"Effective Website Design - The 8 'Must Do' Rules"

By Rudi Ashdown

To succeed at your online business (whether you are selling
your own product/service or are selling for other merchants as
an affiliate), you need a Web design must be just for that - a
simple, focused site. One that is easy to build,
maintenance-free, low cost, credible, and a powerful
traffic-builder and customer-converter.

Having the right tool and the right product alone doesn’t
insure the success of your website. There are many factors to
be considered in effective website design. Unfortunately, most
of these are overlooked by offline business owners using the
internet to promote their business.

Web Design Rule #1 - Build It for Speed
It's a fact of modern life - people are in a hurry. This means
that you have between 10 and 30 seconds to capture your
potential customer's attention. To minimize your load time,
keep graphics small. Compress them where possible. Use flashy
technology (JavaScript, Flash, Streaming Audio/Video,
animation) sparingly and only if it is important to your
presentation.

Web Design Rule #2 - Target your Market
Know who your market is and make certain that your site caters
to their needs. It is critical that your site reflect the
values of your potential customers. Is your market mostly
business professionals? If so, the site must be clean and
professional. Is your product aimed mostly a teenagers and
young adults? Then your site could be more informal and
relaxed. The key here is to know your market and build the site
to their preferences.

Web Design Rule #3 - Focus the Site
Make certain your web site is focused on the goal, selling your
product or service. A site offering many unrelated products is
not necessarily unfocused, but this is often the case. If your
business does offer many products, dedicate a unique page for
each instead of trying to sell them all from one page.

Web Design Rule #4 - Credibility Is Crucial
The most professionally designed site won't sell if your
customers don't believe in you. A clear privacy statement is
one way to build your credibility. Provide a prominent link to
your privacy statement from every page on the site as well as
from any location that you are asking your visitors for
personal information. Provide legitimate contact information on
line.

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Web Design Rule #5 - Navigation should be simple
Make site navigation easy and intuitive. Simple and smooth
navigation adds to the convenience of the visitors. Add
powerful search and catalog features. Many times a lot of
visitors do not have the patience to navigate through the whole
website to find what they are looking for.

Web Design Rule #6 - Consistency is the key
Make sure the site is consistent in look, feel and design.
Nothing is more jarring and disturbing to a customer than
feeling as if they have just gone to another site. Keep colors
and themes constant throughout the site.

Web Design Rule #7 - Make your site interactive
Make your website interactive. Add feedback forms as well as
email forms that allow your prospective customers to ask you
any questions they might have pertaining to a product.
Personalization of your website is another key element that can
lead to customer delight and can increase your sales.
Personalization technology provides you the analytic tools to
facilitate cross-selling and up-selling when the customer is
buying online. It would give you an idea of what products to
cross-sell and up-sell. For example, when a person buys a CD
player, a disc cleaner can also be offered.

Web Design Rule #8 - Content is King
Good content sells a product. Ask yourself the following
questions. Does your copy convey the message you wish to get
across to your visitors? Is it compelling? Does it lead your
visitor through the sales process? Have others review, critique
and edit your copy to insure it is delivering the intended
message. Always double check your spelling and grammar.

These eight, simple rules will go a long way toward an
effective website design, and most importantly, turning
visitors into customers.

About the Author: Article written by Rudi Ashdown and first
posted at http://www.whywebsiteswork.com - This is article 1 of
10 - get the other nine free at http://www.whywebsiteswork.com

Source:http://www.isnare.com

"Ten Steps To Grow Website Traffic"

By Brian Pratt

If you own your own website or have a page supplied by a
program, growing website traffic will be one of the keys to
your success. You need a growing, self-generating stream of
website traffic and plenty of it. Preferably free and
preferably preconditioned to buy your product of service.

This article provides some ideas for growing website traffic.

(1) Directories
Directories are website listings. The trick is to find a
directory which receives huge volumes of website traffic. Start
by applying for listings in Yahoo, DMOZ and Looksmart. These are
huge portals with significant website traffic. Getting listed
isn’t easy but once achieved you will see a significant lift in
your website traffic. Look at other directories but make sure
they have a good traffic rating (use Alexa).

(2) Traffic Exchanges
Every website you view in a traffic exchange generates credits
which are exchanged for views of your site. This website
traffic is free and can be generated almost instantly. The more
sites you view the more people visit your website and the more
your website traffic grows.

(3) Article Writing
One of the most effective methods of generating website
traffic. Best of all its free. Magazines, Ezines and Webmasters
are always looking for fresh content. Just write an article on
any topic which interests you, optimize it for keywords and be
sure to include your website URL in the bio line at the bottom
of the article. Then submit it to ezine directories on the web.
This will generate website traffic and create backlinks to your
site, which in turn helps with search engine rankings.

(4) Search Engine Optimization
Making sure your website is search engine friendly will
certainly help grow your website traffic. Ensure all the meta
and alt tags are completed, optimize the text for your chosen
keywords, ensure there is an H1 header, update your robots.txt,
update your google sitemap and ensure google is alerted each
time you make a change. There are a number of sites which
provide a “spider simulation” which shows you what your site
looks like to a spider and what you can do to improve its
search engine ranking.

(4) Blogs
Ensure your blog is located on your site, that it links to your
key pages and that you ping each time your blog is updated. A
regularly updated blog will attract readers which in turn
builds website traffic.

(5) Forums
Leaving your URL in forums will generate website traffic in two
ways. First, people who read your post are likely to click the
link to checkout your site. Secondly search engines will
generally accept the link a counting towards your link
popularity.

(6) Viral Advertising
If you have a message and you tell 10 people and they each tell
10 people and so on, by the time the message goes through 10
levels it has been passed on to a million people.

A similar principle can be used in marketing. If you produced a
free report or ebook filled with links back to your site and
gave it away, the chances are those you gave it away to would
do the same thing. Your links would be spread all over the
Internet and your website traffic will grow.

There are also couple of viral websites which successfully use
the same principle to grow website traffic. Follow the link in
the resource box below to see some examples.

(7) Reciprocal Links
By swapping links, webmasters hope that people will click on
their link in other websites thereby generating website
traffic. This strategy is one of the very best ways of
generating free, targeted website traffic and should be high on
your list of priorities. It also is highly rated by search
engines

(8) Classifies Ads
Do a search for “classified ads” and you will find many sites,
which accept classified advertisements. Make sure you place
your ad in a site complimentary to your product. Generally
sites at the top of google/yahoo searches will perform better
than those lower down. Again make sure the site you are placing
your ad on has a high traffic rating or it will not assist with
your website traffic.

(9) Pay Per Click Advertising
Programs like Google's Adwords will deliver pre-qualified
targeted website traffic to your site. I have found this to be
an excellent way of delivering high converting website traffic.

(10) Expired Domain Names
Some expired domain names are still receiving traffic. If you
are lucky you can pick one up quite cheaply. These can provide
a very cheap source of long-term website traffic.

The greater your website traffic the closer you will come to
your goals. I hope this article will help you grow your website
traffic and reach those goals.

To your success!

About the Author: Brian Pratt is a 47 year old New Zealander
with over 10 years internet experience. He owns and operates a
Plug-In Profit site at http://www.bestrealincome.com Brian can
be contacted at brian@bestrealincome.com

Source: http://www.isnare.com