The Top 10 Dumbest Web Site Decisions

By Kalena Jordan

Having worked with web sites for the past eleven years, I've seen a LOT of errors, poor judgment and embarrassing gaffs on the web. Sometimes they are the fault of the client, the web designer, the IT Manager, or the SEO, but human error is always to blame. The saddest thing is that the problems are usually preventable.

Here is a list of what I consider to be the Top 10 dumbest web site decisions ever, in reverse order, David Letterman style :

10) Misspelling a Domain

Back in the glory days of the late 1990's when I was working for a large Internet agency, the web designers had responsibility for the registration of domain names on behalf of clients. One particular designer had a face to face meeting with a major client, during which the client asked him to register CarTuneCentral.com (or so he thought!). The staffer did a check and was delighted to see the domain available. He made the purchase and proudly emailed the client.
An hour later his boss called him in to his office to say that he'd had a call from a very frustrated client who *actually* wanted him to register CartoonCentral.com. Needless to say the desired domain wasn't available and the whole office dined on his mistake for months.

9) Letting the Domain Name Expire

Now what type of company would allow their domain to expire a month after site launch? A very large one, that's who. I'll save the company some embarrassment and won't reveal their name but the site was offline for a total of 2 days while they scrambled to pay their registrar, sort out DNS propagation and cover their tails.

8) Flashing your Cyber Underpants

One of the most common web site management platforms provided by hosting companies used to store the site statistics in a common folder called /statistics/. You could password protect this folder, but the default was to leave it open to the public and so many unwary webmasters unwittingly published full traffic data for their site on the Internet, open to any person who knew where to look.

I learned this the hard way in a public forum from a member who said he had just reviewed my traffic for the previous month and was very impressed. Publishing site statistics for all the world to see is what I call flashing your cyber underpants and I’ve never let it happen again!

7) Publishing Sensitive Company Information

Quite a few companies have been guilty of doing this, including AOL, who published a search data report in 2006 that contained the private details of thousands of AOL customers. Although the report was taken offline within a few days, it had already been mirrored and distributed across the Internet. The fallout eventually led to the resignation of AOL’s Chief Technical Officer.

Although not quite as serious, an ex-client of mine once published a page that had notes on it from the Sales Manager about the best way to strong-arm a customer into purchasing a higher-ticket item. Apparently the web designer didn’t realize the hand-written post-it notes were not part of the web page copy. Duh!

6) Using an Insulting 404 Error Page

I clash with the web design team of one of my clients on a regular basis. Earlier this year, my client completely re-designed their web site and so I recommended they ask their web design team to design a custom 404 error page in case visitors navigated to a page on the old site that no longer existed. Their web design team put up a message that read:

"404 Error. You've obviously typed in the wrong URL. Either that or the page you are looking for no longer exists."

That was it! No apology for the missing page, no recommendation to use the navigation to find what they were looking for, just an insulting message that accuses the visitor of being an idiot. Persons viewing that page would be clicking the "back" button as fast as they could.

5) Taking a Site Offline for Maintenance

I find it fascinating that very large sites run by intelligent people still get taken offline for maintenance on a regular basis. Search engines don't understand the "Back in 15 minutes" sign and the longer the site is down, the bigger the risk.

If search bots try and index a site while it is down, they will most likely assume the previously indexed pages have expired and remove them from the search index. This means that all your hard-earned rankings could be flushed down the toilet until search engines can successfully re-index your site. Surely a mirror site for maintenance periods isn't that difficult to set up?

4) Buying a Dot Biz When the Dot Com Was Available

Ok, I'm putting up my hand on this one. I'm not going to reveal the domain but yes, I registered a dot biz domain back in 2000 when the dot com was actually available. The dot com version of my domain was bought by Yahoo a short time later and turned into a product site. Ack! My excuse is that, at the time, dot biz sites were rumored to be the next big thing and all companies were being urged to choose them over dot coms. Ok, I was wrong!

3) Allowing a Customer Complaint to Remain on a Site for 12 Months

When I was working as a public relations consultant, I was given the responsibility of re-writing the web copy of a large real estate client. One of the areas I was asked to re-write was the welcome paragraph on the Customer Feedback page where existing customers of the estate agent chain could login and leave comments about their experience.

While writing the copy, I scanned some of the customer feedback and came across an aggressive message left 12 months earlier by an obviously unhappy customer. She had used some of the most colorful language I've ever seen (and some that I hadn't) and very detailed descriptions of how she was going to take her revenge on the company for allegedly allowing a tenant to destroy her house. Nobody in charge of the web site had even noticed the comment and I still wonder how many potential customers would have been put off from using the estate agent after reading it.

2) Switching a Web Site Off for a 3 Week Christmas Vacation.

Yes, many moons ago, an ex-client of mine decided to take her entire web site offline (without telling me!) while she was on a 3 week vacation over Christmas. Only a month earlier, she had paid me $5,000 to optimize it for search engines.

It had just achieved some impressive top 10 results and all the carefully optimized pages were attracting good traffic when she shut it down and replaced the entire site with a 1 page sign that said “closed until after Christmas”. I noticed the traffic and search ranking declines in her stats and was completely flabbergasted when I found the site gone. Her response when I confronted her? "Why didn't you TELL ME this could happen?"

And the dumbest web site decision I've ever witnessed?

1) Promoting a Domain Name You Don’t Own:

My Alma Mater, the University of Newcastle, have spent thousands of dollars on television advertising here in Australia, marketing their new site for online post-graduate coursework: GradSchool Dot Com. There's only one problem. The domain for this site is actually Gradschool.com.au. They don't even own Gradschool.com!

Sadly, this glaring marketing error seems to have totally escaped them and they are happily referring to their brand as Gradschool.com on all their marketing material and throughout their .com.au domain. It's tragic to think of all the potential students typing in Gradschool.com expecting to find the University program. I see that whoever purchased Gradschool.com has slapped up some AdSense code on it so at least somebody will reap the benefits of those thousands of advertising dollars wasted by the University.

Don't let any of these web site tragedies happen to you. Make sure that your site decisions aren't in the hands of dummies!


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Web Host Services: What You Can Get

By Bill McNulty

When searching for a web host you may want to look into the extra services that are offered. Although some web host companies do not offer anything more than the basics, this is not the case with the majority of them. Since there is so much competition in this industry, every web host is looking for a way to distinguish themselves. And through extra web host services they can do this without any problem at all.

As a buyer, you need to know what is available to you as far as web host services are concerned. Sure, you know that a web host company is going to offer you web hosting for your site. But in addition to this, you want to also look into the many web host services that you may be able to get along with this. In most cases, you do not have to pay for any of these extras. As long as you host your site with a company, they will be more than happy to give you these add on services free of charge. As you can imagine, this can make your time with your web host much more enjoyable. Anytime you are getting something for free you will usually have a good experience.

So what web host services out of the norm are available to consumers? This is a question that has many answers, because as mentioned above, each company has their own way of doing things. You owe it to yourself to look into a number of different companies, and then decide which web host services you are being offered. Obviously, if there are two like companies, you will want to choose the one that is offering you the most in terms of added benefits and services.

One of the most common add ons that you will come across is free domain registration. The moment that you sign up with a company offering this service, you will have the ability to register any domain name for free. While this may not be a big freebie, it is something that you will need nonetheless. This is a particularly good service to receive if you are a beginner. This way, you do not have to worry about registering your domain name with another service, and then taking the time and effort to transfer it to your web hosting company.

Another popular web host service is when the company offers free message boards to users. This may not sound like a huge deal on the surface, but being able to get in touch with other
people using the same service can be beneficial in a number of different ways. This will give you the ability to not only meet other people, but at the same time you can ask any questions that you may have. Although this may seem geared more towards beginners, even advanced webmasters can benefit from what message boards have to offer.

There are many web host services that will be available to you. After you find a few companies that offer the actual web hosting that you like, you will then want to begin to consider these extra services. They may make or break your final decision!

About The Author:

Bill McNulty loves everything tech, especially anything http://www.hostingref.com/ top 10 web hosting related. He writes for multiple tech sites on a freelancer basis and lives with his wife and 2 dogs in rural upstate New York.

Top Internet Marketing Strategies For New Websites

By Daegan H Smith

It is your first time to open shop online and you're wondering what you should do to make your presence felt. The Internet is a daunting world. It's almost as vast and unlimited as the universe, making the prospect of getting your website within your target market's radar seemingly impossible. Be that as it may, your new website still has a chance of surviving and especially if you consider the following tips.

Top Internet Marketing Strategies for New Websites

In the Internet, paid advertisements are definitely bigger and brighter, but search engines still give free advertisements a fighting chance. Here's what you can do to make your new website known without spending too much money.

Create the Best Website You Can

No Internet marketing strategy can help you if your website isn't worth visiting in the first place. Start with the design. You want the kind of web layout and design that your target market will instantly find appealing. The layout must also be user-friendly: it won't do to have your readers lost and unable to find their way back to your homepage. In most cases, navigation will be made easier by creating highly discernible links and uploading a site map.

Understand How Search Engine Optimization Works

Search engines can make or break you. If youíre not in the good side of search engines then it's almost impossible for your website to get noticed by the right people. If you want your target market to discover your website, you need to know how to please search engine spiders.

You need to understand, for instance, why using HTML codes is a positive thing, even if it offers less flexibility and options than other and more sophisticated languages. You need to understand the importance of keywords and the dos and don'ts that come along with using them.

Content Is King

Your website must offer valuable content. Search engines may be responsible for getting readers to notice your website, but it's the content that will ultimately be responsible for making them come back to your website again and again.

Content is what makes visiting your website into a habit. For content to be valuable, it must have relevance to your readers. If teenagers make up your target market then you need to discuss something they can relate to. Talking about the most popular TV shows might get them to listen to you but discussing the stock market would just fall on deaf ears.

Secondly, the data you're providing must be of interest to your target market. It's not enough to simply discuss an important subject. You need to show them what they'll get from it. Ecology is an important issue, but do people generally find time to learn more about it? But with the right perspective or approach, such as using Leonardo di Caprio as spokesperson or pointing how unawareness of ecological issues could cause them to die in five years, even the most boring of subjects will be diligently pursued.

Spell Out the Benefits

People just seem to get busier and busier everyday, and that's one of the reasons why they don't have the patience or inclination to check out websites whose benefits are ambiguous at most. If you want people to pay attention to your website, you need to find the equivalent to having a neon signage flashing the benefits of visiting your website. The message must be simple, straight forward, and powerful: let them know what they'll get and they'll come to you if they want it.

About The Author:

Daegan Smith Is And Expert Online Marketer "Wanna Lean The Secret To Making $85,147,717 Per Month While Quickly And Easily EXPLODING Your Network Marketing Organization by 7,141 People Without EVER Buying Or Calling a Single Stinking Lead?" Free CD Explains All: http://www.easymlmprofits.com

7 Steps To Improve Your Website

By Bernadette Doyle

Begin by understanding the difference between direct-response websites and brochure websites. Brochure websites have a nice, safe logical layout of information but little, if any, clear
calls to action. Direct response websites are geared towards getting visitors to take action.

1. Tell them who it's for and what you can do for them in the first few seconds. Instead of simply having your name at the top of your website, use that space to announce WHO your site is for,
and WHAT you can do for them. That means that in the first few seconds you target visitors will have the reaction "Yes, this is for me". Of course, that will be at the expense of any untargeted visitors who will click away, but you didn't want them anyway!

2. Remove anything that does not support your MWR. MWR is short for 'Most Wanted Response' a term I first heard about from Ken Evoy, author of Make Your Site Sell.

What do you want people to DO when they first visit your site? Call to arrange a consultation? Request more information? Book a coaching session? Reserve a space at your next workshop? Have a clear MWR for each and every page of your website and then only include the content that moves visitors towards your MWR and strip away anything that doesn't.

3. Capture visitors' details. Less than 1% of visitors will buy on their first visit to a website, that's why it's important to capture their details so you can follow up with them.

4. Less is more. In many of the sites I critiqued today, it was almost like the site owners were thinking "I don't know exactly what I should say to my web visitor, so I'll just throw out a
load of things in the hope that SOMETHING grabs their attention". Unfortunately, just adding more and more options or information is simply going to confuse your visitor, and if they aren't sure what to do next, they will probably take the easiest option and click away...forever!

5. Personalize your site. Include your photo and a biography. Let visitors see the person behind the website. It's true that people buy people!

6. Use a mixture of 'towards' and 'away from' language in your sales copy. Some of the sites I reviewed today were for coaches who are very solution oriented in their approach and web-copy. The trouble is, this only works for visitors who have the same solution-oriented outlook and people with problems are typically... stuck in their problems!

7. Copywriter Robert Collier said that you have to "enter the conversation that is already going on in the prospect's mind" and sometimes that means you have to start with the problems that are preoccupying them. So show people that you can both solve pressing problems as well as achieve desired end solutions.

It is critical that your direct response website connect emotionally with visitors who are in your target market. You can do this by making them feel at home so when they visit your site they know they are in the right place. Remove anything that does not lead to your most wanted response, capturing their contact details, limit unneeded text and images, making your site more personal, using the right mix of copywriting that appeals to your target market and addressing the problem visitors are experiencing and explaining the benefits of working with you.

About the Author:

(c) Bernadette Doyle, 2008. Reprints welcome so long as by-line and article are published intact and all links made live.

Bernadette Doyle publishes her free, weekly Client Magnets newsletter for trainers, speakers, coaches, consultants, complementary therapists and solo professionals. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them then sign up for the Client Magnets newsletter at http://www.ClientMagnets.com today!

Web 2.Overwhelming: 22 Ways to Frustrate Your Site Visitors

By Kalena Jordan

Damian Conway is known as the "Mad Scientist of Perl" and he was my favorite speaker at Webstock 2008. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and until recently was an honorary Associate Professor with the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University Australia.

A popular speaker and trainer, he is a former columnist for The Perl Journal and author of two books about Perl. He also runs an international IT training company which provides programmer training throughout Europe, North America, and Australasia.

Damian kicked off his presentation by revealing that his wife is responsible for him being at Webstock. A few months ago, she was trying to buy a DVD on the Internet and was yelling expletives. He went to help her and after several minutes of frustration he finally gave up. Her response was "Are they deliberately trying to make it impossible for non-geeks?" His reply was "Yes". Damian's impression is that mankind has evolved into two distinct species - typical web users / typical web designers.

Damian then showed the Irony Ahead symbol. The sad truth, he says, is that the web designers are losing the battle to the masses. There are now normal humans who can almost use web sites on a daily basis! His sacred promise is to protect your web sites from infiltration by the terrible general public.

In reverse order, here are Damien's top 22 web design ideas to fend off the non-geeks and prevent Web 2.0 from taking hold:

22) Use Zen: Confuse them with anime and odd artistic blobs that are a complete mystery. Is it a web site? Is it art? Is it impossible to enter?

21) Use yellow or black and yellow: This signals danger as in wasps and Star Trek uniforms.

20) Use xenophobia: Try geo-location as an instrument of torture. Show only products not available in their country or illegal in their country e.g. "show me products I can't buy with a credit card issued in my country".

19) Get a site that requires the "www" to work: This is known as a canonical URL to us normal people. Make the www necessary and confuse the heck out of them when they type in the domain name without the w's and get shown an error page.

18) Use variable navigational layout (VNL): Use the previous and next links as people hate them. Let's replicate it for the entire web!

17) Throw usability out the window: Navigability is the pre-requisite for usability. So let's create navigation buttons that don't go anywhere. The non-geeks will be occupied for at least half an hour. Use Javascript to turn the navigation into confusing shadowy arrows. Javascript your scrollbars so they don't look anything like regular browser scrollbars. Use back buttons that embed links that take you up a level rather than actually taking you back. Your visitors will get lost in the hierarchy. Inconsistency is important.

16) Terrorize them with typography: Most non-geeks don't care about typography. They don't even have a favorite typeface! If they do, it's comic sans. Or Impact! All they care about is whether they can read it. Therefore, typography DOES matter. Go with something unreadable! Go with Abduction 2 font or something just as annoying. Fonts are not toys people, fonts are weapons!

15) Make shipping a last minute surprise: Shipping is a powerful tool to dissuade purchasers. It delays their instant gratification. Don't let them calculate the shipping cost in the cart otherwise they can go and comparison check on other sites. Instead, use the W3-recommended 34 step method and make all these fields compulsory:

product selection
shopping cart
checkout
purchaser address
phone number
fax number
email address
social security number
payment method
billing address
shipping address
shipping method
shipping costs
income bracket
referral source
etc.

With any luck, they'll abandon the cart in total frustration.

14) Make them register and login before they purchase: They'll be naturally terrified and run off. Even better, make them register before they can even view the web site!

13) Reduce the quality of site search results: How can you minimize the quality? Don't provide site search facilities at all! Or make the options highly improbable. Don't let them search for the product. Make them search by date of manufacture, or the name of the manufacturer. Or, make them search for the type of person that they are. Or what type of person YOU think they are. Pure genius.

12) Add pages ad infinitum: Don't return more than 10 results for a search at one time, even if you have to list 250 pages of search results. God put the fold there for a reason. If you don't follow this rule, it can result in scrolling! Protect the kids from scrolling!

11) Delay their gratification or their dis-gratification: Show items that aren't in stock, services you used to provide, options that won't work for them. Only tell them a product is not available AFTER they click through to the shopping cart total. This builds up a sense of hope so you can dash it immediately.

10) Don't allow them to sort search results: This non-sortability of results preserves the natural social order. Sort things in random order. For example, don't let them sort by product type, or price. Provide an alphabetical sorting option only. Or sort according to the web designer's favorite items.

9) Use background music and lots of it: It's a sure way to irritate your users. Your music choice probably sucks if you choose it carefully enough. Don't provide a stop button. Make it restart again on every new page. They'll soon leave.

8) The little things count: Like tiny little font. It's the most effective deterrent for anyone over the age of 20. Damian finds size 4 or 3 point is pretty good. Government and news sites use it all the time to great effect. Some browsers have the ability to change text size. Thankfully, most web users Damian surveyed didn't know this until it was pointed out to them. But it's ok! Because 2 weeks later, they'd forgotten again. Tiny text is the web designer's ally.

7) Use Cute Kitten Aversion Therapy: There are some web sites that you don't want your kids to see, Damian says. One of these is the W3 HTML Validator. AAARGGGGHH! It means that solutions for non-valid HTML code could be discovered by anyone and you don't want that. So spread the message, every time you validate, someone kills a kitten!

6) Use J-version therapy: The non-geeks have a strong aversion to the letter J and things like Jscript, Javascript etc. These J languages create fear in the non-geek. Online security companies have scared them into avoiding sites with Javascript or other items starting with J because hackers use them to distribute viruses. If you're lucky, they're so convinced by these fears that they've turned off Javascript in their browsers. This means that if your site uses Javascript menus, they can't be navigated! Brilliant.

5) You can never use too many images: Encode your important data and text in an image so it can't be cut and pasted and make the images huge and dark so that they can't be printed out. Or they can be printed but they use up masses amounts of printer toner. It's a great way to scare off even the most persistent of non-geeks.

4) Play hide and seek with your site visitors: They don't like to wait, so make them. Information that is impossible to find is safe. Don't use a sitemap and make sure there is no rational hierarchy to your site. Hide your most important data on a page that has no links pointing to it!

3) Use gray: It's the new black and it goes so well with black or darker gray. When using gray, make it impossible to read. Use nano-text in gray or even gray text on white. The site visitors run away! Even better, use gray on darker gray - it's the low contrast approach. This is even more effective for site visitors with a color impairment. If all else fails, use intestinal beige. It's apparently the new gray.

2) Flash is very important in our defense against web-mortals: Clocksucking Flash they call it. Some non-geeks even have their Flash facilities turned off so make your site entirely in Flash. Once visitors arrive at your Flash page, they see - "loading 1%". This is delayed gratification at it's best! Also, don't provide a "skip intro" button. Or if you do use it, make the link move away from the mouse. Over and over again. If the visitor persists, then make it disappear entirely. If the visitor without Flash is determined to view your Flash site, provide the "You Need Flash" link. Then make them download an enormous file that maxes out their bandwidth limits. Even better, use a Flash-based installer that requires them to have Flash installed first.

1) Combine all of the above for optimum effect: This is Damian's number #1 best way to scare away non-geek visitors. His favorite example of this in action is the World Glaucoma Association. Scroll down and place your mouse over the eye for the full effect. [My own personal favorite is Fred Frap and Friends where the pink text on the purple background asks you to click on the non-existent image to enter. Nice!]

But seriously folks, Damian says, the non-geek level is the SAME LEVEL as the MAJORITY OF YOUR WEB SITE USERS. Remember this. The typical experience for web-mortals is bad. He's here to plead with us all to build software for how people really ARE. The non-geek users.

The single biggest mistake that web designers make is not doing accessibility testing on their grandparents. Your grandparents are the typical Internet users. Use the Grandma usability metric. It's not about what your client wants. It's about what your client's customers want. It's not about clever, it's about comprehension. It's not about style, it's about usability. It's not about searching. It's about finding. It's not about ambience it's about the outcomes for people visiting your site.

Web 2.0 is Web 2.0verwhelming for most people. So make their experience measurably superior.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Planning for Web Site Disaster

By Kalena Jordan

When you have a business web site that multiple people work on, one of the most difficult tasks is to manage and allocate responsibilities. For example, you might have a corporate site where the content is written by various in-house staff members, the pages are managed by your freelance web designer and your outsourced SEO is responsible for ensuring the content and code is search engine friendly.

But what happens when communication breaks down between all the stakeholders or a miscommunication occurs? It's more common than you might think and it can result in disaster for your web site. Here's a true story of how it happened to one of my clients:

The site in question was being re-designed by the client's 3rd party web designers and the client asked me (as their SEO) to send them a list of instructions to follow during the re-design and launch that would ensure they didn't lose search engine visibility. Naturally I sent the client a list of the usual things to watch out for, including:

• Ensuring that any URLs being replaced or moved had 301 redirects placed on them to their new locations.


• Transferring the optimized title and meta tags to new page versions.


• Implementing a custom 404 page; and


• Building a replacement XML sitemap for Google and Yahoo.

So a week later the client tells me that the new site is now live and would I have a quick check to see if everything is ok? I opened the site and typed in each of the URLs for the pages I had carefully optimized months before. The first one came up with a big ugly 404 Not Found error. Not a custom 404 error page, but an ugly white server-generated one with no design, no branding, no apology and (more importantly) no links back to the main site. So I tried the next one. Same story - 404 error.

As I went down the list, I became more and more concerned. Less than half of the pages I optimized had been transferred to the new site. When I checked their site logs in ClickTracks, I noticed that around half of the page views generated since the site re-launch were 404 errors. Not only that, but a quick check of Google Webmaster Tools showed a small fraction of the original number of site pages as being indexed. Obviously Googlebot had been shown the 404 errors too and had promptly removed the old pages from the Google index. Disaster!

I contacted the client and told her to get a custom 404 page implemented as soon as possible and to double check that 301 redirects from their old page URLs to the corresponding pages on the new site had been put in place by the design team, as per my instructions. Turns out the designers never received explicit instructions about this from the client and didn't know that:

a) a custom 404 page was important

b) 301 redirects were necessary to ensure the continuation of search engine indexing.

I found this news quite shocking - what web designer/programmer doesn't understand the need to redirect old URLs to new ones?

Plus, we found out later that the few pages that the designers HAD successfully transferred to the new template did not have the carefully optimized Title and META Tags transferred, meaning that all the hard-won rankings we had earned for the client had now vanished. The designer's excuse? They weren't SEO experts so didn't know tag transfer was necessary. I found this excuse pretty flimsy considering they managed to transfer the rest of the page HTML code intact.

This started a chain of urgent emails back and forth between the client, the designers and myself, with the designers blaming the client and me for not providing clear enough instructions, me blaming the designers for not taking the initiative to protect the client's site traffic during the move and the client caught in the middle trying to appease everyone. The emails escalated until finally the designers admitted defeat and acknowledged that they should have paid more attention to the client's instructions.

It took a couple of weeks for the designers to upload a custom 404 error page and I still had to manually login to the client's CMS to replace the optimized Title and META tags. As this goes to press, the client site has started to recover in the rankings, the 301 redirects are back in place, the number of pages indexed by Google is increasing, but the site stats are still showing a large number of 404 pages delivered to searchers. I expect it to take upwards of 3 months for the site to fully recover from the disaster.

The whole saga just goes to prove that you can't assume your site is in capable hands. If you are about to make extensive changes to your site design or move it to a new domain, you absolutely have to have a rollout plan in place with crystal clear instructions and tasks allocated to a team so everyone knows who is responsible for what. Otherwise you will be paying the penalties for months to come.


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Ambient Findability and the Future of Search

By Kalena Jordan

Peter Morville is widely recognized as a founding father of information architecture. He co-authored the best-selling book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and has consulted with such organizations as Harvard, IBM, the International Monetary Fund, Microsoft, the National Cancer Institute and Yahoo! Peter is president of Semantic Studios, co-founder and past president of the Information Architecture Institute and a faculty member at the University of Michigan. Peter's latest book, Ambient Findability, was published in 2005.

In his presentation for Webstock 2008, Peter called himself a crazy librarian who fell in love with the web. Peter designs sites so that people can find what they're looking for. It's not just about findability, Peter says. The structural design of shared information environments is important. The vast majority of Internet architects don't even know the term Internet architects. Content authors, bloggers etc. have a responsibility for shared information. One lesson Peter says he constantly needs to give clients is that it's not enough to provide a single taxonomy. You can bring multiple ideas and formats to a single document to a wide audience with different needs. The Stanford University site is a good example of a usable site. When you design for the web, you should provide usable navigation and a site search facility at the very minimum.

The Consumer Reports site is another good example. It doesn't stop with global navigation but gives a couple of information sub-sets to tell the user what the site database consists of. One size does not fit all in taxonomy. The Mayo Clinic use a more user-friendly design by listing all diseases by their most common name rather than the formal medical terminology. The site was re-designed with users in mind and has positively flourished as a result. It demonstrates that you need to design site taxonomies for specific audiences and users.

The elements of the user experience are multilayered. Peter is sick of the word "usability" as it means different things to different people. Depending on who you talk to, usability could mean:

useful
usable
valuable
findable
credible
accessible
desirable

All these elements are important. Peter recommends asking these three questions when designing a site layout:

1) can users find your web site?
2) can users navigate your web site?
3) can users find your products and services despite your web site?

He also claims that not enough attention is paid to accessibility these days. Your web site needs to advance your business goals and inspire trust. Peter mentioned Google search as an example. People tend to trust results that are listed high in Google. Findability and credibility are therefore increasingly connected.

Peter has provided site usability services for the National Cancer Institute. When he began working with the site, 90 percent of traffic was from the general public who had been diagnosed with cancer and were seeking specific information. Peter helped re-design the site to make sure these people found the information they were seeking about specific cancer types. At the time Peter worked on the site, an amazing 70 percent of searches on the major search engines were for specific types of cancer so the Cancer Institute used this information to improve the findability of their specific cancer pages.

We can talk about findability at the level of the object and the system, says Peter. What are the ways the object/data can be found? How do we make it easier to be found? How does the environment support the navigation and retrieval of the object/data? What he calls ambient findability is the ability to find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. The destination is never quite reached because perfect findability is impossible.

We're now drowning in information and suffering from information anxiety in the information age. "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." says Herbert Simon (Nobel Laureate Economist) or the Dilbert version of this is: "Information is gushing toward your brain like a firehouse aimed at a teacup". We are creating alternate ways to receive information via our digital networks, Google Earth being a good example. Another example is the "kid tracker" which is a GPS wristwatch your kids wear so you can know the location of your kids 24/7. Soon, people will be able to track other people every second of every day. This raises privacy concerns.

Peter showed a couple of examples of findability technology available now. Within a wireless network area, you can now use the Cisco Wireless Location Appliance to add electronic tags to items so you can locate them at any time. Hospitals use the technology to tag wheelchairs so they can be found instantly and save staff time and money searching for them. It's claimed this saves one hospital $28K per month. Another example was the keen couple who had tagging devices embedded in their hands so they could open each other's apartment doors and access each other's computers. How romantic!

So in a world where the information haystacks are getting larger, how do we create information needles? How do we solve the findability question? We need to think about business intelligence, visualizing patterns etc. Back in the 1980's Peter wrote an article claiming that the Internet will turn everyone into a librarian and now it's happened. We can't stop talking about meta data, social media labels, bookmarks and Flickr tags! In 5-10 years, Peter thinks that many sites will become like Amazon in terms of findability.

Search is one of the most important ways we learn. "Search has become the new interface of commerce" says John Battelle. Search startups such as Endeca and Trexy are pioneering new ways to search. Everyzing is a search engine that allows you to search audio files by individual words within the transcript. Buzzillions is an example of a site using both structured meta data and tag search. Hybrid search solutions are launching all the time. Google is struggling with how to provide data the way people categorize it. Google Book Search is an example of a site with usability issues. Flickr solved this issue by using clusters to sort photo tags, with huge success.

Peter says that we need to focus on usability in the future. Everyone working on your site needs to have the same goals in mind. He completes his presentation with the story of the three stone cutters. There is a guy wandering in the wilderness and he comes upon a quarry and asks the workers there what they're doing. The first stone cutter is working at a slow pace and says "I'm making a living". The second guy is working really hard and fast. He says "I'm doing my very best". The third guy is working at a pace somewhere in the middle but with a smile on his face. He says "I'm building a cathedral".


About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

10 Reminders for Usability Web Design to Make Site Visitors Adore You

No matter how hard you try, there is always something wrong with your website. There is always a critic. I have a friend outside the USA who thankfully alerts me of my 404 error pages, which I appreciate, even though I told him over the weekend he was making me scream at my own inability to be perfect.

You don't want to be caught with your pants down when trying to present a professional site. Since my work permits me to see a great deal of websites and Internet applications, I can note common problems. This list is not about the common ones. This list is for repetitive web design practices that drive site visitors crazy because we keep driving them crazy.

Here's what we do:

1. There is not enough persuasive or value oriented information to convince visitors to stay on the page. I compare this to car shopping. Automobile's in a showroom have a sheet of paper taped to the window that lists every detail you could possibly imagine about that particular car. How often do you actually stand in one spot, directly in front of the window, squinting to read the tiny words on the page? Usually you are spotted by eagle-eyed car salespeople who leap to your side and begin telling you all the reasons why the car is cool. They ask what you had in mind too, and from there, start to narrow down matches that fit your requirements. Write as if you are a car salesperson for your homepage. Cut a deal. Introduce the manager. Offer a test drive.


2. Don't place 100 links to the inside pages from your homepage. It is not a playground where you run screaming out onto the area trying to beat the first person to the swing set. A homepage should be married to your site requirements and especially your visitors' top tasks. This could be price checking, searching for part numbers or clearance items, finding your contact information or finding the only baby items that are not pink or blue on the planet.


3. Quit talking about yourself so often. Nobody cares how great you are. What they do care about is what you have for them that's worth their time and money. If you're the All Powerful Oz, you can slip that in, but just remember that even OZ lied to Dorothy. If you need help with your ego, try the We We Monitor.

Feedback and email newsletter forms are some of the funniest things I've witnessed on the web. Why would you demand a phone number from someone who is just letting you know your links are broken? If you want general feedback or better yet, sales leads, your form should scream trust. Start by trusting that if site visitors want you to call them, they'll enter their phone number. Requiring one is something managers tell you to do. Ignore them. Consider your prospects that desire email contact only or impress them with customer service clues with a choice of either email or phone contact. Never require a phone number for free newsletter signups, but if you insist on this unheard of practice you invented, offer a sample of the newsletter that requires that phone number and by all means, tell us why you want to call us.

4. If your navigation only goes forward, you didn't learn to dance properly. The actual steps are:
   
   
   • Move forward
   • Move back if your partner doesn't like that move
   • Continue forward if your partner really liked where you landed and trusts where you want to go next.
   
   In other words, don't rely on the "Back" button to go backwards. Guide your visitor's steps backward, forward and side to side with breadcrumb navigation, embedded text links, buttons or links that continue a task's forward momentum. Design navigation to be fluid and effortless. Your visitors should be able to glide along the dance floor and not get lost or spun around into dizzying loops.


5. Application functionality. If you only knew what exists out there in web site land. For example, there was a travel site for camping that only lets you book hotel rooms because the campgrounds weren’t programmed into the options anywhere. There was the application with many parts in the process, however, no matter what link or button was pushed, it only landed on one of those parts. An application is only intuitive if you program its brains properly.


6. Mystery links confound visitors. Non-descriptive labels force us to guess where we will end up. While I love a good game of hide and seek as much as the next person, when I think I know where you're taking me and you take me somewhere totally different, I stop letting you drive.


7. Related to this are Absolute Shock Links. These are navigation links that take you to PDF files without any warning. Since it takes time for the computer to go pull Adobe out of the kitchen, rev it up, load the file and then I swear you have to resize the thing from 200% down to something that doesn't make you get the shakes reading, well, you can see how a little warning is appreciated. The other form of visitor link shock treatment is linking to a totally new domain, with new layout and brand new navigation and no way back because it opened up a new window and cut off all ties to where you were. At least, if you plan on dumping your visitors off somewhere new, work out a nice little warning system and arrange visitation time with the Mothership site.


8. If you want to capture someone's attention, do it above the page fold. Large monitors didn't signal the end of browser laziness. We still like an incentive to use the mouse to scroll, hover or click. If half the page is needed to describe how to use a contact or sales lead form, what is doing business with you like?


9. If you have a FAQ, there had better be a good reason for making your visitors go to a page that displays a long list of questions and answers. They want you to answer the question when they have the question. I remember when I used to show horses and entered jumping classes that required me to memorize the course I'd need to guide my horse around. I could never understand why they didn’t put directions inside the show ring itself that said "Turn left here", "Weave around these scary high jumps" and "Slow down, the judge usually stands about here." A FAQ is nice for backup if you have a complicated process, but user instructions during the actual task are far more considerate and easy to remember.

Finally, don't despair. Web site surfers are often the most incredibly patient and forgiving people, especially if you offer something they want. Just remember to show them where you put it.

About the Author:

Usability Consultant, Kimberly Krause Berg, is the owner of UsabilityEffect.com (www.usabilityeffect.com), Cre8pc.com (www.cre8pc.com), and Cre8asiteForums (www.cre8asiteforums.com/). Her background in organic search engine optimization, combined with web site usability consulting, offers unique insight into web site development. Copyright 2007 Cre8pc.com. All Rights Reserved. Reprint rights by Permission of the Author

Hand Visitors the Keys to Your Web Site

Recently, I wanted to use my car but couldn't find my car key. The last I'd seen it, I was handing it to my daughter, two days ago.

First, I 'texted' her in school, so she wouldn't get into trouble for having a cell phone with her. She typed back, "u hv." Then, I called my husband, who has amazing psychic abilities an hour away from home. He has no idea where my car key is. Fortunately, I had a spare key and of course, later in the evening, my daughter found the original key sitting by her computer, buried in the world's scariest Teenager's Room.

It took all day to solve the missing car key mystery. I stuck with the search because I like my car and like to drive it.

Do you ever hope your web site visitors feel the same way about your web site? Have you driven it around the countryside before offering them the keys to it?

I've Come to Drive Your Web Site

I recently visited a web site that was redesigned. It looked professional and attractive. It was ready for visitors, but perhaps not me. My goal was to find out where the products were and secondly, how to order them. However, the first big whammo! object on the page was a video of a person talking about a product.

This isn't a bad thing. But I'm new. I've just nestled myself into the homepage car seat. I want to look around, play with the radio, adjust the rear view mirror, figure out where they'll let me put my coffee mug and by golly, is that a sale item over there?

I don't want to watch a video yet and their's takes up a huge chunk of homepage real estate, above the page fold. I'm sure it's very nice and I'm sorry for scrolling past it. I came with a mission in mind. Did they build a site for me to carry out my task?

Farther down the page, I finally discover the Way To Our Products click path. I click the link, which takes me to another page with a search function and after a few tries at getting the right search criteria down, I finally arrive at a product I'm interested in. It's been 10 minutes, but YES! I've made it down their web site driveway.

It's a good thing I want to drive their web site because after 10 minutes of figuring out where they put everything, I'm thinking I want to drive a sports car.

Navigation for web sites, especially large sites, is never easy to map out. It takes planning and consideration for visitors’ goals. It has to help visitors complete a task. On this particular web site, which was very attractive, they didn't put a "How to Order" button or link on the product page.

I had no car key. I couldn't start their web site engine. All I was able to do was play "pretend driver" and imagine I was doing something on their web site, because that's about all they designed it to let me do.

The moral of this story?

The next time you design a web site, its okay to take it for a joy-ride. You've earned that right. But, make sure you throw the keys to other drivers and let them take it on the highway or down the street to Starbucks. These people are your user testing hero's.

Trust me when I say that many of them crave bumpy roads and purposely love to drive web sites like maniacs, just to see what that baby can do.

But, remember to get your keys back when they're finished.


About the Author:

Usability Consultant, Kimberly Krause Berg, is the owner of UsabilityEffect.com (www.usabilityeffect.com), Cre8pc.com (www.cre8pc.com), and Cre8asiteForums (www.cre8asiteforums.com/). Her background in organic search engine optimization, combined with web site usability consulting, offers unique insight into web site development. Copyright 2007 Cre8pc.com. All Rights Reserved. Reprint rights by Permission of the Author

Usability and SEO - Red Light, Green Light

By Kim Krause Berg

Another article has appeared on the topic of SEO and Usability and how these two different skill sets benefit each other. The latest, Usability and SEO. Which comes First?, written for Search Engine Watch by Eric Enge, caught my eye because he wrote:
"What I want to emphasize here is one key point: Usability comes first, and SEO comes second."
It's funny to hear that statement coming from a professional SEO.

In the late 1990's, when I offered search engine optimization services, I didn't get the call for help until the web site was launched and swimming for dear life in the search engine pool. In those days, there were lots of search engines. SEO came last, after the design and after people were intended to use it. If they ever found it, that is.

During the past ten years, acceptance by companies to work search engine marketing techniques into their web site pages has vastly improved. User centered, persuasive design, on the other hand, are still whispers in the wind. Will it take another ten years for usability and accessibility to be as justified as marketing a web site property?

What opened my eyes was working in user interface design and discovering that usability came last, AFTER SEO. It was always a pleasant surprise to hear someone on the design team inquire about image alt attributes or fuss over page title tags. Unfortunately, I realized they only knew these things mattered because some of my design team mates owned their own personal web site businesses on the side. It wasn't something the company demanded for itself. They were just lucky the web site designers had their acts together.

User centered design still gets shoved around. As it makes its way into the world of search engine marketing, the experience reminds me of the game "Red Light, Green Light". The caller yells, "Green light!" and everybody runs forward, willy nilly, confident, trying to get to the finish line first. Then, the caller shouts, "Red light!" and suddenly everyone stops. Frozen. They have to hold their position. They can't breathe or giggle, as they wait for their next instruction.

Corporate Blinders

I was recently part of a conversation whereby a man was describing his company's future plans. Presently, they sell products online locally and are now moving into a neighboring country. After this, they plan on going global.

As he describes it, they have no usability person in the entire company. They have search engine marketers. But, they have no idea how to sell online internationally. They don't understand what browsers are popular outside the USA. They don't know how to make forms usable for global customers. User behavior and habits vary by culture, even down to how web pages are read. They assume their present website will work everywhere. I see this constantly and wonder how some corporations survive with such tunnel vision.

Usability is misunderstood and therefore, not even considered a worthwhile investment until sales stop or worse, a lawsuit appears by someone unable to use the site.

It's Not Who Goes First

Whenever I see phrases like "Usability is first, SEO is second" or "SEO is first, usability is second", or "SEO doesn’t need usability", I don't agree with the competition this sets up.
Both disciplines are vital to the air your web site breathes. They are equal sides of the same lung.

Usability, accessibility and search engine marketing practices are united partners because they're focused on the web site visitor. We can all walk up to these customers and shake their hand together.

About the Author:

Usability Consultant, Kimberly Krause Berg, is the owner of UsabilityEffect.com (www.usabilityeffect.com), Cre8pc.com (www.cre8pc.com), and Cre8asiteForums (www.cre8asiteforums.com/). Her background in organic search engine optimization, combined with web site usability consulting, offers unique insight into web site development. Copyright 2007 Cre8pc.com. All Rights Reserved. Reprint rights by Permission of the Author

Web Site Feedback as Your Secret Online Marketing Tool

By Kim Krause Berg

There's a small trick I do with my online order form that helps to identify one of the first problems a web site may have. I purposely don't ask for a business address or phone number right away. I don't want to know what these are. As a web site usability consultant, when I visit a client's web site for the first time, learning how to contact them is my first official task. If I can't locate this information, or it's a pain in the neck to find, I've discovered their first customer service issue.

I wouldn't recommend that you do this with your online business, especially if you are selling products. Your responsibility is to gather accurate information for your transactions immediately so that you can conduct business in an efficient, courteous manner. I, too, have reasons to be more formal, depending on the project. Both you and I have a strong desire to conduct business or provide information in a positive, productive way.

If we do not, how do we know when we've failed? How do we know when we've succeeded? If we don't make the effort to include customers' needs and desires in our interaction with them, and our competitors do, what message does this send? Are you inviting user feedback?

Dear Google, Your Application is Groovy

Search marketers know that local searches are a new arena for promoting online businesses. One way to do this is by informing Google Maps that a business exists. When Google has this information, with data provided by a site owner or their Internet Marketing Consultant, it is more likely a search for your product or service, in your town, will display your business.

I decided to enter my business into the Google Maps application (http://maps.google.com/). There are several steps to the application, with helpful user instructions to guide you. When I reached the end, I had several options for how Google could verify that it was I submitting the data, rather than someone not associated with my business. This extra effort towards accuracy signals a desire to be customer service oriented.

Since I believe in positive reinforcement, I would have liked to have sent a "high five" to Google because I had a good experience using their application. However, on the last screen, there was no place to offer feedback of any kind. I couldn't rate it. I couldn't recommend it to someone. I couldn't send an email. I couldn't answer a one-question quick survey such as "Did you enjoy adding your business to Google Maps?" or "Did you have any problems entering your business and if so, please send us your experience."

I know Google is user centric. This is a missed opportunity for user feedback. It's a missed opportunity to get a pat on the back for a job well done. We all like to hear about when we've done something a site visitor appreciates.

Feedback as User Generated Content

Online customer feedback seems to be tucked somewhere on the last page of site requirements. Forcing visitors to navigate their way through a thick forest of page elements just to locate how to communicate with you creates frustration. Worse, it's a lost opportunity to obtain user generated content for your web site.

User generated content can be a great marketing arm if you understand how to invite feedback and apply it.

I have a book addiction, so to help support it, I buy from Amazon's used book dealers who sell at discounted prices. Shortly after a book arrives, inevitably Amazon follows up with an email invitation to answer a quick survey about the service provided by their third party vendor. The survey is simple, often one or two easy questions focused on a rating scale, and in less than a minute it's completed. The only reason I even bother to respond to them is because I know Amazon issues very fast surveys.

They've earned my trust because I know what to expect from them.

Products are purchased from Amazon as well. I bought a herbal product through them that my doctor recommended after knee surgery. Amazon responded with an email containing a link to a product survey. This one permits user feedback in an interesting way.

"We invite you to submit a review for the product you purchased or share an image that would benefit other customers. Your input will help customers choose the best products on Amazon.com."

The survey is two questions. The first asks if you are over 13. The second is a rating where you can assign 1 – 5 stars. This is followed by an opportunity to enter a title for your review, and a huge comment field to write your review. Alternatively, there is a radio button that allows you to submit a video review.

Consumers can link to the product page in their review. You can "tag" your review with keywords or a category label for the Amazon search engine. Accepted reviews appear on the site in 48 hours.

By getting customers involved, a web site opens the door to user generated content. This is also another outlet for creative online marketers looking to place content and promote products.

Reach Out in the Darkness

By appealing to feelings and emotions, you'll increase a customer's desire to contact you. One sure-fire way of grabbing their heart is to suggest you'll take something away that they care about.

You can ask for feedback by presenting questions such as "Should we remove [insert beloved gadget or site pleaser here]?" One popular topic is asking readers if they mind if you include a few ads. The point is that you need not be afraid to take the initiative. Let your visitors know what you may be considering and offer them a chance to respond. If you strike a nerve, their feedback may be unwelcome if they blog about it, or if you're lucky, they'll send praise. Take into consideration whether you want feedback to be public or private.

Sometimes you won’t have a choice.

In the early stages of Danny Sullivan's new Sphinn site for search marketers, I blogged publically about the lack of a place to post usability topics there. My blog post caught the attention of Sullivan and his loyal band of developers. He responded in my blog, and our dialog became a news story. They added a Usability category because the resulting user feedback justified the inclusion.

It didn't stop there. Sphinn readers are encouraged to ask questions, submit ideas for new features and propose solutions to known problems, in the forum-like space. Danny or his staff responds publically.

By enabling most user feedback to be out front, they're creating content. Behind this content is an enormous message from Third Door Media that customer service is a top priority.

Free Candy for Your Feedback

A food shopping chain in my area places customer service directly on the opposite side of the cash registers, where we get fast help. I once had a vegetable my cashier couldn't identify and he yelled across to the customer service desk for help to verify what I told him it was. It used to be that retail stores stuck customer service in the farthest corner away from the action. Do you do this too?

You can turn feedback into a promotion device or funnel it into site enhancements.

1. Be there when they need you. Place your Contact page in your global navigation so that it appears on every page. Increase the font size of your toll-free phone number.


2. Provide a feedback form, but make it short. Be sure to clearly indicate your form is "quick". Some visitors will balk at polls, surveys or forms that require a time investment. Make sure your drop-down menu has an "Other" category. Don't require registration first. Be very clear with visitors about what you intend to do with the feedback.


3. Watch labels. Amazon calls their customer service page "Help", but that word conjures up a FAQ page, not user feedback. If you provide a form, say so with "Feedback Form" or "Your Fast Feedback".


4. Don't make anyone feel insignificant. Amazon has an option to sign-in before offering feedback and in smaller text offers permission for non-members to contact them. However, another link for "Express" feedback is for members. Not all feedback is created equal? Get permission to use any user generated content on your site.


5. Invite product reviews, guest blog writers, paid product reviews, video, audio, snapshots. Turn your customers into your personal sales force by establishing trust. Let them edit or remove reviews later. Link back and pass "link juice".

Lastly provide incentives such as coupons, free shipping, fee discounts and free samples to those who were unhappy with a product. Many companies truly loathe dissatisfied customers and will bend over backwards to please them. Show you want their feedback by encouraging creative opportunities for them to do so.

About the Author:

Usability Consultant, Kimberly Krause Berg, is the owner of UsabilityEffect.com (www.usabilityeffect.com), Cre8pc.com (www.cre8pc.com), and Cre8asiteForums (www.cre8asiteforums.com/). Her background in organic search engine optimization, combined with web site usability consulting, offers unique insight into web site development.
Copyright 2007 - 2008 Cre8pc.com. All Rights Reserved. Reprint rights by Permission of the Author

Successful Website - Secrets

By Jerry Goldfarb

Does your business have a presence on the Internet? Is it doing well? Did you know that the most important factor effecting your business on the internet is your web site? No matter how good your product is, no matter how low your product is priced at, success on the internet depends wholly on your website. If the website is not professional looking, the chances of your
success are slim.

This article assumes that you are conversant with HTML and includes a few tips on designing a professional looking website.

* The home page should load in the browser in less than 8 seconds at 56.6 Kbps connection. The customer never waits, costing you precious business.

* Search Engines are the agents that bring traffic to your site; about 80% of web traffic comes through search engines today. To make your website friendly to search engines, make sure that proper META tags are included in each of the pages. Before you edit the site or make one, make sure that you understand how to optimize the website.

* Choose your backgrounds and colors carefully. Dark colors and interesting backgrounds take the focus away from the content. Maintain the color and background theme throughout the site.
Colors have an effect on the mood of the visitor. Choose carefully as per your requirements.

* Choose not to use animation on you site. Animation causes slow loading speed and also looks unprofessional.

* The home page should contain relevant information on what you are offering. If the visitor cannot find the product or service at the home page, you will lose him forever.

* Avoid using banners. If you need to use them, keep them limited to 1 per page.

* Always display contact information on every page of your website. Also keep the response times minimal, within 48 hours to promote better relationships.

* Make sure all links and images are working properly on the website. Check for grammar in the content. A professional website should not have mistakes in it and should contain a logo on each page. Make sure that a visitor can get from the start to the end of his destination within 4 clicks.

* The navigation should be simple and easy. Keep all navigation links together.

* Java and frames should be used sparingly, to speed up loading times and to ensure search engine friendliness.

* Finally before uploading, check the site loading different browsers. All browsers are not made equal.

* Keep your site up-to-date and change content every fortnight. The regular visitors should have a reason to come back.

For more information and tips, visit http://www.cobbwebdesign.com/.

About The Author:

Jerry Goldfarb

For more information and tips, visit http://www.cobbwebdesign.com/.

Improving Conversion Rates

By David Andrew Smith

You have optimised your website and attracted a large number of inbound links by one means or another. The results of this are that your site now appears on the first page of the top three
search engines, Google, MSN and Yahoo, for your chosen keywords or phrases. You have cracked it! Now you are getting hundreds of visitors a day to your website. Unfortunately very few are staying to browse your site and even fewer are purchasing your products or enquiring after the services you offer.

You must look closely at your site to find the reason behind this if you wish to improve your conversion rates. There are two immediate actions you can take. Have you optimised your site for the search engines or your visitors? You should always optimise your site for your visitors as they will provide you with your income not the search engines. The search engines are simply a means to an ends.

It is better to have twenty visitors to your site 15 of whom purchase a product or service than it is to have 500 of whom only 5 make a purchase. When developing your site keep in mind your potential customers and put text into the site that they will appreciate, like and find informative. Never write your copy with the search engines in mind and those omnipotent algorithms. Algorithms do not make enquiries or purchases people do.

If your copy is attractive and readable and encourages real people to contact you or buy a product then it is highly likely to be equally attractive to the search engines. When writing your copy you should not be trying to 'sell' your product or service with blatant over the top advertising. Be more subtle. You are fulfilling a wish or a need or solving a problem so be
informative. People have carried out a specific search so the need is already there you have to now give them the information they need to convince them to purchase of you. So as always the
content is the key to making sales as well as attracting the attention of the search engines.

You must work hard at getting this content right. The second line of investigation is to analyse your sites visitor statistics carefully Look at each visitor and how they arrived at your site. That is what search terms did they use? What page did they land on? What pages did they navigate through? What page did they exit on? What area of the World or country did they come from? If they made no enquiry or purchase, look at their search phrase, and where on your site they went, and attempt to calculate why they left without making that enquiry or purchase. Was it because their search was not appropriate for ypour actual product or service? Do you not perhaps provide your service to their particular area? Did they miss or could not find exactly what they wanted on your site because of badly designed navigation paths? Or is it perhaps because the text is simply not up to standard?

If you think it is a structural problem then you can alter this so that people find it easier to navigate to places on the site that they actually want. It may also be a matter of your content so you can change this.

By constantly monitoring your site's statistics you can dramatically increase your conversion rates, that is, convert more of your visitors into paying customers. Finally do keep note of what you do so that you can accurately monitor the changes you make to find out if and by how much they are making a difference.

About The Author:

David Andrew Smith runs a successful contract cleaning company http://www.wesparkle.co.uk for both commercial and domestic customers in the UK. He has devoloped and maintains the company's website.

What Does Your Website Say About Your Business?

By Tim Knox

Q: My business is very small, just me and two employees, and our product really can't be sold online. Do I really need a website?
-- Robin C.

A: Congratulations, Robin, you are the one millionth person to ask me that question. Smile for the cameras, brush the streamers and confetti from your hair and listen closely, because I'm about to answer for the millionth time what has become one of the most important and often-asked questions of the digital business age.

Before I answer, however, let's flash back to the very first time I was asked this question. It was circa 1998, during the toddler years of the Internet, just after Al Gore laid claim to having given birth to the concept a few short years before.

I was giving a speech on the impact of the Internet on small business at an association luncheon in Montgomery, Alabama. My motto then was: Feed me and I will speak. I have the same motto today, but I now expect dessert to be included in exchange for the sharing of my vast wisdom.

In 1998, which was decades ago in Internet years, the future of electronic commerce or "ecommerce" as it's come to be known, was anybody's guess, but even the most negative futurists agreed that all the signs indicated that a large portion of future business revenues would be derived from online transactions, or from offline transactions that were the result of online marketing efforts.

So, Robin, should your business have a website, even if your business is small and sells products or services that you don't think can be sold online? My answer in 1998 is the same as my answer today: Yes, if you have a business, you should have a website. Period. No question. Without a doubt. Thank you, drive through.

Now serving customer number one million and one.

Also, don't be so quick to dismiss your product as one that can't be sold online. Nowadays there is very little that can not be sold over the Internet. More than 20 million shoppers are now online, purchasing everything from books to computers to cars to real estate to jet airplanes to natural gas to you name it. If you can imagine it, someone will figure out how to sell it online.

Internet marketing research firms predict that online revenues will range between $180 and $200 billion dollars in 2003. They also predict that the number of online consumers will grow at a rate of 30-50% over the next few years. These numbers alone should be enough to convince you that your business should have a website.

Let me clarify one point: I am not saying that you should put all your efforts into selling your wares over the Internet, though if your product lends itself to easy online sales, you certainly should be considering it.

The point to be made here is that you should at the very least have a presence on the World Wide Web so that customers, potential employees, business partners, and perhaps even investors can quickly and easily find out more about your business and the products or services you have to offer.

That said, it's not enough that you just have a website. You must have a professional looking website if you want to be taken seriously. Since many consumers now search for information online prior to making a purchase at a brick and mortar store, your website may be the first chance you have at making a good impression on a potential buyer. If your website looks like it was designed by a barrel of colorblind monkeys, your chance at making a good first impression will be lost.

One of the great things about the Internet is that it has leveled the playing field when it comes to competing with the big boys. As mentioned, you have one shot at making a good first impression and with a well-designed website, your little operation can project the image and professionalism of a much larger company. The inverse is also true. I've seen many big company websites that were so badly designed and hard to navigate that they completely lacked professionalism and credibility. Good for you, too bad for them.

You also mention that yours is a small operation, but when it comes to benefiting from a website, size does not matter. I don't care if you are a one-man show or a ten thousand employee corporate giant; if you do not have a website you are losing business to other companies that do. Here's the exception to my rule: It's actually better to have no website at all than to have one that makes your business look bad.

Your website speaks volumes about your business. It either says, "Hey, look, we take our business so seriously that we have created this wonderful website for our customers!" or it
says, "Hey, look, I let my ten-year old nephew design my site! Good luck finding anything!"

What does your website say about your business?

Here's to your success.

About The Author:

Tim Knox Entrepreneur, Author, Speaker
http://www.prosperityandprofit.com
http://www.dropshipwholesale.net http://www.smallbusinessqa.com
http://www.timknox.com

Affiliate Tip - Build A Website

By Nell Taliercio

One of the first things you should do as an affiliate marketer is to build you own website. Yes, you can market affiliate programs without it by adding links to your email or signature file on message boards, but you will be very limited in how much you can earn this way. Building a website allows you to expose the products you are promoting to a much larger audience with less effort.

Decide on a Topic

Your first step is to decide what you would like your website to be about. Find a topic you like, something you are passionate about. You will be spending a lot of time creating content for your site, so it may as well be something you enjoy reading and writing about. Your enthusiasm for the subject will shine through as well, and will get your visitors interested. Once you have your topic, make sure there are affiliate products available that compliment the site and that there are people interested in buying it.

Pick a Domain Name

Use a site like register.com, or your web host's site to research available domain names. It helps to have one of your major keywords in your domain name. So if you decided your website will be about growing roses, try to work "rose" in the domain name. You want your domain name to be easy to remember and easy to type. Try to avoid using dashes in the name and find something that's available as a dot com address.

Hosting

The next step is to set up a web hosting account. You should be able to get by with a basic personal website package to begin with. Get some recommendations from others when it comes to choosing the actual hosting company. You want a service that is reliable and has good customer service. After all, you won't be making any money when you site is down. I have been using Dayana hosting for years and highly recommend them.

Site Builder or Software

Let's talk about how you can build your website. Your options are using a site builder, like internetbasedfamilies.com or software like Microsoft FrontPage, or my favorite x-site pro. A site builder is usually easier to use in the beginning and hosting is included. You will pay a monthly fee for the software and hosting combined. If you build your site using software like x-site pro or FrontPage, you have the added initial expense of buying the software, but your monthly hosting costs are usually lower. Of course a third option is to have someone else design the site for you. You should still get familiar with the site builder or software, so you can make changes to the site.

Getting Traffic To The Site

Your last step will be getting traffic to your site. Optimize your pages for search engines to get free traffic. You can also write articles and submit them to article directories. Pay per click advertising and buying ads on other related sites or newsletters are also great ways to drive traffic to your site.

About The Author:

For more information about websites go to http://www.mommysplace.net and for more information about affiliate marketing go to http://www.nellnews.com

Learn How To Accept Payment Online From Your Customers

By Paolo Basauri

Whether you own thousands of dollars or just a few hundred-at least two hundred, and you are providing a service, it may be a good idea for you to check into accept payment online from your
customers. This is a type of merchant status and the first place for you to look to achieve that status is the bank you do business with. Just because you may have been doing business with them for a long time doesn't mean they will automatically give you merchant status though, and if they turn you down, don't worry, you have other options. You can try a couple of other banks or you can try other companies that specialize in issuing accounts to online merchants. Do a Google search and type in credit card processing, you will find many outfits looking for businesses seeking merchant accounts. This will not be a cheap endeavor either; start-up fees to accept payments online can amount to around $200 and monthly processing fees of around $20 dollars.

While searching for your merchant account so you can accept payments online, you should also realize that you are going to have to make your customers feel safe while doing business with you online. Wherever you buy your credit card processing should also supply you with a secure transaction environment, if they don't find one some where else before you start accepting
payments online. Despite what you may have heard about accepting payments online, credit card payments are still one of the safest payment methods available online. There are many
fraud-prevention tools out there so check them out and get one that will suit your needs. You can also protect yourself by using the card validation code 2 {CVC2} and the card verification value {CVV2} verification systems of MasterCard and Visa, respectively. These verification services use the three-digit codes printed on all MasterCard and Visa cards to help you determine whether your customers are using legitimate cards. Also, you may want to ask prospective processors about the costs of storefront solutions that you should have to make
your website a success, things like shopping carts, Web hosting, online payment gateways, virtual checks, customer tracking, databases for your orders, and a way to calculate tax and shipping charges. These are all the things you need for a successful Web site business.

Shop around for a credit card processor that best suits your needs. Talk to several different processors and don't be afraid to ask questions. Find out about:

The discount rate: The percentage of each transaction paid to the merchant account provider. If your monthly charges are less than a certain volume, the processor may charge a higher percentage. Just make sure you read all the fine print before you start doing business with the services you need to run your own business. You want your customers to feel secure in all aspects of doing business with you, so they will keep buying your products and you can accept payments online.

About The Author:

Leeanna is an expert author writing for accept payment online http://www.onlinepaymentsystem.org

So That's What Goes on a Home Page!

By Marcia Yudkin

In the early days of the World Wide Web, the word went around that the thing to do on a home page is to heartily and sincerely welcome the visitor. Today, this is unnecessary, cliched and ineffective. Instead, an effective home page needs to quickly orient the visitor to what the business or professional practice offers, distinguish these offerings from competitors' and direct the web site visitor what to do if they are interested in learning more.

It's especially important to make a strong and clear presentation on the home page if you want perfect strangers coming from a search engine to spend more than 10 seconds on the site when determining whether or not it is relevant to them. Getting business from such strangers is one of the major payoffs of having a web site, and they lack the patience of someone who has already had contact with you or been referred by a trusted source. Even people seriously
inclined to hire you don't have endless patience to wade through hot air, jargon or superfluous preliminaries.

Therefore, a home page must make it possible to answer these questions within 10 seconds:

• What is being described or sold here? What kind of business is this?


• Why should I do business with this company rather than its competitors?


• What should I do to find out more or get in touch?

In judging web sites for the Webby Awards, I have seen as many rich, large companies as small ones overlook the first essential for a home page - set the context. Orient the visitor. The perfect stranger may need to know things that you assume everyone already knows, such as:

1. What business are you in? Include a commonly understood industry name or the generic name of your primary product or service prominently in the home page copy, if it's not already part of your business name or in the tag line. When this information isn't plainly and obviously stated, many visitors are screaming to themselves, "What IS this?" as they hit the back button on their browsers.
2. Who do you serve? So many businesses - banks, restaurants, dentists - leave it unspoken what state or province and even what country they are in when that's essential to someone figuring out whether or not this business meets their needs. When location plays a crucial role in service, make it unmistakable where the business is. Other times, the answer to this question is more subtle. You need to indicate that you work with Fortune 500 companies, or mostly with authors, or with ambitious fitness professionals and health club owners.
3. Why should someone do business with you? The best kind of answer to this question involves presenting the benefits someone gets from buying your products or services. Indeed, I recommend putting such benefits right in your home page headline. For instance, for a caregiving support site I created this headline: With Support, Caregiving Becomes a Rewarding Journey. For a site about a book on outstanding women scientists and artists, the headline read: Learn From Accomplished Women Role Models How to Create a Fulfilling Lifelong Career. Note the inviting tone of these headlines. Within the paragraphs of the home page copy, refer again and again to what customers get and what makes you different from competitors.
4. What should I do next? Even though you provide navigation links for people to choose where to go next at the site, it's effective to say explicitly what someone with such and such an interest should do. Your call to action might have more than one part, such as: To learn more about how Hyana Heights Club helps you stay healthy and fit, click here. To book your free tour and complimentary aerobics class, click here.

Use these guidelines to create or redo a home page, and you'll enjoy a significantly improved response from your web site both from people landing on your site from search engines and those already somewhat interested in what you offer. There's much more involved in turning web site visitors into customers, but you'll certainly thereby have laid the groundwork for a reasonable return on your web site investment.

About the Author:

Marcia Yudkin (marcia@yudkin.com) has helped to judge the Webby Awards for six years, as well as the Inc. Magazine Small Business Web Awards. The author of Web Site Marketing Makeover and 10 other books, she performs web site reviews, web site makeovers and creates marketing-smart web sites from scratch. See her sample home page makeover at http://www.yudkin.com/sample8b.htm .

Get A Free Google Friendly Website

By Raymond Noud

Squidoo is a free website service. They provide you with a tag based webpage that you can use for just about whatever you choose. It can be a list of your grandmothers cooking recipes, a family tree website, a collection of pictures of your house pets or whatever you want. You just cannot post porn or hate related stuff of course.

The site is set up is such that many different areas of the squidoo site link back to your page via tags and other group links ect. The overall sitewide pagerank on squidoo actually helps each individual site's pagerank improve if the site content is kept fresh by it's owner. This creates good backlinks immediately upon publishing your first page or as they call it: a Lens. Squidoo pages are used for virtually anything. Some Squidoo pages are used for business opportunities and some are used to list grama's favorite recipes and anything in between.

Squidoo also puts Adsense ads on all lenses sitewide and splits the proceeds with the lens owner that the click came from! And remember this website site is free!

Squidoo also has pre-made modules for Amazon Ebay and others that you can add to your site and you can make money from those sales as well.

The site allows HTML in all fields of the setup process. You can see your Squidoo lens in Google within two weeks without even submitting it to a single search engine! And my site showed up in Google the second day after I made it! I just followed the prompts, and put in what I wanted to say and it was not complicated at all.

The site administrators at squidoo work hard to ensure this is a friendly community for everyone. This is very important and I must say, they do it very well.

In my case I created a site to sell products but you can use this site for almost anything. Long story short, you just cant go wrong with a Squidoo page so get yours free today!
http://www.squidoo.com/raysgroup

About The Author:

Raymond Noud, network marketer, musician and Gutiar builder. I Also build websites. See mine here: http://www.makemoneyteam.com

4 Tips To a Better Looking Website

By Kaleb Brody

There are many conflicting theories about color and layout of a website, however I would like to list a few rules that will help you improve your website visitor experiences.

I have seen literally hundreds of landing pages and websites that have great sales copy, are promoting quality products, and have a lot of potential to be a great, but the page looks horrible. Today we are going to focus on the readability and layout of a website.

The purpose of a landing page or website is to get your visitors to read what you have to say. Whether you're selling products and services, or providing useful information, you need to be able to effectively communicate with your visitors for them to take the action you desire. That action could be clicking on a link, signing up for a newsletter, or purchasing a product. The size and color of your text play a huge part in communicating your message to your visitors. Having Black Text, on a white background is THE easiest form of text to read.

Using color schemes that clash, or cause the text to be difficult to read will many times cause your visitors to leave your page immediately. If you want to use a different color background or text color, make sure that readability is not negatively affected. Below are a few rules that will help you improve your website.

1. Do not use dark text with a dark background. Dark text on dark background makes it hard to distinguish text from the background color. Thus making your eyes have to focus harder.

2. Do not use text colors that clash with background color. White text on a black background has a "glowing" like affect that makes your text hard to read. Red on blue also creates a negative glowing affect.

3. Do not use large text for your main sales copy or body paragraphs. It is ok to use larger text for links and headlines, but the main text of your page should be Arial Size 2 (12pt). Arial Size 2 is the internet standard.

4. Do not waste the space at the top of the page with unnecessary graphics, flash, or banners that have no purpose. Simply listing the name of your website, or domain name is a very poor use of this prime real estate space. The first fold of your website is the most important space that you have because it is the section of the page that is visible as soon as your page loads. Do not take up this space with unnecessary graphics, flash, or banners. A Strong headline that states the benefit of your product or service is always better than a banner that has no purpose.

If you are struggling with site design or if its taking too much of your time, here's some tools that can greatly help you.

Site Rubix: Not free but well worth the investment. Cost less than most website builders. This website builder enables you to create professional looking websites within 5 minutes, all without any Html knowledge.

DreamWeaver: This software is allows you to build visually appealing websites without Html skills, but may take you awhile to get past the learning curve that the software presents. DreamWeaver is one of the more popular but expensive website builders.

Nvu: It's free, but will take you longer to make a website and generally the site will not look as professional.

Remember, your website serves a purpose, whatever that purpose is make sure your visitors can easily read and understand message. I hope the tips provided above assist you in creating a professional looking website that you can take pride in.

About The Author:

Caleb Caldwell is a full time Internet marketer and web designer. If you're interested in learning more about how you can quickly and easily build a professional website with no Html skills, the be sure you go to http://www.siterubixone.com for more info.