If Your Website Was a Bridge, Would it Be the Golden Gate Bridge, Or Would People Fear to Cross?

I had the great pleasure the other day to undertake the Storey Bridge Climb in Brisbane, Australia with my father and a son. Whilst on the climb, and hearing about the tales of the bridge construction and maintenance, it occurred to me that building a website is alot like building a bridge. A bridge requires strong foundations, must be easily found, should give clear directions for travel, and must be clearly taking people to their intended destination. So, if your website was a bridge would it be a masterful construction like the Golden gate Bridge or the Sydney Harbour Bridge?

A bridge requires strong foundations. So does a website. What are the foundations of your website and how strong are they? The foundations of your website are the content that it is based around and the keywords that you build the content around. Do your keywords generate strong volumes of targeted traffic? Does your content support the keywords? Does your content tell your traffic that they are in the right location.

A bridge requires a strong network of roads that direct people onto the bridge. The road network should also be related to the intended travel destination of the people using the bridge. This road network also requires regular maintenance to ensure that the traffic will flow smoothly. These are the links to your website. Strong links that relate to the content and goals of your site will bring targeted traffic to your website. The links should be maintained on a regular basis. The aim of the links should be to bring targeted traffic to your website, not search engine rankings.

A bridge requires good signage to tell people where they are going to and what they are going to find when they get there. this is your on-site linking strategy and navigation. Does your on-site linking and navigation give people clear directions around your site. If your directions are poor you will lose people from your site who are unsure where to go or what they will find when they get there.

Finally a bridge has to go somewhere. There is a clear destination which is usually the other end of the bridge! And so must your website have a clear destination. What are people supposed to do when they are on your website. Are you building a list of contacts, do you want them to leave their details, are you selling a product, or are you just sharing information. When your website has a clear goal you will be able to track how effectively it performs and you will be able to test and improve the performance over time.

Finally a bridge needs ongoing maintenance and so does a website. You must maintain and build your content. Keep your site relevant to the changing marketplace. Grow your content. Grow your keyword list. Build more relevant links to your website. Test different onsite linking and navigation strategies. Measure how well your website achieves the goals you have for it. And then repeat the process.

If you build your website with strong foundations, give people clear directions and measure and maintain it on a regular basis your website will have a long and profitable lifetime. If you build your website and you neglect these essential elements or fail to maintain them your website will be a bridge to nowhere!

I am a freelance website designer providing professional website design services to small business. Have a look at my small business website design portfolio.

I design professional looking websites that fit with your business image. My website designs are both customer and search engine friendly. I will help you bring more traffic to your website and convert more of that traffic into loyal, happy clients.

Does Your Website Turn People Off?

Good web design is something that can make or break a business. If a website is designed wrong, people aren't going to stay let alone buy items from it. When it comes to turning customers off, here are some of the things that people aren't going to want to see in a website.

Annoying colors

One of the biggest turnoffs for people in a website is annoying colors. There are some colors that just make your eyes hurt. They may grab the attention of people, but there is good attention and bad attention. Annoying colors give a website bad attention.

Loud music

This is a turnoff for most people, unless it's teenagers. But consider not having loud music on the website or giving the visitors a way to turn it off. Giving them a choice may make they stay instead of leaving.

Hard to navigate

The last big turnoff for people when it comes to websites is having a hard time navigating the site. People want a site which is simple and which allows them to do what they need to do quickly and easily. They know that their time is limited and so they want to get their business done.

When you are designing your webpage, remember the turnoffs which are listed above. You will find that people are going to come back to your website more often and that they are going to be more likely to purchase from you. It's hard to believe what a difference a well made website can make.

Are you really interested in driving massive traffic to your website? Here's the answer:

Secrets Of Article Marketing - Download your free ebook now.

Would you like to know more about the magical marketing techniques that have helped me to quit my day job? I have just completed my new ebook.

Secrets To Make Money Online - Download your free ebook now.

Mark Abrahams is a full time internet marketer who has helped others to earn a living online.

How to Build a Wildly Popular Authority Site in 2 Simple Steps That's Fun, FREE and Ranks Fast Too!

Who else want to build an authority site in a hurry. And no - I'm not talking about having to shell out primo bucks for some fancy pants software that promises to do it all for you overnight, after you shell out your kids college tuition to get there (and of course, never works anyway!)

What I'M referring to are using quick and easy, free tools that anyone can plug in, right now...and turn their simple, presently lonely site into a hub bub of activity, links, visitors and comments....and doing it in a hurry. Also - we're only going to use free tools to do it. Let's take a look.

Step #1: Set Up a free bloglines account that will track and update all of your RSS feeds, and topical or niche updates around the web. (note: You need to obviously tell it who and what to follow)

Step #2: Install the free browser, Flock - and use this for your authority site creation ( plus it's a great social networking browser to boot!)

Step #3: Every day, first thing in the morning, check your blog lines account, and look at the updated stories around the web on your topic. Go to the Websites of those that look interesting....and then right click, choose "blog this", and POST an snippet from the story to your blog, with a NEW title that you create...and an introductory blurb or paragraph about the snippet you grabbed.

Of course, flock will add an outgoing link automatically to the post, so the original source of the story gets a great link, and a full mention, which they love as well.

You? You build readers almost immediate search engine visibility, and a never ending source of fresh, updated content to add to your blog that people love and come back for, and for free.

What We Have: A Brand Spanking New, 28 page Power Packed PDF on Advanced Article and Affiliate Marketing Strategies You Won't Find Anywhere Else for Free.

Who it's For: ANYONE who wants, needs and CRAVES More FREE Traffic, easier sales, better copy and more push button, autopilot online profits.

How To Get It: Simply Click the Article Marketing Manifesto Link and Download it for FREE anytime between now and New Year's Day 2009.

Site Designing For Your Niche

A common mistake that many web site owners make is "over designing" their sites. Let's use a fictitious example of a classic car replacement parts website as a case in point. This company has been in business for 10 years and they enjoy a strong catalog following. They want to increase their sales and expand their business by utilizing the Internet as an additional sales platform. Although not necessarily a home business per se, but a small family owned business that has been highly successful in offering post-war classic car replacement parts. The time has come to expand or stagnate.

The company begins to research web site designers and settles on one that has an impressive portfolio. Lots of flash animation and state-of-the-art design technique. After many weeks of information gathering of product photos and data, design meetings and cost discussions a site is born. It's even been optimized to rank well with the search engines.

The site has been indexed by the major search engines and receives a modest amount of traffic. The site designer assures them that it takes time to get correctly listed and rank well in the search results pages for their top keywords. Almost a year has passed and there is no appreciable increase in sales. The cost to build and maintain the site has not paid for itself.

Should they abandon the site and revert back to a catalog only business? The answer is no, no and no!

What they need to do is understand their internet customer base better. Here's what I would suggest as a consultant.

1. Immediately install site tracking software. This can be accomplished for free by using Google^© Analytics which is part of creating an AdWords^© account. This is pretty simple stuff. You get coding from Google and place it on every page of your site.

2. Create a keyword Advertising program through Google or Yahoo Marketing. This will help to drive traffic to the site and at the same time should help to defray some of the site costs.

3. Allow enough time to analyze site visitors. Another words, wait.

Let's say that by doing the above there is a large enough of a sample to analyze. What did we find?

A. There were hundreds of clicks that landed on the home page or the specific landing page but were abandoned right there. They never bought.

B. The sample showed that many viewers had lower resolution screens, older browser and older flash versions. This is important because of the flash animation on your site. Also the new versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome have many of these supporting features built in.

C. Viewer loyalty was low (They didn't come back) and average site time was very low as well as page depth (the total number of pages viewed.)

D. There was a high level of abandonment for those that did want to buy, but got to the shopping cart and then aborted before finalizing the sale. ( a form of buyers remorse)

This not what you want to see on a site that sells products that people need and want to buy, why else would they come to the site?

Why did so many viewers drop out after viewing the home page? Let' see if we can make some sense of it all. You know that buyers want your products because they have bought from your catalog very successfully. Then why didn't they buy from your site?

A possible and likely reason for some of the short stay issue could be in the site design. Sometimes simple is better. The reason is not everyone's computer has the latest operating, Internet and Flash software. Your site might not show well in older browser versions and consequently any scripting may cause additional problems. This is not to say that your potential customer is backward it may just mean that they have older computers and operating systems that won't display well. Many viewers get spooked right away if there are any oddities on a site.

Also consider that some one running and older Pentium PC or an older version of a Mac your site with all of its Flash and graphics may take a long time to load. This discourages customers as well and is a deterrent to viewing your site. It's important to understand your customer base first and then add some bells and whistles later. So what is the answer?

Begin by creating a simpler site that is easy for anyone to get around. After all your primary purpose is to open up your market and sell more products to a larger audience.

Make sure you are set up with some analytical software to evaluate your site. Google Analytics is a great choice because it can tell you so much about your viewers and buyers. It even has a function to understand all of the steps someone took before they bought one of your products. This is done through a function called goals and it is a powerful feature to this free service.

In closing, the smart choice is to start out slow and simple and be in the position to analyze everything that goes on in your site.

Rick Carbone is the Director/Publisher of http://www.HomeBusinessResearch.com one of the top home business sites on the Internet. HBR has been helping entrepreneurs start up and successfully manage online home based businesses since 1998.

Three Profitable Benefits of Bilingual Websites Online

Do you have any idea of how profitable a bilingual website can be online? The web is packed with millions of online buyers who want your service. Some speak different languages, some can not understand your language, and you can break that barrier by using a bilingual website to sell your products. Three profitable benefits of bilingual websites are attracting more prospects on one site, easily sell to various markets, and enhance your professionalism by offering a language option to prospects.

Attract More Prospects on One Site

The internet's market is considerably unlimited with prospects from different companies in need of language translations. With the growth of the World Wide Web, developers took in the consideration of offering these features for online business owners to get to these prospects without hesitation. If a prospect understands your pitch, you can have a potential sell. You will no longer target just one market of your native tongue, you can get in touch with millions more with a click of a button. Bilingual websites introduce prospects to new services they could not understand at first. With this in mind, it is important to learn the basics of selling to different markets due to culture differences.

Sell to Diverse Markets

Different audiences need different segmentation and planning to convert prospects into buyers. Although you may have a bilingual website, you must do your homework. Your new prospects may not enjoy dry humor; it may offend a prospect from a different culture. Diverse markets invite lucrative clients who may value your services or products more than your traditional customer. Some of the best bilingual websites are targeted to growing populations in certain countries. By transforming your website into an inviting source for these growing markets, you place you place your business on the forefront for an additional market waiting to learn how you can help them accomplish their goals.

Enhance Your Professionalism

Today's customers demand more for their money. If they feel you were inconsiderate to provide a bilingual option, they assume you do not want their business. Can you imagine how many prospects you can gain by diversifying your language options? Some customers look for the option when they browse interesting sites - but, there is one problem: the language barrier. Enhance your professionalism by giving prospects an option to learn about your business. Once you choose to transform your site, you are in for a treat - more profits for your business.

As mentioned before, the unique and thorough understanding of your diverse markets improves your edge against the competition. New online buyers with language barriers will notice you because they can understand your offers. Your competition will be left in the dirt because they can not speak directly to the audiences like your website. If you think this is not important in online business, imagine how certain professionals feel when they can not make a sell in international markets. Be smart, invest in a bilingual website to launch in a new market of wealth.

For further information, please visit Build Bilingual Websites

Use Safe Identifiers Like Class Names Or Variable Names in Your Web Templates

Stop guessing about what is a valid name for a new CSS class, a JavaScript variable, a PERL function or any other identifier!

Use the common, shared set of rules for those languages. It could not be any easier. Print out that article and keep this valid reference handy for the most important languages on the Web.

Web masters, Web designers, and programmers do not have an easy job, when it comes to update templates, files, and programs for a Web site. In most cases they will have to build on "code" that has been written by somebody else. Furthermore there are many different languages that have rules of their own.

* HTML, XHTML, XML
* CSS
* JavaScript, DOM
* PHP, PERL

Sometimes the differences are minor, but the interpreter, browser, the code validation tool will complain, if the syntax of a particular language is violated. We humans tend to overlook the subtle differences between languages. A computer does not.

1. Characters you can use safely

Use only the following ASCII characters for your identifiers, variables, and functions names.

[ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ] -> [A-Z]

[abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz] -> [a-z]

[0123456789] -> [0-9]

The beauty about the old-fashioned ASCII character set is:

All ASCII characters are available on any computer platform in any country in any language setup.

Even though current standards allow the use of a wider set of characters in most cases, restricting it to the ASCII subset avoids problems with older or badly configured operating systems, servers and browser and different regional/language setups.

2. Case-Sensitivity

Most identifiers are case-sensitive according to the language specification, that means "Web-site" is different from "web-site". Some are not. For example, note in particular that element names are case-insensitive in HTML, but case-sensitive in XML.

To avoid potential problems and ambiguity type the identifiers always in exact case, but treat them as they were case-insensitive. Here is an example, do not use "Manual" and "manual" as two different identifiers. You could mix them up too easily, and "buggy" software could mix them up, too.

3. HTML, XHTML ID and NAME Tokens

For Example:

<div id="Main_Content-1">

* No spaces
* Must begin with a letter [A-Za-z]
* And may be followed by any number of letters [A-Za-z] , digits [0-9], hyphens "-", underscores "_", colons ":", and periods ".".

4. CSS Class Names

HTML:

<div class ="MainContentFooter">

CSS:
.MainContentFooter {
background-color: white; ...
}

* No spaces
* First Character must be a letter [A-Za-z]
* Allowed are Letters, Numbers, Underscores, and hyphen [A-Za-Z0-9] + [_] + [-]
* Case-sensitive in XML, "WebSite" is not "website"
* Case-insensitive in HTML, however type exact case, but treat it as it were case-insensitive
* Multiple class names are delimited by a whitespace [ ] character.
* Descriptive, but keep it short (even though there is no upper limit for length defined)

5. Variable and Function Names

in PERL, PHP, JavaScript

* no spaces
* [A-Za-z0-9] + [_], no "-", ".", ":"
* Case-sensitive
* Must begin with [A-Za-z] or [_], no digits up-front
* Must not be a reserved word of the language
* Descriptive, but short
* You must not use any reserved word

Reserved words for JavaScript:

abstract, boolean, break, byte, case, catch,

char, class, const, continue, default,

delete, do, double, else, export, extends,

false, final, finally, float, for, function,

goto, if, implements, in, instanceof, int,

long, native, new, null, package, private,

protected, public, return, short, static,

super, switch, synchronized, this, throw,

throws, transient, true, try, typeof,

undefined, var, void, while, with

Print this article and refer to it whenever you are working on Web sites or Web site templates.

The author John W. Furst provides first class articles and information about every aspect of Internet business and personal development on his Blog. His writings are the essence of 15+ years of experience with business in general and Internet in particular. Recently Mr. Furst shifted his focus towards Email Marketing. Read more at his E-Biz Booster Blog at http://blog.fcon21.biz and check out the Email Marketing Tips Blog Carnival.

Business Website Design - Why Build a Custom Business Website?

So you just started a new business. Now you need a great website to help market your goods or services online. Well, you are now faced with a choice. Should you design and build a website yourself or pay to have a website built for you?

Building the website your self would certainly save some money, which is important when launching a new business venture. Wait a minute, you need to ask yourself if saving some money trumps all the benefits of getting a custom designed and professionally optimized site. The short answer is a resounding no!

Most business owners realize that a visually appealing and functional website is an essential marketing tool. If your site isn't built properly the first time (especially the back-end) you are likely to end up having to get it built again once your business grows.

Now, in order to save money you could use a sophisticated 'website-builder' tool. There are many available. However, you are then limited to predefined templates, limited functionality and it is often difficult to perform search engine optimization, which we know is of course essential.

The code that you don't see is as important as the graphics and front-end design work. If your site features a customer support ticketing system, multimedia, ecommerce or other interactive features you need to know these have been well-programmed and will enhance a visitor's website experience.

Furthermore, you want your new business website to be unique. Definitely, not a template or 'cookie-cutter' site. You want your business website to stand out from the crowd. It needs to reflect the professional business image you are working to create both on and offline.

Studies show that people will spend more time and make more purchases on a website that appears professional and visually appealing.

Your new business website is often the first interaction between a potential customer and your business. Lets face it - if your site isn't professional, creative and fully operational........your competitor's probably is!

Inksoft Media is a complete web solutions company with over 10 years of experience. We help get your businesses noticed.

Mike is a consultant for Inksoft Media Inc. web solutions.

Visit Our Site at http://www.inksoftmedia.com