Archive for the ‘Websites’ Category

By Tammy Embrich

First of all, you need to ask yourself why you are creating a website? What are you hoping to gain or benefit from it? Most sites are created to make money. If this is your case, then you need to determine how you are going to make that a reality.

Are you going to make money through a service you offer or products you are going to sell? Making money through a service you offer is web design, ghostwriting, proofreading, virtual assistant, and the like.

You have skills in a particular area and you are going to make money offering a service. So, what do you think needs to be included on your homepage? What about a welcome message? Remember this as you contemplate…”First impressions are important.”

On a website, first impressions are everything! You need to grab your reader’s attention with the home page to get them to seek further what your site is all about. You want them to hopefully, stay on your site. And thus, land on the sell page, and of course purchase your services.

So, what do you need in order to motivate your reader into finding out more and to purchase your services?

Well for starters, many people think that a web design is more important than the content. Nothing can be further from the truth. The content on a web page speaks volumes. People are searching for information…meaning letters put together to form sentences and paragraphs. This content must be simple and to the point. Most often, a person won’t remain on a site where you have to translate fancy long words into understandable english. Simple and short paragraphs are key.

A landing homepage will need the main facts of what the website is all about and to further contain additional pages that are incorporated and structured around that home page. So, you want to include just the main points, it’s important to not go into great detail on the main page of your site. You want the reader to click through onto your other pages, get them on your sales page, and finally, entice them into a call of action to purchase.

What exactly should I include on my homepage?

* A brief summary on the kind of services you offer, remember, don’t go into great detail

* A frequently asked questions link that leads to the answers you provide

* A testimonials link that leads to what people are saying about your services (if available)

* Contact information, usually a working email address where you can be contacted

* Site map link that leads to the various pages throughout your site

* Main menu list, this list includes the names of the various main pages of your site and is often located either in the upper right or left corner.

A Few Highlights

1. Don’t include any pricing information on your homepage, make an additional “pricing info” page

2. Determine if you are going to offer advertising space and include something or the text “Advertise Here” in a specific area where the ads will be located. Make a separate page that includes headings of the ad options and pricing.

3. Include a links page where you will list various websites that have exchanged links with your site. This will also warrant a “link to us” page where you will include a text link option as well as graphics for your site. (banner or a button)

4. Name your website according to what key phrases you would like to be highly ranked for. You will also need a description in you code and keywords as well. This helps you get indexed with the major search engines.

One final thought: Always proofread your website content. There is nothing worse than a site with a lot of typos and poor grammar. You want a professional, well-written, and search engine friendly website.

Article Written By Tammy Embrich

Tammy has been successful in the work at home industry for 4 years now. She is an Internet marketer, article marketer, and ghostwriter. She offers free job leads for the job seeker, as well as other work at home resources, work at home articles, tips, and more at Work At Home Jobs

You can also find Tammy at Work At Home Job Leads, offering legitimate work at home companies, more free job leads, work at home articles, and much more.

By: Sally Ormond

Frequently I am asked by people to give them an analysis of their website copywriting. Again and again I see the same mistakes so I thought I’d write this post about it to help you review your own site.

Believe it or not, the appearance of your website text can actually have an impact on your sales. Its readability can affect your reader’s buying decision. Many companies place more importance on the design of their site than the words it contains – big mistake! It is the words that will sell not the graphics.

To give you a helping hand I have listed below 7 basics to make your website readable:

1. Easy to read

This covers everything from simple words and sentences to the colour scheme. Use a light coloured text on a light background and your copy will be unreadable; the same goes for using a bright coloured font on a dark background.

2. Attention grabbing

If you want to get their attention, use headlines. Make sure you work your keywords into the headings too. Break up your text with plenty of sub-headings. Not only will it make it more attractive on the screen (a huge block of text is a major turn-off) but they will also act as sign-posts so your reader can find the information that’s relevant to them.

3. Highlight your keywords

Emphasize words that are important to your reader by making them bold, italics or a different colour. Things like free, fast, free delivery and your key selling points.

4. Font size

Don’t use text that is either too small or too big. Save the larger text for your headings and sub-headings.

5. CAPS are bad

If you use all capital letters in your copy you’ll come across as unprofessional plus it’s very hard to read.

6. Spacing

A well spaced page of text is a readable page of text. Use plenty of white space, headings and sub-headings to signpost the important sections. Show your benefits as a bulleted list so they stand out. Whatever spacing format you use, make sure it’s consistent throughout your site.

7. Check and re-check

Breaking grammar rules can be very effective in sales writing, but sloppy spelling and punctuation isn’t. Mind you that’s not to say that your grammar can be sloppy – it should always be used correctly unless you are trying to get a point across. There is nothing worse than a website full of typos – it’s very unprofessional.

This list is by no mean exhaustive and I could go on for hours about. Take time out to review your website. It is your company’s online shop window. Review every section of text from its appearance to its factual content – is there too much detail or too little, are there any call to actions?

Your website shouldn’t be viewed as an optional extra in your marketing campaign. You don’t have one just because it’s nice to have or because everyone else has one. Your website is there to sell – use it.

Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com

About The Author

More details about copywriting can be found at www.briarcopywriting.com and www.freelancecopywritersblog.com.

By: Balwinder

“What makes a great web page?”

People ask me this all the time, though they often encounter
difficulty boiling the question down to so few words.

Every serious website operator wants to know how to create
and maintain the best possible website that makes them the
most money and builds the largest subscriber base!

The following “commandments” represent the ideals towards
which every new or existing website should strive.

1. Thou shalt have a Purpose

Clearly define the site’s purpose and ensure all content
(pages, graphics and text) tightly focus on that purpose.
Discard all extraneous material… only give people exactly
what they came for!

2. Thou shalt be Lightweight

Use only small, fast loading graphics. If you must use large
graphics use thumbnails and image slicing to diminish the
size of every file to less than 12-15kb. Use standard
optimized gif’s and jpg’s and avoid anything that requires
the user to download a “plug-in” to view your content.

3. Thou shalt Load Fast

Each and every page on your site should weigh in under
30-60KB total, including graphics and navigation.

If your pages must be larger, such as the case with long,
1-page sales letters, make sure the top part of the page
loads fast so surfers can read your headline and
introduction while the rest of your sales letter loads
further down and out of site.

4. Thou shalt not use False Code

Use only html. Never use java, xml, dhtml or other forms of
code that require a surfer to keep their browser set up
“correctly” to accommodate your page. This is especially
true when using “cloaked” pages that require the use of
javascript in order to work correctly.

5. Thou shalt respect the Search Engines

If you want search engine traffic, use whole web pages that
don’t incorporate frames. Search engines get confused trying
to read content from most frames pages because the designers
don’t set them up with the proper information in the
correct frame.

6. Love thy Surfers and Visitors

Design for “last year’s” technology so surfers using 56K
modems can download and use the site quickly and easily. If
you design only for people with high-speed Internet
connections (DSL and cable) you have eliminated 85%+ of your
potential market.

7. Thou shalt not Annoy

Use only stationary text and graphical layout elements. No
Scrolling text, marquees, or animations of any kind,
including rollover buttons.

This “eye candy” steals valuable bandwidth and adds little
to a site’s main purpose, especially for returning visitors
who just want information, not a carnival sideshow.

8. Thou shalt Not Scroll Left or Right

Design your pages so they never force a visitor to scroll
left or right, no matter what the resolution settings on
their monitor. Sites that read “best viewed at 800 x 600″
really say “look at it my way because I don’t care about
your preferences or limitations.”

9. Thou shalt stay Consistent

Include a standard navigational structure on every page.
Though it may mean a serious challenge for the designer,
users should only need to click once to find every major
section of a site.

Also, this includes using standard link colors in all text
links. Blue: hyperlink; Purple: visited hyperlink; Red:
active hyperlink.

10. Thou shalt Know Thy Traffic

Use a site-wide statistics program that enables you to
determine what brings someone to the site, where they go
once they arrive, and when and where they leave.

This critical information helps with marketing efforts as
well as identifying parts of the site that need tweaking or
adjustment to help you increase sales. If everybody bails
from your site at the same page, knowing this can help you
change the page so people go from “bail mode” to “buy mode”!

Article Written By: Balwinder

For More Free Resources visit www.greateducationonline.com

Article Source: http://greatarticlesformoms.com

By: Denise Willms

Buying a ready-made website from someone else sounds like an ideal way to start working from home. The hard work of building the site and developing the business has already been done. All you have to do is step in and reap the profits.

Right?

Not exactly. Having built a few websites, and businesses, from scratch and now having purchased one, I can assure you that in some ways, yes, buying a website from someone else is easier than building your own. But in other ways, it can be even harder.

We purchased WAHM-Articles, and here are some of the reasons why that was a good move for us.

1. I knew the sellers. Not personally, but I knew their reputation and was confident I could trust them.

2. It was in a niche I wanted to break into. I had worked with a lot of WAHMs with my Virtual Assistant business, and discovered they were my favorite people! I wanted to use my talents to give more support to the online WAHM community, and WAHM-Articles was an ideal solution.

3. It had good backlinks and a Page Rank. One of the hardest parts of launching a new site is finding your first backlinks and waiting for your first visit from Google. That part had already been done for me.

4. It had content and authors. If I had started an article directory on my own, I would be struggling to find my first writers. This site already had writers who submitted articles regularly.

5. It didn’t have a newsletter or a mailing list, but it had a membership list – people I could contact and invite to sign up for our ezine.

6. The sellers provided after-purchase support for as long as I needed it.

7. The website was a good idea, but the sellers just didn’t have the time to promote it properly.

If there were so many pluses to buying a site, why would I say that it might not be a good idea?

I wouldn’t recommend buying a website if:

1. You don’t know how to manage a site. If you can’t build or manage a website, you probably shouldn’t buy one. Building and maintaining your own site – even though it can take a lot of time – is invaluable experience to have before you begin managing a ready-made one.

2. You don’t know the seller. Make sure you know who you’re working with and that they can be trusted.

3. You don’t know why the site is being sold. Is the owner ditching it because she doesn’t have time for it, or because it wasn’t a good idea in the first place?

4. The seller does not provide after-purchase support. There are a lot of little details that need to be ironed out even after a site has been transferred over to you. If you’re buying a site, find out how long the seller will provide after-purchase support and get everything in writing.

If buying a site still sounds like a good idea, you will need to create a business plan and a marketing plan for your new business. Even a developed website will not automatically make money without planning and work on your part. And finally, make sure everything, including the hosting and domain name, is transferred to your name before the transaction is over.

Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com

Denise Willms,a homeschooling mom of two, helps her clients get targeted traffic to their websites by writing articles and press releases for them. Subscribe to her newsletterWAHM-Articles Ezine, and receive 105 Power Tips to Get Your Online Business Noticed and Profiting.

By: Bill Kernodle
The perfect web page is not only nice to look at, but is easy to use. Most web visitors stay only seconds before they leave your site. That is one sad fact you must come to terms with. There is no second chance for a first impression, as they say. You must grab their attention and hold it.
Here are some of the most often overused designs you will come across and ones you may do well to avoid.

Background music

Music has become so overused and misused that it is downright annoying. If a visitor hears music without requesting to hear it, they may leave. If they again hear the same music on each page they visit, you can bet it will not be long before they will be gone forever. If you have a music site and have samples for visitors to listen to, that is another story, but at least give them the option to turn it off or on at will. Do not force them to listen. Personally, I leave my speakers off because I am sick of the whole thing. I especially hate it when a person on-screen starts talking to me when I did not hit the play button. In addition, music takes longer to load and the visitor may leave before the music ever comes up because they are tired of waiting.

Popup windows

Pop up windows used to be cute; used to be. Now I find them another of the oh- so- annoying attempts to get you to sign up or buy something. I realize we are all in this business to make money and we all must use the devices available to us, but use some common sense and don’t beat people over the head with all of theses techniques at once, a little goes a long way.

Here are some essential practices to follow:

Give your visitor an easy way to find what they are looking for by including a navigation menu, a site map and perhaps even a search bar if you have a lot of information on your site.
Pay attention to the font size so that your pages are easily read. Too large of a type makes for a strange looking page and too small makes people squint or worse yet, leave altogether.
Do not use strange color combinations unless your site is all about art or very esoteric. Black background with white type for example you will see but I can hardly stand to look at it!

Take care not to over-use images and be careful of their file size. Large file sizes make pages load slowly and you are then faced with the same situation, people leaving before the page loads. Most image editing programs have the capability to reduce file size.
Be sure every link in your site is working. It also goes without saying that you must test every link on your site before you place the site on the web. Broken links are a sure sign of sloppy work.
Make more paragraph breaks than you normally would in a written paper. This makes it easier to scroll and read and keeps your visitor on the page.
Check your site in different browsers as they do not all behave the same. . The most important is Internet Explorer, but many people prefer Mozilla Firefox as well as others.

Hire A Designer?

You can see that there is a lot to think of when it comes to web design. There are many ways to get a simple web site up quickly. Many hosts have web templates that you upload images to and type directly into the page. This is fine for an informal site and for the initial learning phase, but soon becomes old and looks the same as everyone else. You can buy software designed for this purpose which is what most people eventually do, or you can hire a designer if you have the funds and lack the desire or the time to learn yourself.

If you are a business owner, for example and are using the website to sell products you will have many things to do rather than spending countless hours learning the process of web design. There is a time to hire a designer and this makes sense not to waste all your time doing everything in your business. After all, you cannot be the bookkeeper, the human resource manager, the warehouse manger and the web designer! You need to concentrate on the big picture. If on the other hand you are a work at home business, you may find it helpful and perhaps necessary to do everything yourself.

No matter which way you choose to go, remember the design of your website is the most important first impression you may ever make and perhaps the last.
Article Source:

http://www.article-buzz.com

Information about the Author:

Web Design with ad words,affiliate marketing and ebooks. Sales and business advice from the best in the field. http:///www.SimpleSalesAdvice.com