The Truth about How to make Website More Attractive

The Truth about How to make Website More Attractive

Word Count:

809

Summary:

Learn how you can make your site more attractive to earn you more bangs. Know how you can turn your visitors into customers by your interacting site.

Keywords:

Home based business, internet marketing, free, online business, affiliate programs, work at home, free website, bonus, money, business opportunity, website design.

Article Body:

In the physical world you can easily sell a product by your interacting behavior and your marketing tactics. But in the e-world where there is no face to face interaction and all marketing is totally a game of your site's interaction with your visitor which may desperate them to turn into your healthy customers. While designing your site you must know who your target people are and what are their needs and will your website turns to be beneficial for them. A website's form and content is what will determine if a visitor will stay just a visitor or turn into your next customer. Today we will discuss how to accomplish the later.
To succeed at your online business (whether you are selling your own
product/service or are selling for other merchants as an affiliate), you need a
Web site created just for that - a simple, focused site. One that is easy to build, maintenance-free, low cost, credible, and a powerful traffic-builder and
customer-converter.
Having the right tool and the right product alone doesn’t insure the success of
your website. There are many factors to be considered while designing a site.
Unfortunately, most of these are easily ignored by Internet business owners.

Build It for Speed
It's a fact of modern life - people are in a hurry. This means that you have
between 10 and 30 seconds to capture your potential customer's attention. To
minimize your load time, keep graphics small. Compress them where possible. Use flashy technology (JavaScript, Flash, Streaming Audio/Video, animation) sparingly and only if it is important to your presentation.

Target your Market
Know who your market is and make certain that your site caters to their needs. It is critical that your site reflect the values of your potential customers. Is your market mostly business professionals? If so, the site must be clean and professional. Is your product aimed mostly a teenagers and young adults? Then your site could be more informal and relaxed. The key here is to know your market and build the site to their preferences.

Focus the Site
Make certain your web site is focused on the goal, selling your product or
service. A site offering many unrelated products is not necessarily unfocused, but this is often the case. If your business does offer many products, dedicate a unique page for each instead of trying to sell them all from one page. Selling all products on the same page may annoy your customers and he may never comeback to your site.

Credibility Is Crucial
The most professionally designed site won't sell if your customers don't believe in you. A clear privacy statement is one way to build your credibility. Provide a prominent link to your privacy statement from every page on the site as well as from any location that you are asking your visitors for personal information. Provide legitimate contact information on line. Make them sure that their information is not disclose to anybody at any price.

Navigation should be simple
Make site navigation easy and intuitive. Your all pages should reachable within three clicks. Simple and smooth navigation adds to the convenience of the visitors. Add powerful search and catalog features. Many times a lot of visitors do not have the patience to navigate through the whole website to find what they are looking for. A simple navigation may hold your site's visitor for a long time and may create a chance of some more bucks for you to enjoy your weekend.

Consistency is the key
Make sure the site is consistent in look, feel and design. Nothing is more jarring and disturbing to a customer than feeling as if they have just gone to another site. Keep colors and themes constant throughout the site.

Make your site interactive and personalized
Make your website interactive. Add feedback forms as well as email forms that allow your prospective customers to ask you any questions they might have pertaining to a product. Personalization of your website is another key element that can lead to customer delight and can increase your sales. Personalization technology provides you the analytic tools to facilitate cross-selling and up-selling when the customer is buying online. It would give you an idea of what products to cross-sell and up-sell. For example, when a person buys a CD player, a disc cleaner can also be offered.

Content is King
Good content sells a product. Ask yourself the following questions. Does your
copy convey the message you wish to get across to your visitors? Is it
compelling? Does it lead your visitor through the sales process? Have others
review, critique and edit your copy to insure it is delivering the intended message. Always double check your spelling and grammar. Well its contents that talks with your customers so make it to the point.

These eight, simple rules will go a long way toward the improvement of your
website and most importantly, turn visitors into loyal customers.

What you need to know about CSS !

Style sheet is a progressive breakthrough for the advancement of web. Today, more and more browsers are implementing style sheets, opening authors' eyes to unique features that allow influence over presentation while preserving platform independence. The advantages of style sheets have become – apparent -- and the disadvantage of continually creating more HTML tags -- galore -- for presentation effects with the gradual development of CSS.

• Let's understand CSS in the right perspective. 
• Style sheets in retrospect 
• Style sheets have been around in one form or another since the beginnings of HTML in the early 1990s . 

As the HTML language grew, however, it came to encompass a wider variety of stylistic capabilities to meet the demands of web developers . With such capabilities, style sheets became less important, and an external language for the purposes of defining style attributes was not widely accepted until the development of CSS.


Teething problems with implementation of CSS

Many implementations of CSS are fraught with inconsistencies, bugs and other quirks . Authors have commonly had to use hacks and workarounds in order to obtain consistent results across web browsers and platforms .

One of the most well-known CSS bugs is the Internet Explorer box model bug; box widths are interpreted incorrectly in several versions of the browser, resulting in blocks which appear as expected in most browsers, but are too narrow when viewed in Internet Explorer. The bug can be avoided, but not without some cost in terms of functionality.

This is just one of hundreds of CSS bugs that have been documented in various versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera many of which reduce the legibility of documents. The proliferation of such bugs in CSS implementations has made it difficult for designers to achieve a consistent appearance across platforms.

Currently there is strong competition between Mozilla's Gecko layout engine, Opera's Presto layout engine , and the KHTML engine used in both Apple's Safari and the Linux Konqueror browsers - each of them is leading in different aspects of CSS. Internet Explorer remains the worst at rendering CSS by standards set down by World Wide Web Consortium as of 2005 .

Some breakthroughs …

These problems have preisely led the W3C to revise the CSS2 standard into CSS2.1, which may be regarded as something of a working snapshot of current CSS support. CSS2 properties which no browser had successfully implemented were dropped, and in a few cases, defined behaviours were changed to bring the standard into line with the predominant existing implementations..

What makes style sheets significant enough?

et representsStyle she an enormous step forward for the Web. With the separation of content and presentation between HTML and style sheets, the Web no longer needs to drift away from the strong ideal of platform independence that provided the medium with its initial push of popularity. Authors can finally influence the presentation of documents without leaving pages unreadable to users

A style sheet is made up of style rules that tell a browser how to present a document. There are various ways of linking these style rules to your HTML documents, but the simplest method for starting out is to use HTML's STYLE element. This element is placed in the document HEAD, and it contains the style rules for the page.

Functionality and Usage of CSS

CSS is well-designed to allow the separation of presentation and structure. Prior to CSS, nearly all of the presentational attributes of an HTML document were contained within the HTML code; all font colors, background styles, element alignments, borders and sizes had to be explicitly described, often repeatedly, in the midst of the HTML code.

CSS allows authors to move much of that information to a stylesheet, resulting in considerably simpler HTML code. The HTML documents become much smaller and web browsers will usually cache sites' CSS stylesheets. This leads to a reduction in network traffic and noticeably quicker page downloads.

For example, the HTML element h2 specifies that the text contained within it is a level two heading. It has a lower level of importance than h1 headings, but a higher level of importance than h3 headings. This aspect of the h2 element is structural .

Customarily, headings are rendered in decreasing order of size, with h1 as the largest, because larger headings are usually interpreted to have greater importance than smaller ones. Headings are also typically rendered in a bold font in order to give them additional emphasis. The h2 element may be rendered in bold face, and in a font larger than h3 but smaller than h1 . This aspect of the h2 element is presentational .

Prior to CSS, document authors who wanted to assign a specific color, font, size, or other characteristic to all h2 headings had to use the HTML font element for each occurrence of that heading type.

Moreover, CSS can be used with XML, to allow such structured documents to be rendered with full stylistic control over layout, typography, color, and so forth in any suitable user agent or web browser.

CSS has its share of inconsistencies as well

CSS may at times be misused, particularly by the author of web documents. Some developers who are accustomed to designing documents strictly in HTML may overlook or ignore the enabling features of CSS. For instance, a document author who is comfortable with HTML markup that mixes presentation with structure may opt to use strictly embedded CSS styles in all documents. While this may be an improvement over using deprecated HTML presentational markup, it suffers from some of the same problems that mixed-markup HTML does; specifically, it entails a similar amount of document maintenance.

Discrepancies compared: CSS vs programming languages

CSS also shares some pitfalls common with programming languages. In particular, the problem of choosing appropriate names for CSS classes and identifiers may afflict CSS authors. In the attempt to choose descriptive names for CSS classes, authors might associate the class name with desired presentational attributes; for example, a CSS class to be applied to emphasized text might be named "bigred," implying that it is rendered in a large red font.

While such a choice of naming may be intuitive to the document author, it can cause problems if the author later decides that the emphasized text should instead be green; the author is left with a CSS class called "bigred" that describes something that is green. In this instance, a more appropriate class name might have been "emphasized," to better describe the purpose or intent of the class, rather than the appearance of elements of that class.

In a programming language, such a misuse might be analogous to using a variable name "five" for a variable which contains the value 5; however, if the value of the variable changes to 7, the name is no longer appropriate.

CSS in a nutshell

CSS is used by both the authors and readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout and other aspects of document presentation. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document structure (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS).

This separation provides a number of benefits, including improved content accessibility, greater flexibility and control in the specification of presentational characteristics, and reduced complexity of the structural content. CSS is also capable of controlling the document's style separately in alternative rendering methods, such as on-screen in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on braille-based, tactile devices.

CSS allows complete and total control over the style of a hypertext document. The only way this can be illustrated in a way that gets people excited is by demonstrating what it can truly be, once the reins are placed in the hands of those able to create beauty from structure.

What Does Your Logo Say About You?

In the marketing world, a lot of attention is given to the concept of “image”, both on an individual product level and for a corporation as a whole. Researchers know the perception of a product or service can be vastly different from actuality. Business owners are faced with the difficult task of communicating to their consumers exactly what benefits they will derive from using their product or service vs. the competition’s offering.

One way businesses do this is through their logo, or their corporate identity. Part of a logo’s impact comes from repetition, the very act of seeing a familiar symbol on a continual basis. Every company, every branded product or service needs a logo for this purpose.

Because logos are everywhere, it is essential for a logo to have meaning; to present to the subconscious mind of the consumer a message about the corporation and/or the product it represents.
Of all the factors that comprise corporate image , the most significant one is that of integrity. Integrity, in itself, has components: honesty, loyalty, determination, strength, completeness, dependability.

Another element that is important for a corporate or product image is value; the consumer must perceive that they will be receiving something of worth for their money.

Leadership is another factor; it connotes a knowledge of the marketplace and the ability to conduct business in such a manner that others in the field acknowledge this company’s worth.

Innovation is another important component of image. Businesses want to be seen as creative, knowledgeable and able to meet consumer needs with the newest and best products and services.

To build such an image through logo design requires the use of all of the tools a graphic artist has in his armory: fonts, color, placement, size, pictures and design motifs. Logo designers know that some images require a sense of movement in the logo design; some need the strength of heavy block lettering; logos for products for infants, for example, would be best served with soft pastels and lines that are rhythmic and flowing rather than having sharp angles.

Any entrepreneur seeking a logo for his company or product should first choose the elements he or she wants to present as a communicator of the corporate image.

Knowing the relative weight of each factor, a logo designer can then create a logo that catches the public eye and imagination, sends a subliminal message about your company’s image and indelibly imprints the logo in the consumer’s memory.

There are four options for actually getting the design work done. From a freelancer, an ad agency, from an online logo design specialist like LogoWorks, or by doing it yourself. All have benefits and drawbacks, but for most small businesses hiring a freelancer or using an on-line company are the most effective and affordable methods.

7 Pointers about Web Design

In order to master the art of web design, designers must follow the subsequent pointers:

1. Web designers are marketers per se. Web sites are all about advertising products, ideas and services. Thus, a web designer has to understand the mindset of marketers in order to create a design that sell.

2. Read, read and read. We do not experience everything. Thus, our tendency is to learn from others. Reading web design books, newsletters and tips are pretty valuable since they can save you time and effort. Basically, books are more conclusive than newsletters and tips however, they are for free and mostly updated.

3. Narrow down your target market. You cannot please everybody same thing that you cannot be good at everything. Thus, this fact calls for the narrowing of your target market. Even in the interface of the so-called web design, a designer cannot claim that he is an expert at anything or everything about the needs of a website. It is better to pick a certain audience and try to be good at catching their attention, preference and choice. This practice allows you to be best at a given area thus developing expertise.

4. Answer your target audience’s needs. In order to answer the visitor’s needs, web designers must know what kind of visitors his site is welcoming. Do they belong to the younger generation or otherwise? What do they want from your site? Are these information, details and pleasures in your site in order to get their undivided attention and loyalty? Bear in mind that colors, font size, style of graphics, contents and the entirety of the site affects viewer’s decision and choice.

5. Know the basics of SEO and copywriting. Though Search Engine Optimization and copywriting are not directly related to designing, still, designers must have basic knowledge about them. This is because web designing is intertwined with marketing, use of keywords and visibility.

Aside from that, designers must also have knowledge of the programming basics. If not, the tendency is waste time or to create a mediocre or unsatisfactory design to the detriment of the sites.

6. The primacy of functionality. If ever you are faced to make a decision between a web site’s aesthetic form and its functionality, you have to be firm in upholding the latter. Not everything that is pretty is ‘saleable’. Besides, you don’t create web sites for the sake of making it nice-looking.

Above anything else, the site must be functional so as to cater to every visitor’s wants and needs. Appearance is a means to catch visitor’s attention nevertheless, it is not the end. If a designer prioritizes appearance alone without considering its primary consideration the web site’s marketability will suffer.

7. Know when to break the rules. Rules are only guidelines, if you feel that the rules are inappropriate for a certain creation follow your heart’s desire and venture on an experimental adventure.