Tips to Know Your Customers

Ask for feedback: include a feedback form in your Contact Us page. Publish an ezine and include a subscription form in your homepage. Give your customers valuable information and encourage them to contact you. Include polls and other tools to gather market intelligence.

Tips on Linking

Make your links descriptive. They should indicate what user will be linking to, as opposed to just saying "click here". Don’t underline anything that is not a link. Underline your links and use a consistent color for them across your site (preferably blue). Use a different color for visited links, so that your visitors know where they’ve been (preferably purple or a more subdued tone of unvisited links color). When linking to a non-HTML file, such as Excel, Word or Acrobat, make it evident, by including a small icon next to link. Don’t link to "under construction" pages. Make sure that your links work and that you don’t have broken links. There are free online tools that can help you with this. If you use graphic links, don’t forget to use ALT attribute. The ALT attribute should describe what are you linking to.

Tips on how to use graphics

Optimize your graphics. Use only .gif and .jpg formats. Make your image files as small as possible while maintaining acceptable quality. Use a free online graphics optimization tool. Use thumbnails (miniature versions of a picture) and make them clickable to actual size picture. Avoid graphics that look like ads. People ignore them. Use ALT attribute on pictures, even image is not a link. It helps users with disabilities and people who have turned off graphics.

Tips to optimize your site for search engines:

Create short, descriptive page titles, to entice search engine users to click on your links. Create a site map containing all your pages, and link to it directly from your homepage. Search engine robots will follow link to your site map and will most likely add all your pages to index. Decide what two or three main keywords are for each page (the words you believe search engine users will type to find your page) and repeat them often in your page title, description meta tag and page body. Create a Links page and call it Resources. In it, place links to those sites that have agreed to place a reciprocal link to your page. The more inbound links you have from quality sites with a topic related to your site, better your site will rank with search engines. Use more text than graphics, and minimize use of Flash and JavaScript. Search engines heavily favor text and will crawl and index your site faster.

Mario Sanchez publishes The Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ), an online collection of web design and Internet marketing articles and resources.

HostingChecker.com - help for all your web hosting needs.

http://www.hostingchecker.com

Article may be republished if this portion is not removed.

The best way to get a template is to have someone professional design your web site layout for you! This will ensure that your template is uniquely designed for your business. It will be easier for you to make changes in future. Typically, a template may cost you between $0-$500 depending on intensity and added features!

Now, we've talked about "Slow loading pages". I've found a good "norm" to stick with when it comes to size and speed: Web sites are compiled of 2 elements:

1) Graphics & Layouts

2) Programming & Pages

Both of them require memory from your computer when downloading them. If one or other is too large then this may result in negative results for your visitors.

Here's a good norm to stick with, either you or your web designer should stick with these specs:

1) Graphic Design Layout: Should be no more than: 30-50K in size

2) Programming Pages: Shouldn't be more than: 10-30k in size

Giving your entire web page no more than 40k-80k in size. Anything drastically more will result in loss of many visitors from slow downloading pages.

Animation: Last but not least, making "some" aspects of you page stand out by adding small size animations. PLEASE NOTE: DO NOT overkill your site with graphics and animation!!! I can't stress this enough, your visitors will most likely get a head ache from it and won't be coming back very soon.

Instead, try targeting specific promotions or services you wish to attract your visitors to right away! Many sites exchange "animated banners" with other sites to exchange traffic. I personally NEVER take part in adding ANY banners on my site. I honestly feel that banners only take away from design, not add to it! A typical "Banner Dimensions" is 468px x 60px. There are many other sizes!

What I will usually take part in, if any, is smaller, more unique banners that are geared to complimenting an article or text with it. This is much more effective because study shows us that "Content (text)" accompanied by a "graphic image" is more likely to be read by our visitors than just text on its own.

Martin R. Lemieux Smartads Information Centre Advertising, Marketing Resources & Web Design http://www.smartads.info

HostingChecker.com - help for all your web hosting needs.

http://www.hostingchecker.com

Article may be republished if this portion is not removed.