13 Ways To Destroy Your Website

With all the talk of how to make a great website and ways to keep visitors, it is important to also understand the other side of designing an Internet business.

Every day, thousands of websites are finding unique ways to turn away visitors and potential customers. Although many webmasters know about the obvious “turn-offs”, there are many little details that “tick-off” visitors and make them leave.

In fact, I have found that there are 13 “small” items that can make or break a website. To avoid having your visitors “click-away” from your site make sure that you include the following things:

1) A Professional Appearance: Most websites don’t need flash effects or dazzling visuals. But, your Internet business should be perceived as legitimate site, built by someone who cares about the content and appearance. In other words, the colors and graphics should blend well with one another. In addition, all web-copy should be dynamic and devoid of grammar or spelling mistakes. Finally, any images on the page should enhance the experience for your visitors without distracting them.

2) Proper Navigation: The pages on your website should be easily connected. To do this, every section should connect to the main page, with a clear and concise menu. Don’t make your visitors spend a lot of time looking for different sections. Help them by ensuring that the navigation of your site remains constant throughout all pages.

3) An Obvious Theme: Your index page should immediately let the visitor know what you are selling or promoting. Usually the best way to do this is by briefly describing the purpose of your website and include product photos that can help people understand your purpose.

4) A Logo: One of the best ways to “brand” your site and remain unique is to have a logo for your Internet business. By having a logo, your website is more likely to make an “impression” with your visitors and develop a following. Any logo used needs to be consistent with the theme and color scheme of your site.

5) FAQs: There will be times when your visitors have a question that is not covered by the standard descriptions or sales pages. To help them out, it is important to have a section that is devoted to answering common questions. By creating a FAQ page, your prospects can easily find the answers to their questions and will be more likely to order from your site.

6) What’s New Section: With repeat visitors, there will be times when you want to update them with current news or promotions. The best way to do this is to create a “What’s New” section. That way, you can inform old visitors, while making sure that they know about all current marketing campaigns.

7) Contact Information: Eventually, your website visitor will have a question for you. Because of this, it is vital that you list all possible ways that they can reach you. By creating a contact page, you will be able to answer questions and reinforce the fact that there is an actual person behind the website.

8) Feedback Forms: The best websites always change, catering to the needs of the visitor. In order to find out what your customers need, it is important to solicit feedback from them. A common way to do this is by creating a feedback form on the site, which includes questions that will help improve the overall quality of the Internet business.

9) Privacy Policy: With the problem of spam, many people are afraid to give out personal information such as their email address and credit card numbers. To help alleviate this fear, you need to include a “Privacy Policy” section. Basically this page will let them know how all information is used and if they will be contacted in the future. It is better to upfront about your practices than to be accused of mishandling information.

10) Email List: Top websites work on developing an email list of prospects that can be contacted in the future. This should go without saying, but your email list subscription area should have a prominent position on your web page. In addition, include a quick blurb about any incentive that you offer to visitors for joining the list.

11) About Us: Most website visitors appreciate knowing that a business is run by an actual human being. To help personalize your website, you need to include a little information about both you and your online business.

12) Sales Page: Even with the best product descriptions, it is important to create a dedicated page that describes how your products are superior to your competitors. This section should be a summary of all your key features written in a dynamic tone. Basically, you want your visitors to read this page and immediately buy from you. An example of a sales page, can be seen from my own site: http://mizambar.com/whyevileye.html .

13) Refund/Return Policy On the other side, there will be times when a customer is not happy. To help alleviate any fears that they might have about purchasing online, there needs to be a section where potential customers can read your rules on accepting returns and refunds. Carefully list how and if you accept refunds. If you do not, then be upfront about it.

Because there are over a million websites on the Internet, it is now vital that you give your visitors what they need. Unfortunately, they will never tell you what is necessary. But, by including these 13 items in the design of your website, you can assured that you will have a distinct advantage over your competitor’s Internet business.

About the Author
Scott J. Patterson designed and promoted his own online store with NO computer experience. To find out how he did it, be sure to check out a FREE copy of his ebook: http://www. buildingastore.com/free-ebook.html?13L.

7 Web Site Design Mistakes That Will Lose You Clients

In today's world, a web site is virtually mandatory for any successful business. But there are web sites that will win you customers, and there are web sites that will lose you customers.

Good design has a lot to do with which category your web site will fall into. But what is it that makes good or bad web site design? In my personal opinion, a good web site is one that's simple, informative and gives me a reason to come back frequently. That's what you should get from a good web designer/writer team. Bad sites, on the other hand, are complicated to use, slow loading, confusing or just plain annoying.

Here's a list of my personal top 7 turn-offs as far as web site design is concerned:

1. Slow loading pages
Studies have shown that you have less than ten seconds to grab a visitor's attention. If your web page hasn't finished loading within that (very short) amount of time, you might as well forget about it. The main culprit I've found here are huge, slow-loading graphics, especially when they are embedded in tables. If large images are absolutely vital to presenting your business, compromise by adding thumbnails to the main page and allow the visitor to click on them to access the main image. Nobody minds a longer loading time, as long as it's them who can make that choice.

2. No contact information
As I've already mentioned in my article "Do's and don'ts of web site copy", one of my pet peeves is a web site that has no contact information accessible form the main page. If I can't get in touch with a company quickly and easily, chances are that I'll go to the competition. My advice is to have a whole page dedicated to contact information – address, phone, fax, email, and preferably a map of where you can be found (remember item #1, though – no huge graphics!) And please, don't use a graphic to display that information in a particularly clever way. I like to copy and paste that information directly from the web page to my contact management program. If I can't do that, you'll likely never hear form me – and all other customers who do the same!

3. Difficult to navigate
Don't try to be clever with navigational features. Simple text links or, if you prefer, quick-loading graphics are perfectly good means of allowing a visitor to navigate your site. Anything that requires interactive navigation, like menus that expand into sub-menus, sub-sub-menus and so on, is more an indication of a wrong information architecture than of a true need for complicated navigational features.

4. Non-HTML features
Don't get me started on this one. I've got a firewall on my
computer, and my browser is set to block all those little nasty things that can mess with my PC. As a result I come across many a site that won't display or function properly, because it relies on features like JavaScript, Cookies, Interactive Headers or Java Applets. None of these are necessary to build a good web site, and unless you want your web site to lose you potential customers, you shouldn't use them. Or, if you absolutely have to, make sure that they are not integral parts of the web site!

5. Huge splash page
Another pet peeve of mine. As mentioned earlier, you have less than ten seconds to get your message across. Now guess how many visitors are going to wait longer than that just to watch a fancy animation? 'Nuff said.

6. Pop-up ads
A huge turn-off as far as I'm concerned. As a matter of fact, I've got a pop-up blocker installed on my PC, so if your web site tried to tell me something important via a pop-up window, I'd never even see it. If you feel that you have to use pop-ups, consider going for the less intrusive (and annoying) pop-under windows instead.

7. Sideways scrolling
Not everybody has a monitor with the same screen resolution as you, so make sure that your web site displays on monitors with a lower resolution without forcing your visitor to scroll sideways. It's a singularly annoying thing, and chances are that you'll lose those visitors very quickly. Or, if you have information in a column on the right side of your web site, it may simply never appear on the screen

About the Author
Need online copy that gets results? Frauke Nonnenmacher is a
copywriter who specialises in clear, informative and persuasive
web copy. For more information, please visit her web site at
http://www.creativecats.com

10 Tips on designing a fast loading web site

The Number 1 rule that every web designer should follow is to create a fast loading web site. You might have a great design but very few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load. While designing a web site always think about how long it will take to load. Try out our tips to build a great looking web site that also loads fast.

Minimize the use of images - The key to a fast loading web site is to minimize the use of images. Images do enhance a page but don't make 80% of your web site only images. Instead break it down as much as possible to simple HTML. Notice the popular sites like Yahoo, Google, Ebay, Amazon etc., they have very few images because the load time is more important. Very often simple designs are the best.

Optimize images for the web - Once you have decided on the images that you need on your site, make sure that it is optimized for the web. They should be in the gif or jpeg format. You can also minimize the size of the image by choosing the number of colors you need, from the color palette. The less the colors you choose, the less the size of the image. You can also use online tools like Gif Wizard to optimize your images or to get a recommendation on how to cut down the size of an image.

Use Tables creatively - You can get some great looking designs by using tables creatively . Tables load very fast because it is just HTML code. Tables can be used in the homepage, menus or anywhere you like.

Cut down the use of animated gifs - Don't use animated gifs unless it is necessary. Animated gifs take a long time to load and can also be very irritating. But since they catch your attention you could use small animated gifs to draw a visitor's attention to a particular section of your site.

Design simple icons - Instead of using big, bulky images use simple and small icons that add a little color and draw the attention of a visitor.

Use background images instead of big images whenever possible - Use background images whenever possible. This is usually a very useful tip for headers and footers. Instead of using an image of width 580 which is a uniform design you can use just a part of that as a background fill. This reduces the size of the web page as the image is small. The code will look like this :

Try out CSS Styles - Have fun with CSS styles to get some cool text effects. Again, a CSS Style is simple HTML code so it loads very fast. You can create cool rollovers using CSS Styles.

Use Flash sparingly - There seems to be a lot of hype about Flash but I recommend that you minimize the use of Flash on a site. Don't make entire sites using Flash. It may look great but it takes hours to load and can really put off visitors. If you do want to use Flash use it within an HTML site and make sure it loads fast.

Design most of your site in HTML - As much as possible try to design your site using HTML. You can create great designs by just using HTML code. Use tables, CSS Styles and simple fonts to design your site. Minimize the use of animated gifs, Flash, bulky images etc.

Keep checking your load time - Last but not least, before you decide on the final design of your web site, check its load time on NetMechanic. This site gives you a free analysis of your web site which is extremely useful.

About the Author
Rachna is the CEO of Entheos, a Web Design firm, with the vision to expand its horizons to encompass new areas of service on the Web. Rachna is a creative Web Designer with capabilities in Flash, Dreamweaver and ASP. She has written over 50 articles and tutorials on Web Designing and Web Promotion.