Keep Visitors Coming Back Over & Over! Offer Them What They Want!Written by Paulina Roe
If you have a site you want to be "sticky" - meaning visitors will hang out at your site and check it out for awhile, and then come back for more visits due to changing content they want to see - you need to have a strategy. You need to know what your site theme needs to draw targeted visitors back again and again. No matter what you do with your site - you need good content that changes - relating to what people want to know about. The content must be timely, pertinent, consistent with site theme, and offer something of value to visitors. Some strategies are offered below. Figure out what is new, or innovative for your site theme. What can you post in updates that will make curious come back? Is there a new product, a new site announcement, a new article (especially in a series that is continuous), a new prize or contest to win? Think over your options and see what relates with your site. Offer a way for visitors to win something - or offer freebies they can win, or discount coupons on items - just for visiting. Don't go broke over this, but find something of use and which follows your site theme. You might even get donations of products or samples from a company that wants its link or banner on your site, and perhaps has its logo on samples. When winners are picked, list them at page or in your ezine so that visitors will return to find out if they won. It will also add credibility that you are actually awarding prizes. Keep winners current and post any "thank you" messages winners send to you.
| | "How's Your Sense of Style?"Written by Merle
No, I'm not referring to your wardrobe here, but to cascading style sheets, also known as CSS. Developed by World Wide Web Consortium, it allows webmasters to separate site layout from design. CSS is actually a standard for controlling appearance of your Web pages. It's essentially a set of rules that, when linked to or embedded in HTML pages, control their appearance.Right about now you're probably thinking "What's so great about that?" The benefits are numerous -- two of biggest are: 1) Easy Site Updates: Global site updates will be simpler when you can make all your changes in one place to update entire site. It's much better than going through page after page of HTML code. For example, say you have a site made in Times New Roman font and your customer calls you up and tells you he wants Verdana. Can you imagine scrolling through 25 pages or more looking for every incident of tag and changing it to Verdana? What a nightmare. With CSS you would simply specify font in one location and change would be implemented site wide.2) Faster Loading: Your HTML pages will load faster due to cleaner code. All of extraneous coding will be in a style sheet, leaving less clutter and faster downloading of site. So now that you've seen a few of "benes" to style sheets, let's learn more about them. Let's clarify up front that while both Netscape and Internet Explorer both support CSS from version 4.0 and higher, they don't exactly see eye to eye on CSS and interpret some style properties differently. You'll want to test your pages in both browsers to check and correct any inconsistencies. So what can you control with CSS? Things like paragraphs , Headings , borders, table layouts,Fonts and font colors, text alignment, pixel size, line height, letter spacing, word spacing, font weights, page margins, and even background images; and way they work is a big improvement over just plain old HTML. Are you beginning to see possibilities and just how powerful this can be?
There are three ways to use CSS: 1) Inline: The CSS tags are applied to web page itself, to any body element you choose. This is not best method, as you'll have to find each incidence in web site in order to make changes in future. Example of this: Text Here In example above text would be highlighted yellow. 2) Embedded: The actual CSS code is part of HTML page placed between tags on each page. Again, placing tags inside pages defeats convenience of CSS and being able to make global site changes from one document, but some do like to use this method.
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