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words and graphics will be the main forms of communication in a website, it is of utmost importance that they convey your message in the most effective way without any jarring expressions, omissions and complications. The ultimate aim is to create a website that will attract millions of visitors and have them returning to the site again and again. From my observation, great websites, regardless of their functions, seem to observe the following rules: Good sites are rich in contents. ------------------------------------------- Before you set out to design a website, you must first identify your purpose and target audience. What do you want to do with your site? Who is your target audience? Where can you find them? What are their interests? What products, services and information will appeal to them? Why should they visit your site? How are you going to attract and retain your target prospects? Getting the answers to the above questions would pretty much set the looks, appeals and contents for your site. Whatever your contents and resources, they must always share a common theme and focus. You may consider offering some free information and resources to attract visitors to your site. It is a fact that most people use the Internet first and foremost to search for information. 'Content is king' as witnessed by the successes of Yahoo and America Online. Both started out as an information portal providing value-added information and resources to millions of users who flock to their sites every month. Good sites have great homepages. ------------------------------------------------- The homepage is the entry point to your site. If it does not appeal to your visitors, chances are high that they will leave your site as soon as they arrive without ever viewing a second page on your site. How can we create an effective homepage? There is no straightforward answer. A directory-styled homepage may serve the purpose well for web portals like Yahoo. In other cases, a simple homepage with an enticing slogan and graphic may work equally well. You may also consider setting up multiple entry points if there are distinctive sections in your site. Whatever your preferences, the key to designing an effective homepage lies in determining the needs and wants of your target audience and offering them the desired solutions in your site. This concept should appeal to your visitors and generate enough interests for them to start exploring your site. Good sites are easy to read. ---------------------------------------- You are judged by how well you write! I am not exaggerating. The ability to write simply and clearly in an appropriate format and style is very important in the world of business communication. A well-written sales literature is usually what it takes to close the sales. This is particularly true for a website, as the written words are the only effective means to convey your messages to your readers. Your writing should be free from jarring expressions, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. If you do not have the ability to write clearly and concisely, you should seriously consider paying several hundred dollars for a freelance editor to proofread and edit your entire sites. It would be money well spent! Good sites are easy to navigate. --------------------------------------------- Good contents are useless if visitors could not access the information easily. Web surfers are very impatient people. They would simply go elsewhere if they feel lost in your 'maze' of information. A simple rule of thumb is to present your information in easily identifiable categories. You may consider color-coding your pages according to their respective categories or sections, particularly if you are designing a big and complex site with more than several hundred pages. At Aloha-City, we have color-coded our pages in various colors - gray for Work@Home; violet for Home; gold for Fort Street Mall; pink for Biz Connection and green for Utrendz. This methodology let us maintain a consistent layout throughout our website, while allowing visitors to identify and navigate from one page to another easily. Good sites are good communities. ------------------------------------------------ Good websites are usually good communities. The notion of selling a product online must include community building and vice-versa. The logic is simple. People want to belong to a community, and commerce will flourish in places where a community settles in, regardless of whether these places exist in cyberspace or in the real world. An online community dedicated to a specific target audience can play a very important role in arousing its members' awareness and interest in specific products and services. These highly qualified prospects will then be more receptive to seek information about related products and make purchases subsequently. Studies in the United States have confirmed that relevant content adjacent to merchant or product links helps to trigger impulse buying. On average, they reported six times higher than average click-through rates for these links. Good sites mimic the real world. -------------------------------------------- You should create virtual community that mimics the real world community. It must be relevant to the members' lives, works or hobbies. Your contents and information should be restricted to those that your community wants. You must pay constant attention to changing visitor demands and interests, or your site will die. When you upload your pages to the web, your job does not end there. On the contrary, it has just begun. You have to continue to update your contents regularly to keep them current and relevant to your visitors' need. Good sites encourage interactivity. ------------------------------------------------ People have a natural urge to share ideas and stories. Make your visitors feel that they have a vital role to play in your web site, and they will be encouraged to share their ideas and stories with you. If possible, you can provide interactive features such as chat rooms or bulletin boards that allow online exchanges of ideas and views. To adapt a well-known phrase, 'A web community that clicks together sticks together.' Studies have shown that good websites that last for years have operated on the bases of sharing free information, helping each other and keeping their contents current and relevant. The idea is to build a community with the intent of including other like-minded people and then let it grows on its own. Good sites do not stand-alone. ------------------------------------------ Good sites also do not stand-alone. You must create outgoing links that are complementary to what you have to offer. It will be a win-win situation for two related sites to share contents, exchange links and cross-reference each other. The idea is simple. If you do not have what your visitor wants, then help him find what he wants in another site. And if your outgoing links are comprehensive enough, you may actually end up attracting more people to your site as a one-stop, quick reference source for everything they need. A good example would be Web Tool Box at http://www.aloha-city.com ools/. It contained hundreds of links to web resources and tools that are useful to online business owners, webmasters, designers and programmers. Final Considerations. ----------------------------- The above guidelines are meant for designing third-generation websites. Conceived by design, these websites focus more on styles, functionality and contents, and less on technological features. Unless necessary, you should avoid using Java plug-ins, multimedia, shockwave, flash, animation and large, useless graphics in your site. They load slowly and make no significant contribution to the overall effectiveness of the page. Ideally, you should keep the file size of your web pages below 60 Kbytes to facilitate fast loading time. Remember that web surfers are very impatient people. They would be more than happy to 'click' to another site if your site takes more than 10 seconds to download.
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