WHAT'S THE QUALITY OF YOUR WEB SITE? Written by Miles J. Nixon
A good web site receives thousands of visitors a day. But how many of those turn into customers? People sign-up or buy when they feel comfortable with a web site. If it's down, slow, or broken in any way, visitor will usually be uncomfortable and go elsewhere. Why? Well, do you like to shop in a retail store that is missing products, has no customer service, or you can't navigate? Probably not. Many web sites have equivalent of these situations, only they are represented to visitors as problems with site. Remember your web site does talking for you and visitors make judgments strictly on their experience at your site. When things do work way they should work, sign-up or checkout process is simple, product or service is not confusing, and whole experience feels right - result is customers. If this is ultimate goal, corporate web site managers and web site owners must treat their web site with same care they would a physical store or office. In virtual world we don't have store managers, but we do have a relatively new emerging business category: online monitoring. Online monitoring services mind site/store and make sure it's open and ready to do business 24 hours a day, every day. These services can watch site performance, content, availability/reliability, and security. They can also provide site managers with immediate notification of problems via alerts. By watching a site from outside firewall and not inside, online monitoring services identify problems that cannot be immediately seen from inside.
| | Sites for Budding BeginnersWritten by Grant Hewlett
So you want to put up a web page? As a relative newcomer myself to magical world of web sites - I only went online in July of '99, and I didn't even know how to send emails - I have picked up many valuable tips from Jaydee newsletter. Most of articles though are directed towards pro and semi pro, but what about budding beginner? Before you can get to appreciating finer points of Jaydee feature articles on web site design and promotion etcetera, you have to get that page up, and where do you start? The following is a basic step by step for beginner that will help get them onto main road of web site construction. To start: First, set up a file, and keep everything that is going to be related to your page/site together in this file. Then open a blank web page on your browser. If you were in Netscape, you would do this through COMPOSER. When you have a page opened and saved, insert an image, any image, just for sake of this example. To do this, you go to INSERT, choose your image from menu, and click it into your page. Then (if in COMPOSER) go to FORMAT and choose PAGE COLORS AND PROPERTIES, and pick a color for your page background. Then place a button at bottom of your page. Buttons are used to link your pages. Repeat this process again, and create a second page with a button. Choose LINK on main menu, and link your first page to second. Now go back to first page, and link button there to your second page. Then link button on your second page, back to first. Now test out your links in preview mode on your browser. If links work okay, then you're ready to upload these example pages to your site. To upload pages to your site space, you will need and FTP engine. FTP, means File Transfer Protocol. An FTP engine, is a software device which enables you to transfer your pages (files) from your hard drive to your site. The most recommended FTP engine for beginners, is WS-FTP PRO 6.5. Here is how you can get one.
|
