good to visitors but rank well for the keywords you need. Let us increase your business by first giving you a free analysis.
Some Good Design Practices
Your website is the storefront of your business — it’s like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.
- Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.
- Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.
- Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big (usually no more than 4-5 lines). This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.
- In addition to that, don’t let your website be too wide. Our eyes have a very small focal point and to have to constantly scan across an entire screen becomes tiresome. You’ll lose the visitor’s attention very quickly.
- Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.
- Avoid using javascript languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use javascript to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that. Most importantly, search engines are unable to read javascript!
- Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go. We use CSS on all of our sites we create – even this one.
This article was written by Dallas’ TexasSEO.com – Texas SEO is a Dallas-based web marketing and consulting company. We can help you improve your on-site and off-site optimization so that your website not only looks good to visitors but rank well for the keywords you need. Let us increase your business by first giving you a free analysis.
How To Make Your Website Sell Better
Convincing your prospects to purchase from you is a hard job, but have you ever thought that you’re making the process twice as difficult for both parties if your prospects are convinced but don’t know how to buy from you? No matter how good you are at convincing your prospects, they won’t buy if they find the process cumbersome.
First, you will want to check that people can find your order form easily and hassle-free. You can write a clear, concise paragraph to direct your prospects to your order form so that you can minimize the chances of them getting lost. You can also reduce the chances of losing prospects by putting a prominent link to your order page from every other page on your site.
Also, do you offer multiple payment options? Some people may feel comfortable paying via Paypal, some may only want to pay with their credit card and others might want to send a check. The more options you offer, the better your chances of covering your prospects’ desired payment method. After all, it wouldn’t make any sense to sell hard to a prospect only to find that they won’t be able to pay you when they want to.
On the other hand, you will want to prove that you are a credible merchant. Is your order form secured using encryption technology? You would want to look into SSL for this. You can also offer a money back guarantee so that people will feel confident about buying from you. How about after sales support? Who do they contact when they have problems after purchasing?
Alternatively, you can add customer testimonials, your contact information, address, and so on to boost your prospects’ confidence. Make them feel safe about buying something from you, a total stranger to them on the other end of the Internet.
As a conclusion, it would be very pitiful if you sold hard and sold well to a prospect and something goes wrong when he or she is ready to pay. Eliminate any chances of that to maximize your profits!
This article was written by Dallas’ TexasSEO.com – Texas SEO is a Dallas-based web marketing and consulting company. We can help you improve your on-site and off-site optimization so that your website not only looks good to visitors but rank well for the keywords you need. Let us increase your business by first giving you a free analysis.
