Wednesday, December 14, 2005

How to design your website for optimal productivity

From Entireweb

Eight Simple, Yet Essential, Web Design Principles

As the internet evolves from its infancy into maturity, website development, design and marketing becomes more and more sophisticated - and more and more complex. Content manipulation, various scripting methods, fancy graphics and effects... and on and on... allow us to create some impressive web sites.

A good gauge of this complexity is the a slew of new internet-related acronyms which popup on a consistent basis. Heck, I don't know what half of them mean. But one acronym I do know - and it's not an internet creation - is nevertheless key to the development and design of any successful business website. Perhaps you've heard of it - K.I.S.S. As you probably know, it stands for 'Keep It Simple, Stupid!'. And it's a methodology widely employed by the best web developers, designers and marketers in the business. A philosophy that provides the foundation for all successful revenue-generating web sites.

From the largest, multi-product online business conglomerate to the one-page one-product mini-site, the purpose is the same. Provide visitors, whether internet savvy or first time surfers, with an online experience that's fast, efficient, easy to understand - and dare I say it... yes, enjoyable.

Whether your an entrepreneur building your own web site, or reviewing one built for you by a web development and design expert, it is important your web site, your online business, adheres to these eight simple, yet essential, design principles. Heed them, and online success is sure to follow. Ignore them, at your peril. Here they are.

Each web page must have a purpose - and that purpose must be clearly stated. While a consistent design 'look and feel' is vital across all pages of your web site, each page has a specific function to perform. And that function should be clearly understood by all visitors to your web site. Whether it's to elicit feedback, provide feedback, promote your company, present product information, etc., all play a role in your ultimate goal of growing your business.

Navigation around and through your business web site must be clearly visible and easy to use. See my article on web site navigation for more details.

Avoid distraction and clutter by minimizing usage of fancy flashing and moving objects, which provide more sizzle than steak, and make your essential products or services harder to find.

All business websites should have contact information clearly visible. A 'Contact' page is minimum. It's also advisable to include contact information on every page of your web site. You never know when the urge to turn from prospect to customer will strike your visitor.

Not everyone has broadband. Yes, there are still a fair number of users surfing the internet with slower, less efficient, dial-up access. That may change in the future, but it's a reality today. Ignore this substantial customer base and you're business will surely suffer. To avoid this pitfall, pay careful attention to eliminate internet-clogging elements on your web site. When possible, use text instead of graphics, static graphics instead of animation, several smaller pages instead of one large page. Do this and you can feed quite well on the desertions from your flashier competitors.

For those who are broadband users, who are not negatively effected by all those 'bells and whistles', who may actually enjoy such an impressive display, remember, 'form follows function'. This is especially important on a business web site, where functionality is key. All else is fluff and distraction.

For those of us who may be 'visually challenged, make sure your web site is easy to see. Avoid fancy fonts and use the more legible standard-bearers, such as Times New Roman, Courier New, Arial and Verdana. For standard text, use font sizes of at least 10 pt... 12 pt is better. On many a web site, font sizes of 8 pt or less are used, perhaps in an effort to avoid the need to scroll. Let me tell you... it's much better to scroll than to squint. For when I squint, I usually stroll... right out of the site. It's also a good practice to limit the use of italics as they too are harder to read. Lastly, pay attention to text and background color. Although white text on a black background looks cool at first glance, it can quickly strain the eyes. You don't want to do anything that will cut your visitor's journey through your business web site..

Whenever possible, limit page lengths to no more than two page-downs. It is better for performance (page loading) and visitor attention when pages are short, quick reads. If necessary, breakup your text into multiple pages, with a 'continued' designation at the bottom of each page.

There you go. Eight simple, yet essential, web site design principles that can spell the difference between online business success or failure. Always remember, you're never more than one-click away from visitor abandonment. K.I.S.S. your website and it will reward you abundantly.

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About the Author: Alan Richardson is a well-known internet consultant and publisher with http://www.optimalwebservices.com - a Web resource firm in North Easton, Massachusetts, offering free advice and information for web-based small businesses and entrepreneurs. To read other articles by Alan, click http://www.optimalwebservices.com/articles. To signup for the free 'Optimal Web Services for Small Business' ezine, click http://www.optimalwebservices.


Posted by: Jethro | 11:09 PM |

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

KROSTech

I just finished developing my latest Drupal website. It is a community website for a LAN game clan.
Let me know if you or your organisation could use a website like this.

www.krostech.biz

Utilising Drupal 4.6.3 and the following modules
adsense
article
commencloser
dba
event
flexinode
gsitemap
image
image_filter
image_import
img_assist
legal
notify
poormanscron
print
signup
site_map
sitemenu
subscriptions
syndication
taxonomy_access
taxonomy_context
taxonomy_dhtml
urlfilter


Posted by: Jethro | 11:25 AM |

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

An Easy Guide To Building Links to Your Website

From EntireWeb

Link Building is vital for a good placement in any search engine and most website owners are unaware of this or don't really understand how it actually works.

Apart from good Keyword research and the right meta tags, linking building is an absolutely must for the success of any website and is an on going process, so make sure your put some time aside for this on a weekly basis or pay some one with experience to do it for you. Without it your website will certainly get no traffic.

There are 4 different types of Linking involved and each one is as important as the other.

If they are done correctly, they most certainly will give you a good ranking in the search engines.

They are : Reciprocal Links, Oneway Links, MultiSite Links & Directory Listings.

Reciprocal Linking
Quite simply - this is a link from your site to another and they link back to you. A bit of advise here is to only link to sites that are relevant to yours. i.e - If you are selling Cars - only link to Car websites, a link to a Health website will really do you no justice, and trust me I have seen hundreds of website owners make this mistake. What's important here is not number of the links you have, but the quality and relevancy of the site your are linking back to. Be Selective and also take a good look at the sites linking to the site you want to link. It's really no good if this Car Site you want to link to has 40 reciprocal Links from Online Pharmacies.

How to Do this :
1. Pay a SEO Company to do it for you. (can be quite expensive)
2. Buy Them
3. Link Exchange Sites.
4. Search for them on your own.

Important : Do not add to many reciprocal links to quickly, build it up gradually otherwise you will be penalised by the search engines, as it will be seen as un-natural. A good way to start is not more than 10 to 20 in one month. As your site gets older you can start adding more.

One Way Links
This is what the search engines call a natural link, and these links are given a far better ranking than a reciprocal link. The easiest way to do this is to write articles on what you are selling and then submit them to article directories with a link back to your website. Website owners are always looking for content for their sites, and Article Directories are the easiest way for them to get content, with out them having to write them on their own. There are hundreds of these directories around and the more you submit to the quicker you will build up your one way links. It also is less time consuming than reciprocal linking and you will get far better results.

MultiSite Links
For this to be effective you need at least 3 to 4 websites to be involved in this. It is also seen as a natural link by the search engines and can be quite difficult to do if you only have one website. Although it can be done. You will just need to find 3 other websites that are interested.

How it works is this :

You link to site B, Site B links to site C, Site C links to site D and site D links back to you. This way all the sites get a link with out any of them creating a reciprocal link.

Directory Listings
This is also seen as a natural link as most directories don't require a link back. It's very simple and all you need to do is submit your site to as many directories as possible. There are thousand's of them on the Internet, so all it requires is a little bit of time and hard work. If you make it your goal to submit to one a day, the process won't become a tiresome.

Good Luck!

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About the Author: Dale Maxwell - http://www.affiliate-program.co.za


Posted by: Jethro | 1:08 PM |

Saturday, December 03, 2005

Mew Link Blog named addurl blog

Received today:

In order to build up a categorywise systematic Blog Directory, we have come up with an interesting and voluntary portal: www.addurlblog.com featuring more than 200 interesting categories and growing.

You should add your own blog to the suitable category so that more and more people can reach you!!
This is very simple
- Find a suitable category
- submit your site at :: www.addurlblog.com/dir-bin/addblog.pl
- add a Link to AddUrlBlog using below details (this will help your visitors to take benefit of reaching other interesting blogs)

Title: Blog Directory
URL: www.addurlblog.com/
Description: Listing of all possible blogs from personal pages to politically related. Manually edited.

Looking forward to hear from you and HAPPY BLOGGING


Thank you
Nirmal Solanki
Link Manager
AddUrlBlog.com


Posted by: Jethro | 12:42 AM |