Designing a Web site

noreply@blogger.com (Increasing Your Earning Success) — Tue, 8 Jan 2008 06:34:00 -0800

When designing a web site you need to keep in mind the needs of your customers. Your web site needs to be user-friendly not fancy and confusing. You need to plan a navigation that compels your visitors to click and buy. Too many people make the mistake of spending thousands of dollars making a web site look fantastic but hard to navigate and difficult to follow the sales process. The result their visitors end up leaving and there is no sale. A lot of sales are lost because people can’t find what they were searching for.

The Headline
Internet buyers are unforgiving. Read my article on sales copy. You only have precious seconds to convince your visitors to buy. A Headline is your attention grabber. It has to compel the visitor to read your sales copy and buy! Simplify the process. Study your competitors or similar sites to get an idea of what is a good web site. It is a good idea to draw on paper a list of all the content, images, products etc you want to include on your site. Draw your homepage etc and lay them out on a table. Then pretend you are a visitor and ask yourself was this easy to navigate? Was I compelled to buy? Get other people to test your design as well.
Build the website
So how will you build your site? There are plenty web designers eager to build your web site and most are expensive. Nevertheless, you only need to do a simple site. You could learn basic HTML and build it yourself or better still buy something like Microsoft FrontPage which allows you to build professional looking web sites effortlessly. Believe me it’s a simple process. Building it yourself is the best way to go. You have complete control and you can maintain the site yourself. Furthermore, many web hosts provide an online web site builder that are easy as 1 2 3. They are WYSIWYG, (What You See Is What You Get). They also supply free shopping carts, scripts for Pay Pal and so on.

Hiring a web designer
If you have big budgets then hire a web designer or web master. Be aware this could cost you an unnecessary fortune. If you do hire someone make sure they create a basic site with a professional looking logo, graphics and payment features you need. Also, make sure you have complete control of your web site. Otherwise, you will have to hire them for every little update. My Tip: Go to your local University or College and hire a talented student. They will appreciate the work and you’ll get a great web site for a fraction of the cost.

There are many great online resources to teach you HTML. It really isn’t that hard. The important thing to remember is to keep your web site simple. You should focus on the sales copy not a flashy beautiful web site. Having fancy graphics and banners with flash is a waste of time. The text should do the selling. The sales process should run from top to bottom.

Test your website
Now, its time to upload your web site to your host and test it. You will need a FTP program such as CuteFTP to upload your web pages. Your host will provide information on how to do this. Finally, you should test your web site on various browsers such as Internet Explorer, Netscape and FireFox. If possible try to test it on older computers with older versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer. There are still many people out there with old computers and old operating systems. You should keep this in mind when designing your web site. The whole idea is to get a sale not entertain. Keep it simple and you should succeed!This will increase you earning power and increase your online business success for years to come.