Internet and Business Online

When you build your website you need to have a plan first. The reason for this is if you do not have a plan you will likely make mistakes, forget to include information, and overall have an unorganized and not a well thought out page. While you might read the page and completely understand everything, remember that your website visitor did not design the page and needs a little more direction. Read the following 10 website blunt are common and will make your visitors head to another site quickly. ders tha

Blunder #1 Contact Information
You need to provide your contact information, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and physical address if important. The reason for this is if a potential customer wants to contact you for whatever reason they can!

Blunder #2 Poor Organization
Make sure your website is well organized and that all links are obvious. You should even use subheadings to make it even more clear where information is. You don’t want to have to make people search.

Blunder #3 Checkout
Make the checkout process straightforward and easy. Too many times people get to the checkout and it is difficult, asks for a lot of unnecessary information, and generally takes longer than the customer wants to spend buying the product. As a result, the potential customer leaves your site to buy elsewhere. Don’t let this happen to you, make your checkout fast and easy!

Blunder #4 Typos
If your website has typographical errors, it will be noticed by your visitors. Many people consider this a sign of a novice, not a professional who is in business trying to make a living. If your website is full of typos, people are not going to believe that you take your site seriously and as a result they won’t either.

Blunder #5 Hidden Information
Do not hide information. You as a webmaster might not think the information is hidden, but if it is not readily visible it might as well be hidden. Make all information obvious and easy to find.

Blunder #6 Personal Information
Do not ask for personal information, and if you do explain why and do not make it mandatory. Many times people will want to buy your product and get to the checkout page only to have to answer lots of personal questions first. This will send people to other less interrogative pages.

Blunder #7 Too Many Forms
Keep it simple. If you are asking for memberships, checkouts, or anything that requires information, do not use a lot of forms. Figure out what questions you really need to ask and keep it short and sweet.

Blunder #8 You, not We
Focus on your customers, their needs, and what you can do for them. Your customer is not going to your page to find out about you, but what you can do for them. Remember this and if you have to put a web history about yourself, then do so in a special section where people can opt to read it.

Blunder #9 Help People Make a Decision
People might not know what they want when they go to your website. So, lead them, make suggestions about products, and provide backgrounds and uses for different products.

Blunder #10 Focus
Make sure the focus of your site is obvious and clear from the first page of your site and throughout.

About the Author
Michael Turner reveals his foolproof way to increase website traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it free right now at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/

You might not think the way your site looks is very important - but you’d be wrong. People’s first impressions will affect their opinion of the site and your business. In fact, it takes less than a 20th of a second for people to form a lasting opinion of a website.

Before you start work on the actual design of the site, you should have a clear idea of what message you want your design to communicate and what style of design you intend to use.

First, think about the impression you want your target audience to be left with when they visit your site. Should they think of you as “trustworthy”, “young” or “high-tech”? Then look at other people’s sites, as well as ads in magazines and newspapers, to find a style you think would work for you. Once you find a style you like, ask a few potential customers what they think. After all, they’re the people who’ll be using your site.

Mood Boards

An effective way to plan your site’s look-and-feel is to create a mood board.

Find objects with a style, colour or shape which reflect how you want this site to look, for example magazine ads and pieces of fabric, and then stick them to a sheet of card. This will help you establish a mood for the site when you’re designing it, such as “dark and gothic” or “young and funky”.

A mood board will give you a good starting point for your site’s design and can help communicate your ideas to other people. It should also give you ideas for colours, images and typeface.

7 Steps to a Great Site

1. Planning: Before you start work on your website you need to plan it thoroughly. Make sure you set a clear goal for your site and then use your knowledge of your target audience to work out how you are going to achieve it.
2. Design: The next stage is to design your site in a graphics package, like Photoshop. It’s important to finalize the design before you start to build the site, as it’s much quicker and cheaper to make changes in Photoshop than it is in HTML.
3. Writing and Content Gathering: During the planning stage, you should have decided which pages your site will contain. Now it’s time to write the text and decide which pictures to use. You can often create the content at the same time as the site’s being designed.
4. Building the Site: Once you know what the site’s going to look like and what it will contain, you need to turn it into an actual website. You’ll use HTML and CSS to create web pages based on your Photoshop designs. You might create a database as well.
5. Testing: Does the site work? Can people use it as you’d expected? Before launching your site you need to test it thoroughly. Check for broken links and make sure the site works on difference browsers. Also, check for spelling mistakes.
6. Promotion: Your site’s completed so now you can sit back and watch the visitors roll in - right? Not quite! Getting your website up there is just the start; now you need to get people to visit, using search engines, marketing and word of mouth.
7. Evolution: Once your site’s finished and visitors start arriving, you may think your work’s done - but it isn’t. The best sites constantly make small improvements and test new ideas.