Ensure your site’s content reflects its purpose.

If yours is a sales site for example, ensure that your content concentrates on selling. Stay focused and avoid temptation to upload content that is not relevant to your web site’s purpose.

Enable quick and easy location of information.

Quite simply, most customers will quickly leave your site if they cannot locate information they are seeking. Internet users increasingly require information to be instantly available and there is no shortage of other sites eager to take business from you. Think what information customers are likely to want and do not hide it away.

Make sure content is relevant, accurate and up-to-date.

Provide accurate and relevant content and keep it up-to-date. Failure to do this will make your company look inefficient and reflects badly on your customer service levels. Search engines also appreciate content that is updated regularly.

Encourage interaction.

Get visitors to interact with your site and spend more time on it. Make a visit an interesting experience for them by including useful online tools, etc. Just make sure they are relevant to your site.

Personalize your site.

Depending on technology you have available to you, it may be possible to greet visitors to your site by name and serve up content tailored specifically to their needs. If you can do it then do so.

Invite dialogue.

Give your customers opportunity to contact you via email, online forms, a call-back/call-me facility, web chat, etc. Ask for their feedback via online surveys and feedback forms. Invite them to subscribe to a customer newsletter.

Acknowledge customer contact.

It is common courtesy to say ‘thank you’. Very little effort is required to set up an email auto-responder. When requiring customers to complete and submit a form, make sure there is a ‘thank you’ page or pop-up. It reassures customer that you have received their communication and does not leave them wondering whether or not your site is working properly.

Make it a ‘seamless’ experience.

Aim to give customers same level of service online as you give them offline. Your goal should be to facilitate customer’s interaction with your company and allow them to choose how to do business with you. You know that customers are your most valuable asset and that retaining them is vitally important.

Give your customers support.

Reassure visitors to your site by providing elements such as help pages, FAQ’s, a site map, terms of use and a privacy policy. They will appreciate it.

Inspire confidence.

Ensure that your site works properly and its content is up-to-date. Check error messages make sense and forms and data entry fields are logical. Get someone to proofread your site and spot any grammatical and spelling mistakes. The quality of your site tells customers a lot about quality of service they can expect from you.

Get to know your customers.

Learn as much as you can about your customers and way they use your site (and, if you can, find out how they use your competitors’ sites). Then use this learning to improve your site and increase your return on investment.

The number of web sites is growing every day and now just about anyone can create one. If you want your site to stand out from rest, plan it carefully and design it with your customers in mind. Far too many web site owners just do not bother.

This will provide search-engine spiders a path to follow and will ultimately result in your web pages getting fully indexed.

You can learn more about sitemaps here: http://SiteMapSoftware.com

Note that most, but not all servers have SSI's enabled. Please check with your web host to find out whether SSI is enabled in your server.

How to Easily Create a Navigation Menu Using SSI? ------------------------------------------------- Step 1# - Create a HTML navigation menu file

This is navigation menu file that will be inserted into your HTML pages and is also your HTML navigation menu template.

A simple horizontal text HTML navigation menu can look like this:

Home | Products | Pricing | About Us | Contact Us

(You'll need to hyperlink each of above text to make these navigation links clickable by using your favorite HTML editor e.g. FrontPage or Dreamweaver)

You need to save this file with a .shtml extension once this file has been created e.g. topnavi.shtml

Step 2# - Insert navigation menu file into HTML file

Open up HTML file (e.g. products.html) and place cursor on location where you wish to insert navigation menu.

Click here to view SSI directive: http://BizSuccessOnline.com/SSI_CodeSnippet

And copy and paste above SSI directive at cursor.

(Be sure to replace "your_navigation_filename.shtml" with name of your navigation menu file)

Note: You CANNOT use absolute path with an SSI directive: e.g. do not use http://yourdomain.com opnavi.shtml

And finally, save HTML file with a .shtml extension e.g. products.shtml

Step 3# - Upload files onto your server

The last step is to upload newly created .shtml files onto your web server and check to make sure pages display properly.

And if you view HTML source code of your HTML file on a live internet connection, you'll notice that SSI directive would have been replaced by actual HTML navigation menu code.

Maintaining your navigation menu is now a simple matter of changing contents on navigation file.

That's all there is to it!

Give it a go!