Good Design Practices and Important Rules in Website Design

by: Kanicen Nichathavan

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well. 1) Do not use splash pages Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page. 2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy. 3) Have a simple and clear navigation You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site. 4) Have a clear indication of where the user is When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"! 5) Avoid using audio on your site If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine. Your website is where your business resides it's like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible. Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion. Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size. Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content. Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors. Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that. Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

About The Author
Kanicen Nichathavan is the owner of Shoppers Journey, At Shoppers Journey, we provide quality Web Marketing & Web Design solutions for your needs. Be it dazzling websites and portals or customized software solutions, our team is trained and ready to fulfill your every need. Visit my site at http://www.shoppersjourney.com

Keyword Optimization: Why It Is Important To Online Marketers

by: Vanessa Doctor

Online marketers know that in order to be able to succeed in the vastness of cyberspace, they must be able to learn how to optimize their website’s online exposure by being able to optimize the use of certain keywords and phrases that can help with their site’s search engine ranking by improving their position in search engine results. Since online businesses are starting to discover the complexity of marketing online, employing certain means can ensure the success of your attempts to market a certain product or Web content online, one of which is by keyword optimization. Keyword Optimization In Online Marketing Strategically placing keywords and phrases within your site’s content can help boost your site’s traffic immensely, thereby improving your site’s ranking in search engine results. The choice of keywords that you use, and how you optimize them, can play a role in how well you will be able to promote your website in your online marketing campaign. Also, the places where you may situate these keywords can also affect how your site will be able to rank high on search engine results since search engines give higher relevance to keywords that are in the correct places within the web page. Keyword optimization is such an important part of online marketing due to the fact that using the appropriate keyword in describing your site’s content helps inform online users, and potential clients, about your Web content. People will have an idea of what your site is offering them even before they actually access your site by merely reading the keywords used to describe it. Your keywords should be relevant to the product or Web content that your site is offering, and these keywords should be prominently featured on the web page to give focus and importance to these keywords, in order to improve your search engine ranking since this will help your site receive consistent web searches over time, thereby increasing your site’s traffic. Another reason as to why keyword optimization is such an important part of online marketing is so that you will be able to find your target potential customers online without having to exert that much effort. If you can improve your site’s ranking position in search engines, then prospective clients will be able to find your site much faster and in a more efficient manner, thereby increasing your chances of closing a sale with them. By using appropriate keywords to improve your site’s search engine result, you can expose your site on the Internet better since your site is able to achieve omnipresence. Also, by making sure that your site is able to hit the top keywords that you aim to optimize, you can help make it easier for online users to find your site in almost all types of browsers. Optimizing keywords will also help provide relevant information to some of your potential clients, giving them a clear idea as to what product you are selling, and making it easier for search engines to pinpoint what your site is all about. This helps avoid the problem of confusion, especially if you want to target a specific market to your site, by making sure that your site offers them with only the appropriate information and relevant links that can help them understand more about your site’s Web content.

About The Author
Vanessa Arellano Doctor http://7seo.com - seo Company For more info visit http://7seo.com and http://seo.xon.us

What You Need To Know About SEO: Basic Facts

by: Vanessa Doctor

Exposure could mean a lot for different firms, organizations or groups seeking a wider venue to make their views heard, accepted, and patronized. The main term used for this web-positioning method is the seo, or the Search Engine Optimization. ---- What exactly is Search Engine Optimization? The Internet age has spawned a phenomenon of new terms, new jobs, and new career paths. The growth of the Worldwide Web is creating a new realm, where new types of internet-savvy folks engage in careers that require the skills of an intrepid explorer, searching for new worlds to discover. Among these new tasks are those that require the faster, more strategic placement or positioning of company adverts, documents, products or issues, in order for these entities to have the most maximum level of exposure in the web. Exposure could mean a lot for different firms, organizations or groups seeking a wider venue to make their views heard, accepted, and patronized. The main term used for this web-positioning method is the seo, or the Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is the terminology used to define, or describe the action of gaining a better position within a search engine or internet directory system based upon a selected key word or a group of key words. With well over 4 billion documents already on the internet, the prominent search engines are all flaunting that they can locate most of them and show you a link from within their systems, and each of the search engines or directory providers have different guidelines by which a listing within their system is accomplished. * Achieving Maximum exposure As web-updated consumers, we are constantly on the lookout for sites that address our specific interests, goals, or products at a specified time and day. Most of us do not always know the URL (Universal Resource Locator) for all the types of businesses that can fulfill that interest, so we use a search engine or directory service to find them for us. For example, I plan to go out and take my girlfriend with me to a bar, but I haven’t got an idea of which place to go to that I haven’t already been to yet. The next most probable step for me would be to go to a search engine and type in something like: “bars and restaurants pasadena ca"; I put in the quotation marks to make the search more specific, to get me closer to what I am looking for. The phrase I wrote, "bars and restaurants pasadena ca" will be used represent my main key word phrase. Once I write those key words, I am, hopefully, going to get back a list of the restaurants within the greater Pasadena area, and I indeed got well over 500 or so choices too. What makes it more helpful is that I could find those assorted choices in the local phonebook listings. However, if I wish to make my list of choices much shorter, I would type in, or enter a new search maybe like: "jazz bar pasadena ca”. Once the search engine has done its job, then I probably will get a shorter list with these new, more precise characteristics. However, the list created will be made in an order that is determined by the search engine. The first one may or may not be starting with the letter A or a number like the one on the phone directory. From the bar and restaurant viewpoint, if they could be in the top 10 or 20 and get a lot of “hits” or visits by web users, they will have a chance of being seen by the searcher. This is what Search Engine Optimization is all about: gaining a position as close to #1 as possible and then staying there on top, and to achieve maximum exposure. * It’s all about location For those who own businesses, then the primary name of the game is profits. Revenue of course, comes from people who spend their incomes with you. The more people spend their money with you, the richer and more successful you become. In today’s business environment, it is all about LOCATION, and the next important word that comes is “ADVERTISE”. The way the worldwide web works is the same as in the world of advertising or the directories: It’s about location in the search engines and directory systems, and advertising. If your listing is something less than the top 100, you stand an excellent chance of never being seen, or viewed. Most people are notoriously impatient, and they do not wish to wade through tons of listings. This simply means that you really need to be near, or on the top of the lists for the key words that you feel your prospective customers are, or will be using to find you. * How Search Engine Optimizers Do This Improving your position on the web could be done through a wide variety of methods. An easy way for this is to hire a professional Search Engine Optimization firm that can do the job for you. You could check their fees and price ranges on the web or the phone book. The process is definitely a labor-intensive one, and definitely doesn’t come cheap. But anyway, you too can do it yourself. All you need to do is to get the rules for listing within each of the engines and directory systems where you wish to be listed, the register with them. If they allow you to point to secondary pages that also discuss specific topics, then be sure to do that by pointing to the pages within your site that cover that topic. You may also need to check on your position every month within each of the engines and directories to see how you are stacking up, and sometimes you may need to modify your site to improve your position, as well as your exposure.

About The Author
Vanessa Arellano Doctor http://7seo.com - SEO Company For more info visit http://7seo.com and http://seo.xon.us