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If you run a site, chances are you often wonder whether it is the correct time to do a total redesign of the layout of your site. Here are some points to consider:

Are you thinking of a redesign just for the sake of it? If you answered yes to that question, it's not yet the correct time to do a redesign. Remember, a design serves a specific purpose. If you aren’t, are not] sure perhaps it is high time to do a redesign. The last thing you would ever want to happen to your site is when visitors leave your site without taking a look at your content just because the design is old fashioned. If this is your case!

As a web designer, you should design your web sites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience. It does not make a difference if you had the greatest item in the whole world — if your web site is badly done you won't be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your web site by the crappy design.

When I'm talking about a “good design”, I'm not only talking about a good graphical design. A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components which contribute to a good web site design — accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design.

Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I’ve come across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it’s high time to take serious action!

1) Background music

Unless you are running a site which promotes a singer, a CD or anything related to music, We would really advise you to keep away from adding looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and everytime a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I would just turn down my speakers or leave your website. Moreover, they just adds to the visitors burden when viewing your site — users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it should be viewed.

2) Extra large/small text size

As I said, there is more to web design than only graphics — user accessibility is one huge part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your web site or your sales copy is, if it’s illegible you won't be selling a thing!

3) Popup windows

Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertising that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just close them on instinct everytime each one manages to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and, well, pops up on my screen. Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor’s screen. Your web site loses its function right away!

In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster your task is to make sure your web site does what it's meant to do efficiently. Don't let some little mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally!

Anyone who has been marketing online knows that the lifeblood of a business is the traffic of a site. More visitors equal more sales. However, here are some ways that you can tweak your websites with to improve sales without the need to get more visitors.

The first method is to put in your personal touch in your sales message. Nobody wants to be sold to by a total stranger, but many people will buy what their close friends recommend to them. If you can convince your audience that you are a personal friend who has their best interest at heart, they will be convinced to buy your items. Remember to speak to an individual in your salesletter, not to your whole audience.

The second method is to publish testimonials and comments from your customers. A nice way would be to publish both good and bad comments; that way prospects can be really convinced that these testimonials are really real. When prospects see testimonials on your site, they will have the confidence to purchase from you because human beings follow the herd mentality; when others have purchased and proven it really real, they will jump on the bandwagon and purchase also.

Use visual representations for the problems and solutions that your merchandise offers. Not all will read your text copy from the head to the tail, but most people will pay attention to images on your website.

Offer quality bonuses to accompany the product. When you offer bonuses that complement your product, your prospects will feel it's a great deal plus it will be crazy to miss it. Be sure to mention the monetary value of your bonuses so that individuals will be even more compelled to get your good deal.

Finally, ask for the sale! Many individuals entice their prospects with the benefits of their product, sell to them with stories of how it has solved many problems, even offered killer bonuses but forget to ask for the sale. Give a clear instruction on how to purchase your product (e.g. “click the button to buy now!”).

A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By stressing the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

1) Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your website. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

2) Conveying your site’s theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your website by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.

3) Site optimization purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your website gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your web site.

4) Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables one to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for web site projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone.

Your web site is the center of your online presence; it is the virtual representation of your company whether your company exists physically or not. When you are doing business online, people cannot see you physically like how they would if they were dealing with an offline company. Hence, people do judge you by your covers. This is where a good design comes in.

Imagine if you are running an offline company. Would you allow your salespeople to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they are dealing with your customers? By making your staff wear professionally, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. This works simply because first impressions matter.

Similarly, the same case is with your web site. If your web site is put together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute “quick fix”, you are literally screaming to your visitors that you are not professional and you do not care for quality.

On the opposite, if you have a totally professional looking website layout, you are giving your visitors the perception that you have given meticulous attention to every detail and you care about professionalism. You are organized, focused and you really mean business.

On the other side, you should also have anything related to your company well designed. From business cards to letterheads to promotional brochures, every little bit matters. This is because as you grow your business, these items become the face of your business. Once again, think of the “salesperson dressed shabbily” anology, and you will get my point.

There is no point in building a web site unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most websites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. So, by designing a search engine friendly website, one will be able to rank high in search engines and obtain more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

If you want to make your website indexed easily, one should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they could even abandon your website because of that. Moreover, frames make it hard for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.

Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate pointless HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the internet's population is still running on good old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you're designing your web site, and a very major consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website.

Usually, all the text on your site will be loaded in a very quick time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading web sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough graphics to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your website.

You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.

If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the “quality” of the JPEG image — normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image’s file size.

On the other side, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format — the image editing program clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format can often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!

Flash-based sites have been a craze since the past few years, and as Macromedia compiles more and more great features into Flash, we can only predict there will be more and more flash sites around the Internet. But, Flash based sites have been disputed to be bloated and unnecessary. Where exactly do we draw the line? Here is a simple breakdown.

The good:

Interactivity

Flash’s Actionscript opens up a vast field of possibilities. Programmers and designers have used Flash to create interactve features ranging from very lively feedback forms to attractive Flash-based games. This whole new level of interactivity will always leave visitors coming back for more.

A standardized site

With Flash, you do not have to worry about cross-browser compatibility. No more woes over how a certain css code displays differently in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. When you position your site elements in Flash, they will always appear as they are as long as the user has Flash Player installed.

Better expression through animation

In Flash, one can make use of its animating features to convey a message in a much more efficient and effective way. Flash is a lightweight option for animation because it is vector based (and hence smaller file sizes) as opposed to real “movie files” that are raster based and hence much larger in size.

The bad and the ugly:

The Flash player

People have to download the Flash player in advance before they can view Flash movies, so by using Flash your visitor range will decrease considerably because not everyone will be willing to download the Flash player just to view your site. You’ll also have to put in additional work in redirecting the user to the Flash download page if he or she doesn’t have the player installed.

Site optimization

If your content was presented in Flash, most search engines wouldn’t be able to index your content. Hence, you will not be able to rank well in search engines and there will be less traffic heading to your site.

Loading time

Users have to wait longer than usual to load Flash content compared to regular text and images, and some visitors might just lose their patience and click the Back button. The longer your Flash takes to load, the more you risk losing visitors.

The best method to go is to use Flash only when you absolutely need the interactivity and motion that comes with it. Otherwise, use a mixture of Flash and HTML or use pure text if your site is purely to present simple textual and graphical information.

Website templates are very affordable and they save you a lot of effort and time when you want to create a new layout for your website. However, a lot of people make mistakes in the process of choosing and using a site template and end up with something that was unlike the image they had in mind. Here are some guidelines to help you avoid those mistakes.

The first obvious mistake you should be aware of is using a template that is very popular. If many people use the same template, your website will not appear unique at all and your credibility as a solid, different website will be tarnished. In other words, you will appear generic just like your next-door neighbours.

To whole point of using a site template is to save time and effort. You just change the title and appropriate details and you’re done. The biggest mistake one makes is to customize the template beyond recognisation. While that may be good in the sense that you’re creating a unique graphic, you’re defying the very purpose of using a web template — saving time and effort.

However, on the opposite side, if a template you purchase is suitable but some changes must be made to suit your site’s theme, then you will have to take some time to make the changes. For example, you can find a very nice template that suits your hobby site except the original designer has put an image of stamps in the header. You can find images of garden plants and spades to replace the stamps for your gardening hobby site. However, do only make the necessary changes and don’t redesign the whole template.

In some circumstances, some people simply make the wrong choice of templates. This is a very subjective issue but you have to be careful in selecting templates to suit your audience. Do not choose templates just because they are pretty, choose them because they serve your purpose.

Convincing your visitors to buy from your website is a tough task, but have you ever thought that you are making the process twice as hard for both parties if your prospects are convinced but don’t know how to buy from you? No matter how good you are at convincing your prospects, they won’t buy if they find the process cumbersome.

First, you will want to check that people can find your order form easily and hassle-free. You can write a clear, concise paragraph to direct your prospects to your order form so that you can minimize the chances of them getting lost. You can also reduce the chances of losing prospects by putting a prominent link to your order page from every other page on your site.

Also, do you offer multiple payment options? Some people may feel comfortable paying via Paypal, some may only want to pay with their credit card and others might want to send a cheque. The more options you offer, the better your chances of covering your prospects’ desired payment method. After all, it wouldn’t make any sense to sell hard to a prospect only to find that they won’t be able to pay you when they want to.

On the other hand, you will want to prove that you are a credible merchant. Is your order form secured using encryption technology? You would want to look into SSL for this. You can also offer a money back guarantee so that people will feel confident about buying from you. How about after sales support? Who do they contact when they have problems after purchasing?

Alternatively, you can add customer testimonials, your contact information, address, and so on to boost your prospects’ confidence. Make them feel safe about buying something from you, a total stranger to them on the other end of the Internet.

As a closing, it would be very pitiful if you sold hard and sold well to a visitor and something goes wrong when he or she is ready to pay. Eliminate any chances of that to maximize your profits!