Richard Vanderhurst

Before you start coming up with your website, you want a concrete plan for what you need to do with it. Do not get this one backward ; your internet site design should fit with, but be secondary to, the purpose for your internet site’s existence, not the other way around.
For many of us, the goal is to design a site which will generate business, not outbursts of “Ooh.

This, in my mind, is one of the most significant steps of the design process : Develop a “mission statement” for your internet site and stick to it. Fight the urge to add absolutely surplus items simply because you “like them”. I am not good at planning and I can admit I’ve a weakness for the bright, glossy objects of the Web, but I have attempted to train myself to act otherwise for the good of my site and you must consider doing so too. Another difficulty with many business sites is dead, flat, uninteresting and uninspiring content.

You do not have the luxurious of going on and on about why your product is great. With print advertising, possible clients can look over the data almost at their leisure. Online, they look over it at that moment and if you do not catch their interest straight away, you could have lost them for good. Make it interactive if at all possible and make it concise.

Do not expect your visitors to read a 2500 word pitch for your product / service ; I’d bet about 99.9999% will not ( and that is being conservative ). “Make $5500 in the following two hours, if you are not busy.” “Become a millionaire in your spare time.”. “Since dinosaurs rambled the Earth, there’s never been a better product than [fill in the blank]. In fact, in a rare occurrence of species foreboding, dinosaurs essentially foretold our product and died out due to overpowering despair caused by the awareness they might never be ready to use it. But do not cry for the dinosaurs, their loss is your gain. There’s not a thing in the world inaccurate with being happy with them, but duck the ludicrous claims, the bold text, the exclamation marks, the blinking thingies, and the money graphics. I believe folks’s fraud meter pegs out at any of these.

Your contact info should be really obvious on the front page. Explain to visitors how, where, and when they can get in contact with you. Help dispel that unnamed, faceless image that we site owners are sometimes the subject of. To my mind, this fosters trust and trust engenders potential sales. Some sites I have seen have the products displayed poorly, or not at all. This ties in with “form follows function” above. If you are making an attempt to sell something, you would like to make it straightforward to buy, don’t you? Make your website simple to navigate ; particularly the order / shopping areas. Provide clear, easily followed instructions on ordering and ( I suspect ) you must consider accepting visa cards on your website, if at all possible.
Don’t make your visitors jump thru lots of hoops to set an order. Spend a while contemplating how you might make your website the best it can be for your visitors ; they will love you for it.

For people who do not know what a 404 is, it is a blunder that is displayed when a user requests a net page that is not free anymore on the server. This frequently takes place when sites change layout and or page info but 404s are in no fashion unavoidable. Sadly too many sites appear to slide thru the net.

But, as the search engine hasn’t sent another spider to the site since the page was removed, it thinks the page is still free, and serves the link in the search results. And just like that you have lost a future client. 404 mistakes caused a genuine problem for a customer of mine who run an internet stock site that provides users with revelations and tips into the arena of trading.

They were extremely new to the entire SEO arena and wished to get more traffic to their site. After performing a little research at some search engines I was amazed at what I found : they’d some good rankings but the pages that were listed were no longer free on their site. When I realized what was taking place I could help to solve the issue. I could only guess how many visitors were lost due to these missing pages. I showed them how, rather than ever taking a page down, they should redirect the page to a main page of their site ( or a page that displays a message pronouncing “Sorry but the current page isn’t updated. Another choice is to check with your hosting company to see whether they supply a 404 redirect.

It is the easiest way to guarantee a future customer is rarely lost because of a page not being found. Another brilliant idea is to resubmit new pages to search engines for reindexing. While it’s sweet to inform visitors a page they are searching for no longer exists, it’s even better to have the new page with all of the info the visitor wants appear when they perform a search.

Do yourself a favour and check continually to make certain your website lists are not taking possible customers to 404 pages.
This way you can make sure that folk who search for info on your internet site will be brought to the right page till the new page is indexed and make sure you don’t lose potential sales due to missing pages.

Keep notes : maintaining a domain is a huge job, so don’t rely only on your memory. Keep a notebook or digital log full of your internet site changes to help refresh your memory and guarantee you chase up changes with the search engines.

If you are a right-brainer, you would like a log analysis product that won’t need a 2nd mortgage on your home, and you are up to here with pie charts and hideous tables, then look no further. I am not the best Web designer in the world.

With a mix of shock and distraction, I see Sites each day that make me scratch my head and wonder. Thankfully though , there’s business out there for Web designers of varying talent levels, and though I am not building Sites for Fortune five hundred corporations, my local clients are OK with the completed product. But I do understand that baselining a siteknowing what’s working and what isn’tis crucial in making helpful suggestions to my clients. I know, too, that getting that info sometimes involves running log file info thru some program that spits out tables and numbers and, if you are truly fortunate, 3-D pie charts.

I have attempted different log file analyzers ( granted, most were of the ‘free’ variety ) and have gleaned some info, but always felt uncomfortable with the way the info was presented. I knew there had to be something better out there someone had to have put together a program for those among us who don’t writhe with pleasure at the idea of pie charts. A little concentrated looking on Google netted the jackpot. The product’s Web site , unlike others, listed the price right there on the front page : $495. I could likely make back this cost in one project. And the makers claimed that installation took about 10 mins, and the product could do amazing things.

I followed the prompts till I got to the point of finding my customer’s log file I couldn’t’ find this myself a fast call to the customer’s ISP revealed the non-standard nature of log files, and the heretofore secret locale of the log file often. What does this mean? It suggests I could show this to my customer and he would get it. I would like to see whether the Google visitors have an interest in our classes ( as we’re attempting to improve the classes’ ranking on that search engine ).

The results show the Google people are essentially, as a group, much more likely ( 53% ) to take a look at the classes and workshops page than users coming to the site from other referrers. Also, I showed it to another designer buddy of mine who asked where the pie charts were I assume that type of thing truly works for some folks. I am a right-brainer : my eyes glaze over at rows of numbers and charts. The visible interface of this program, with the tagging feature, and the power to put it on my credit card without maxing out my limit, makes it a worthwhile purchase in my book.