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A well designed and thought
out web site can mean the difference between success and failure
on the web. What makes a good site? Asking these 4 questions can
help you ensure your site is effective and causes visitors to stay.
What's
In It For Me?
That's
the question each of your visitors is silently asking when they
happen upon your site. So, the sooner you answer this question,
the more of chance your visitor will stay. So many sites do nothing
but talk about themselves, what type of company they are, how great
their service or products are, but never tell the visitor what's
in it for them. Internet attention span is measured in seconds,
so by the time you get to the benefit of your product, service,
or site, your potential customer is long gone.
Visitors generally don't
care about your newest facility, how you're "committed to quality",
or your 15 years of corporate history. Tell them immediately what's
in it for them, show them benefits of your product or service, and
they'll stick around. If you hook them quick, you can then take
your time in educating them on how they can take advantage of these
benefits.
How
much graphics and animation should I use?
You've
seen these sites - they take an hour to load, and if you are patient
enough to wait, you are rewarded by an amazing array of animated
buttons, mouse over effects, flashing banners, blinking lights,
and god forbid, even sound effects and music. This is all well and
good if you want to impress someone with your ability to create
annoying and distracting elements, but if your goal is to attract
potential clients or customers, and to keep them at your site, limit
your use of these to a tasteful minimum. Remember, too, that if
your site takes longer than a few seconds to load, no one's going
to see it anyway. They'll be long gone.
For some high-end corporate,
technology, artisitc, or entertainment sites, a Flash interface
or Flash/HTML hybrid might be more appropriate. Remember that for
most search engines, loading a page heavily with Flash will make
it difficult or impossible for that search engine to spider your
site, and find your subpages, your internal links, and therefor
to rank you high, necessitating the production of doorway pages
optimized for each engine. So, When in Doubt, Leave it Out!
Some of the most successful
commerce sites don't use frames, Flash, or multimedia. So,
How
do I best organize my content?
When thinking about putting your business online, take
extra time up front to organize the content you wish to present
into logical subdivisions. These will be your main areas, and will
probably end up in your navigation bar, available from any area
of the site.
If you've got many different
categories of information to present, think about organizing it
heirarchically, with not more than a handful of top level categories.
When users click to a main category, they can always be presented
with lists of relevant subcategories. Take a look at Yahoo for a
good example of this. There are millions of sites indexed at Yahoo,
but the visitor is always just presented with short lists of relevant
directories, then sub-directories, making it easy to navigate down
to find very specific information, without the need to use the site's
search facility. This is good organization.
Generally the organization
of your content on the screen is mimicked by the underlying directory
structure of your site, which makes site maintennance easy. Think
of the fact that the person who designs the site isn't necessarily
going to be the one to maintain it, so taking the time to organize
it up front will save time, frustration, and therefore money in
the long run.
Should
I design the site myself, or hire someone?
This will depend on how much time you wish to spend, and how talented
you are not only technically, but visually and from a marketing
perspective as well. The difference between a well designed site
and a site put together by someone who just happens to have a site
design tool running on his computer can be drastic. The professional
site designer knows how to create marketing copy that pulls a visitor
in, and keeps him there. Also, a good designer knows how to create
a customized look and feel with clean, crisp, professional graphics.
This alone can create the appearance of a high-end corporate site,
instantly creating credibility. A well organized site with poor
graphics will tell your visitor you are a low-budget operation,
or a fly-by-night company they'd feel nervous about ordering from.
Unless you have both
the technical and technological background, combined with the artistic,
or have staff that is proficient in these areas, it would be best
to spend your time doing what you do best and let a professional
designer create a site which will create that elusive credibility,
draw customers in using outward and behind the scenes marketing
techniques, which will far outperform an unprofessional site. Even
a few more sales per week can mean thousands of revenue per year.
So, look at the bigger picture and realize that a little extra money
spent today on a professional job will continue to pay you year
after year after year in revenue, increased exposure, happy customers,
etc.
CompuGODs is a
firm which is expert at all these essentials. If you are looking
for a single firm to design a clean, effective polished site, look
no futher. And that's where most design firms stop, yet we'll help
you design an effective marketing campaign, providing you with not
only the knowledge but the tools necessary to explode your profits
online.
We offer flexible options
to fit all budgets small or large, and provide friendly, personal
service and advice all to help you get the results you've dreamed
about from an online campaign. Click
here for more info, or click the logo on the left to chat live
now.
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