"Let Your Little Website Shine" Part 3Written by Lynne Schlumpf
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garbage sales talk or just plain trash. This is usually case when a company does not understand how to sell on web or is just plain too lazy to plan their content carefully. A website should be useful to target market of buyers you are aiming at. If you are selling widgets, have a section of FREE information just on everything you can find out about history of widgets and all aspects of using them. If you provide a service, have some information that is useful background for buyers of that service. Sit down with a pad of paper before you ever design your website, and make a hand-written plan of how you want it to look. Include elements described in this article. Giving something free on your site, like free information that is really worth something, will make them feel more at ease about purchasing whatever it is you are selling. If a website only sells something but gives nothing in return, it's just plain garbage. Many MLM websites are like this. (no offense to MLMs!) In contrast, one couple decided they really loved peacocks, so they created a website based only on information about peacocks, such as how to raise them. The website started out as just a hobby type of site, but end result now is that they sell more peacocks than they can breed. They are sold out as soon as babies are born. The other end result is that CEO of company wrote a full-length book just on peacocks and sells that on his website now, too. Another example was a man who decided he was a pretty knowledgeable government contractor. He wrote articles on his site about how to have upper hand when it comes to being awarded government contracts. His site is now selling a lot of information, as well as providing it free. His company was recently purchased by another company and sells books, CD-ROMs, and all sorts of other information about this subject. These websites, in contrast to those websites you see that just look like sales letters, are useful. They serve a purpose that keeps people coming back. No one wants to see a whole website dedicated to "I love my company and this is what we do". They only care what you do if you dedicate one page to "About Us", and rest of website keeps their attention with useful information. Plan your website around your expertise on a given subject. Eat, breathe and sleep that subject. Learn everything you possibly can about subject, and write about it. Gone are days that you can have a website that just sells information. You've got to "give away" some of your expertise, too, or your website hits are going to be pitiful at best. You'll be lucky to get 10 people a day to come and look. Enough said on this little pet peeve of mine!
Lynne Schlumpf is the CEO of Route 66 Cyber Cafe, Inc., http://www.r66cci.com, a Web hosting and design company specializing in promoting websites for new owners, building affordable e-commerce sites, and providing reliable web hosting solutions as an affiliate of Virtualis Incorporated.
| | Let Your Little Website Shine, Part 1Written by Lynne Schlumpf
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year contract with a hosting provider. We've since switched to another provider and don't have this problem anymore. See Web Hosting to find out where we went for better bandwidth. No matter what we did to make our Website load fast, our foundation was not good enough to make people want to come back. More than a few seconds to get to your website, and your site goes down in history as not being seen, along with all websites hosted at places where websites are free. (You probably know who they are) If you have huge graphics and all kinds of whirlygigs and java scripts that would make a grown man cry, your site is in trouble again. Try to make all your graphics small and in a .jpg (jpeg) format. If you must use moving gifs or other animated stuff, make it something useful that replaces text information. It must have some use on your page - not just to look good. And try to make it only one per page, if you can. If you love java, be aware of a couple of issues with fancy java scripts: Not everyone can see them if they don't have right browser or latest version of some browsers, not everyone is going to appreciate that their mouse leaves "trails" across screen, or that everything on your site is what they call a mouseover (where an image changes into something else when you run your mouse over it). Leave this stuff to your "other" site - you know, one you wrote for fun. Try to keep this stuff to a minimum on a business website. A plain white background is always better than some fancy, bandwidth-eating background bitmap image. If you must have a background image, make it a very small watermark-style image. Better to leave it plain. Makes it easier to read for many people who don't have greatest video card or best pair of eyes. One side note: It's always good to test your website's pages in another screen resolution. If you like to keep your resolution (right-click on desktop in Windows, go to settings, change slide bar) at 1024x768, test your site using 800x600 and possibly 640x480. You can also put some java scripts that test user's screen resolution and adjust accordingly, or you can put a disclaimer on your main page that says: "Best when viewed in 800x600 resolution". You decide how easy to make it for your visitors. Remember that things that may look great on your machine might look like crap to someone with their screen resolution set differently. The next thing to make sure of after they actually get to your site is whether or not it looks good. When I return, I'll discuss how to make your website credible with a great look.
Lynne Schlumpf is the CEO of Route 66 Cyber Cafe, Inc., http://www.r66cci.com, a Web hosting and design company specializing in promoting websites for new owners, building affordable e-commerce sites, and providing reliable web hosting solutions as an affiliate of Virtualis Incorporated.
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