Web Site Business Objectives

A small business web site can do many things. This can include:

- Generate Leads. Pre-sell your business services and products to generate telephone, e-mail, or online form leads from customers.

- Generate Sales Quotes. Solicit or generate automated quotes that in turn generates a customer sale or lead.

- Generate Advertising Revenue. Display online content and free services with affiliate or ad network advertisements that generates advertising revenue from your merchant partners.

- Provide A StoreFront. Host online catalog that fully automates customer purchase and communications process.

- Generate Customer Traffic. Generate customer traffic from search engines and business directories to pre-sell your product or service. Traffic is then re-directed to you main web site or product web pages.

Your e-Commerce web site design is greatly influenced by your specific web site objectives for your small business.

eCommerce Web Site Design Fundamentals

A web site is a lot more or even a lot less than a traditional store. There are more considerations with ecommerce web site design versus a traditional store. Web design considerations include:

Customer Friendly: Present a professional image, offer customer convenience, have good sales copy, and just make it easy for customer to make desired response (click, lead, sale).

Search Engine Friendly. For most online businesses, most customer traffic comes from search engines like Google, Yahoo!, or MSN. If part of your e-Commerce web site design strategy is to generate search engine traffic, you will need search engine optimization expertise to succeed. Buy it or grow it.

Integrating Advertising into Your Web Design

By Stephen Bucaro

If you are going to be placing ads on your website, you'll want to put some thought into how you'll integrate them. Poor integration of ads into your website will cause visitors to click away fast. Successful integration of ads into your site can be highly profitable. Before I show you where to position ads, I want to mention a few important points about ads.

1. Ratio of ads to content

How many ads should you place on your website? There is an optimum ratio of ads to content. If your website has too high a proportion of advertising relative to content, traffic on your website will suffer and you will lose money. If your website has too low a portion of advertising relative to content, sales on your website will suffer and you will lose money.

What is optimum ratio of ads to content? I can't point to any studies, but I feel optimum ratio is somewhere around 20 to 25 percent ads relative to content. Go much above that ratio and, despite more ads, revenue from your site goes down. But, there are ways to exceed that ratio and still make more money.

Ads as a service

Advertisements can provide useful information, as well as content. In that case, ads become content. Here's an example. Rather than post ads that pay you highest commission, post ads that provide best value to visitors to your website. These are ads where value is so good you might respond to ad yourself. This type of ad is more of a service than an advertisement.

Another example is ads for gifts around holidays. People expect and are not turned off by an increase in ads around holidays. Finding gifts for everyone on your list is difficult work, and people appreciate gift ideas. Again, this type of ad is more of a service than an advertisement.

You can safely exceed normal ratio of ads to content if you hide ads in content. An example of this is product "reviews". For example, computer magazines are almost 100 percent advertising posing as product reviews.

2. Repetition of ads and ad management

I have seen websites that display exact same banner on every page. If I didn't respond to banner on first page, what makes them think I will repond to it on second, third ... hundredth page?

Displaying same banner on every page of your website is annoying to your website's visitors, and a money losing propostion for you. Keep your ads fresh. Ads are boring enough without repeating same ad over and over. Display a variety of ads, and use an ad management system. An example of an ad management system is a banner rotator.

3. Ad type relative to response rate

I have heard claims that text ads receive highest reponse. I'm sure these results are not related to whether ad is text or graphics, but more likely related to fact that text ads are usually placed in more responsive areas of a webpage. All thing being equal, a graphic ad will always get better response than a text ad.

A graphic ad will get higher response than a text ad, and an animated graphic ad will get higher response than a static graphic ad. But animation can be taken to an extreme. Some types of animation are annoying and not only does ad get a low response, but it also causes visitors to click away from your website.