First Impressions : Do-It-Yourself?

There are some truly gifted artists providing unique internet experiences now. There are also some truly boring templates that many web “designers” are assaulting webscape with right now.

If uniformity or invisibility is in your business plan, then I recommend picking one of these. Of course, most web design firms simply won’t allow a solid online price quote, or even a firm up front bid, so consider risks when facing those scenarios.

Web design software has made it feasible for small businesses to design their own sites. However, this also creates need to pay someone else to manage a site that they didn’t create, nor received payment for its design. On other hand, using a pre-screened professional web design service has several significant benefits that are easily overlooked if focused upon prospect of a fat price quote on custom work. First of all, if your

How To Double Or Triple Your Page Views?

It's easy, just design and engineer your main page in such a fashion that people will click beyond it into rest of your site. If you are like a lot of webmasters, you're losing a significant number of visitors as soon as they get to your front door. The "main page" on any site is doorway to rest of content of that particular site. But, BIG question is....will door open? Will visitor turn knob and push through main page to see what's really in there? We faced this situation recently. We had what was a very pretty web page. That's not just our opinion; many visitors commented very positively on look of main page. Some even went as far as to copy design completely and place it on their own page (but that's another story). The problem was that a good percentage of visitors never went beyond main page. Something had to be done, and done fast. Following is what we did to dramatically change click through rate on our site pages. 1) Tighten up on load time. The graphics files got reduced and used more efficiently. Some of nonessential copy got turfed too. We also took out virtually all outside links from main page. The result is a sleeker looking page that is more efficient in delivering message about rest of site. 2) Ease of Navigation. All main category pages are clearly listed on sidebar. Each category page is a site unto itself with its own navigation features and links to all other site categories are still listed on sidebar. This repeated but tasteful use of same links and graphics on every page greatly increases load time on subsequent page views. 3) High Value Perception. The top 4 links at our site judiciously use words; Traffic, Free, & Special. These words are proven to draw interest and attract attention. The second part of this though is to actually deliver value. Nothing will turn people off faster than a phony. If you promise a FREE Report, then you'd better deliver it. This leads us to another point.