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# 10 The images used on your site include a revolving globe, bevelled horizontal line separators, and one of those animated mail box icons that were popular in free image libraries around 1995. If this is you, listen up. If your site looks dated and unprofessional you will not make any sales. The key to generating sales on line is with a professionally designed web site. People form an impression of your business, and whether or not they will do business with you, within 30 seconds. Cheesy graphics used in an amateurish web site will do nothing for gaining the trust of prospective customers. # 9 Your hit counter is of the free variety and after one year reads 'You are the 38th visitor to this site.' A site that publicized for all to see that no one has visited is doomed for sure. Remove the counter, and see point number six below for help with this one. # 8 Your site starts with the words 'Welcome to our site. Please bookmark our site. Click on the links to find what you are looking for' If your site starts off like this you need a lesson in marketing and copywriting. When you read a magazine or the newspaper, notice how headlines and powerful copy are used to get your attention and motivate you to do something. Your web site should use the same strategies to get people's attention. This starts with an easy-to-read layout, and wording that is interesting, motivating, and most importantly is about the reader, and not about you. # 7 There is no easy to find contact information anywhere on your home page. Contact information on the main page of your site is convenient for your readers and makes you look credible, and accessible. To make a sale, you've got to earn people's trusts, this starts with giving them lots of ways to contact you. If they have a problem with an order they place, they want to make sure you will be there if they need you. # 6 You don't have a way to analyze your web site traffic and determine where your traffic is coming from. Without this you are marketing your web site wearing a blindfold and simply praying for the best. Web site statistics software can reveal valuable information to help you evaluate your marketing efforts. Information about search engine traffic, including which search engine was used to find your site, what key words did they use to find you, what pages are people looking at when they get to your site, referring URLS, and much more! # 5 You don't have a way of tracking leads or prospective customers when they visit your site. How can you do this? Track visitor information by providing prospects with a form to complete to request additional information, or to find out more about your products and services. The form allows you to request important details including name, address, phone, email address, budget, level of interest and so forth. You get more detailed information for follow up, and your prospective customer gets faster service because you have all of the relevant information before you. # 4 You've not had a lead off your web site for more then 24 hours. Your web site should complement your traditional methods of business. Be sure to include your web site address on all of your print marketing, business cards, letterhead, shipping inserts and more. The more people who see your web site address the more likely you are to get business from your site. If you are not getting leads from your web site, or inquiries by email it's time to rethink what you are doing. # 3 You've NEVER sold one thing at your web site either directly or indirectly. If you've had your web site online for a year and not made one shiny nickle then you need to reassess what you are doing. You aren't doing something right. It could be your web site, perhaps it is not professionally designed. Or it could be your traffic, no traffic = no sales. Either of these factors can effect your sales. # 2 Your web site address is of the free variety and is so long that you have no hope of ever fitting it on your business cards. If this is you, get a domain address, they are cheap, easy to set up and give you instant credibility for your business. Free web site addresses make your business look fly by night, a domain address says 'I'm a legitimate business because I've paid for an actual address for my business site.' and the number one reason your site needs an overhaul.... #1 Your 'last updated' time stamp reads March 19, 1996!
This post comes a bit late in the whole web 2.0 cycle. I feel that it bears repeating because I have come across sites that don't follow some basic principles when pulling in 3rd party data from sites such as flickr, twitter et. al. APIs and data portabilityThe blessing of popular and easy to use APIs and the data portability of web 2.0 applications has had an unfortunate side effect, and that is that some implementations that use these services do not integrate appropriate contingency design should these 3rd party services fail. Caching data calls to APIs is a good bit of contingency design. Many APIs will require caching - like that of Amazon - but I suspect this is intended to help limit resource use of the API host, not the site using the API. The reasons a person using API accessed data on their website would want to cache the data are:
A simple implementation to handle those two cases would be one that caches an API call for a given amount of time and one that freshens stale cached data and triggers an error should an API call fail. Caching is good contingency design practiceAs I said above, this post is a bit late to the party but it is worth writing as recently I have come upon at least three sites where firebug and other widgets have revealed issues retrieving API fetched data and the site loading times have been horrible. A decent implementation idea would be to roll your own caching wrapper and agnostically plug it in to a stable caching tool, perhaps something like Cache Lite for PHP. In this manner you have a reusable, caching library independent piece of code that can handle caching/flushing and refreshing of data which could function to handle the two cases discussed above. And that's it. It's been 541 days since my last post. Wow. I hope this is a re-start of a new phase of blogging. Article Index: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 |
More Articles:1. Blaming it on the inks When prints do not turn out fine, the first things that people blame them into are the inks that they use. They are under the impression that inks are one of the most common factors that affect the output of printing materials. This is most especially seen in the color printings and graphic designs. Not getting the right kind of colors into printed materials would be charged on inks.It is a known fact that inks sometimes encounter problems especially during the course of printing. What people ar… 2. How a Blackbelt Got Raped By a Bunch of NERDS! By Eric Graham I’ve got to tell you a funny story that happened to me recently…A few weeks ago, I was playing golf with a friend of mine who owns a chain of martial arts studios. While we were playing he began telling me about how he had just spent over $50,000 having a website designed to promote his business.He went on for over thirty minutes bragging about how beautiful the graphics and pictures were and how much he spent on this and how much he spent on that. He even told me how his graphic designer had … 3. How Do We Know When It's Time To Redesign Our Web Site? By Jon Kee A question we frequently get asked is, “how do we know when it is time to redesign our Web site?” The answer undoubtedly varies.The first thing to analyze is your existing Web presence. What kind of traffic are you receiving? Are you getting a lot of calls from Web site users? When you navigate the site, is it easy to find what you are looking for? Is the data still current or do you still list products that have been discontinued since 1999? Make a list of the things you like and don’t like a… 4. Facts You Should Know About Web Site Design and Search Engine Optimization By Rajitha Dahanayake 1. Web site File Structure / File NamingMost search engines do not recognize beyond two directory levels.Make sure to name your files and directories with keywords.Don’t separate keywords using the underscore instead use hyphens.File names should be not too long.2. Load TimeIf a page doesn't load in 8 seconds, Web site will lose 1/3 of the visitors.Images and Graphics -Image optimization will help to improve the load time. Images can be optimized using the “GIFBOT” image optimization tool (htt… |
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