Who Is Your Audience?
Understanding the type of people who visit your site is a very important task because you can use that information to enhance your site to suit them. As a result, you will gain more loyal returning visitors that come back again and again for more.
What is the age level and what kind of knowledge does your audience have? A layman might linger around a general site on gardening, but a professional botanist might turn his nose at the very same site. Similarly, a regular person will leave a site filled with astronomy abstracts but a well educated university graduate will find that site interesting.
Take your audience’s emotional state into consideration when building your site. If a very irritated visitor searches for a solution and comes across your site, you will want to make sure you offer the solution right up front and sell or promote your product to him second. In this way, the visitor will put his trust in you for offering the solution to his problems and is more likely to buy your product when you offer it to him after that.
When you design the layout for your site, you have to take into account the characteristics of your audience. Are they old or young people? Are they looking for trends or are they just looking for information served without any icing on the cake? For example, introducing a new, exciting game with a simple, straightforward black text against white background page will definitely turn prospects away. Make sure your design suits your site’s general theme.
Try to sprinkle colloquial language in your sites sparingly where you see fit and you will create a sense that your audience is on common ground with you. This in turn builds a trusting relationship between you and your audience, which will come in useful should you want to market a product to your audience.
Should I Create a Website? Do I Need One?
People always want to follow the latest thing, be it in fashion, sports, that kind of thing. Websites have become a necessity to almost everyone. Companies, businesses, individuals, even young adults have created personal websites with their respective purposes, be it for profit, or for entertainment.
What one must consider, however, before creating a website, are the factors in which must be put to thought before doing so, such as the cost, maintenance, use, web host and so forth.
Firstly, associating with the cost, we must always try to find an affordable host, not spending too much, nor too little. A cheap host does not exactly symbolize a credible reliability rating, but we must always look for value for money deals. Also, regarding the efficiency and server/web host reliability, there are many cases of web hosts not providing the service they had assured other people, some had even shut down and were nowhere to be seen. Keep this note in mind, as if you would like a long-lasting website, this would be the first thing to look for.
Next, would hiring a professional be affordable? Is it the best option? For simple websites, we could always pick up the coding, or even use programs, as it is relatively simple. However, when it comes to more complex coding, and when you want it to do a tad more than just providing information, hiring help in doing so would be the best way. Not only in terms of design, but security is also a key factor in assuring a quality website. If the website also acts as a portal for businesses, security would definitely be the issue here.
So, having considered the things to do before building a website, do we actually NEED one? If creating one would boost sales or promote positive implications to oneself, then by all means, go ahead and do what’s best. Yet again, planning is the key to success, in everything we do.
Improve Usability of Your Website
No matter how brilliant your website design is, if it is hard to reach the content of your site then your site is as useful as an empty shell. Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally.
The first method is to make sure the typography of your content is suitable. If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily. Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.
Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can use your site with ease.
Ensure that your site loads fast if you do not want to lose visitors. Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure the crème de la crème of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention.
Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links, so be very careful about that.
Mistakes To Avoid When Using Website Templates
Website templates are very affordable and they save you a lot of effort and time when you want to create a new layout for your website. However, a lot of people make mistakes in the process of choosing and using a web template and end up with something that was unlike the image they had in mind. Here are some guidelines to help you avoid those mistakes.
The first obvious mistake you should be aware of is using a template that is very popular. If many people use the same template, your website will not appear unique at all and your credibility as a solid, different website will be tarnished. In other words, you will appear generic just like your next-door neighbours.
The whole point of using a web template is to save time and effort. You just change the title and appropriate details and you’re done. The biggest mistake one makes is to customize the template beyond recognisation. While that may be good in the sense that you’re creating a unique graphic, you’re defying the very purpose of using a web template — saving time and effort.
However, on the opposite side, if a template you purchase is suitable but some changes must be made to suit your site’s theme, then you will have to take some time to make the changes. For example, you can find a very nice template that suits your hobby site except the original designer has put an image of stamps in the header. You can find images of garden plants and spades to replace the stamps for your gardening hobby site. However, do only make the necessary changes and don’t redesign the whole template.
In some circumstances, some people simply make the wrong choice of templates. This is a very subjective issue but you have to be careful in selecting templates to suit your audience. Do not choose templates just because they are pretty, choose them because they serve your purpose.
Five Important Rules in Website Design
When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.
1. Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.
2. Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.
3. Have a simple and clear navigation
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.
4. Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!
5. Avoid using audio on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.
How to Create a Custom 404 Error Message
How to Create a Custom 404 Error Message
and Increase Your Web Site Traffic
by Herman Drost
Have you ever received the dreaded ” 404 error page not
found ” message when you surfed to a web site?
This is usually due to typing the wrong URL or clicking
on a page link that no longer exists. If you are the site
owner, you lose the visitor and a potential sale. Creating
a custom 404 error page on your site will prevent you
from losing visitors and increase your web site traffic.
Benefits of creating custom 404 error messages
1. Stop link rot – as your site becomes larger, it’s more
difficult to keep track of pages that once existed,
resulting in link rot.
2. Redirect old cached pages – old web pages are cached
by Google for a long period. If someone types in the URL
of your old web page they will get the dreaded 404 error.
A custom 404 error page redirects those visitors back to
your main site.
3. Capture mistyped urls – visitors often type the wrong
URL resulting in the ” page not found ” error message.
4. Increase traffic – instead of losing visitors that
receive page errors you keep them on your site resulting
in a small increase in web site traffic.
How to create a custom 404 error page
Example: http://www.isitebuild.com/error404.htm
1. Create a new web page and name it error404.html (or
whatever you like).
2. Include these points on the error404 page:
a) clear message that they have arrived at the wrong address.
b) navigation bar or site map so visitors can quickly find
their way to around your site (if you have a large site you
may want to include a search engine).
c) contact information, so visitors can inform you of a
broken link or ask you a question directly.
d) a link that points back to the main page of your site.
You want to make it as effortless as possible for them
to find your site.
3. Create a .htaccess file – this is a hidden file that is
placed in the root directory. This is what directs users to
the custom error page, when they type in a wrong URL or
click on a broken link. This file affects the directory and
all sub-directories in which it is placed. Since you want
it to affect your whole site, place it in the root directory.
To create a .htaccess file, open notepad and add this line
to it:
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.domainname.com/error404.htm
If you already have a .htaccess file in your root directory,
then don’t create a new one. Just add the above
line to it. Make sure it is all typed on one line, the E
and D letters are capitalized, and there is a space before
and after the 404.
The URL can be absolute:
( ErrorDocument 404 http://www.domainname.com/error404.htm )
or relative
( ErrorDocument 404 /error404.htm )
4. Save the file as “htaccess.txt” and change the name
remotely after you FTP it. (i.e.change the name of the file to
.htaccess when it has been up uploaded to the server).
5. Upload the htaccess.txt file and the error404.htm page
to your root directory (same location as your index.html
page) using your FTP software. Upload in ASCII mode (not
binary) or it won’t work.
6. Change the name of your htaccess.txt file to .htaccess
7. Test the custom error404.htm page by mistyping the URL
of your web site. Check the URLs on the error404 page.
Tip: Create a custom error404.htm page for every web site
you have, so you will stop losing precious visitors and
increase your traffic and sales.
How To Use A Tell A Friend Script To Drive Traffic
More and more webmasters have the recurring dilemma on how to increase the flow of traffic in the websites. During the past few years many methods that been developed to solve this predicament. While most of them would work there are those that would not make even a small impact.
One of the methods that have spawned many success stories in driving traffic into websites is viral marketing. Viral marketing makes use of the tendency of a person to share something to find informative, entertaining or amazing.
Many companies bank on this behavior to spread their products and increase the popularity of their company or their website. Viral marketing makes use of many mediums in enticing this behavior. It might be in the form of an interesting story, an addicting flash game, an amusing video and many others that may catch a person’s fancy.
This ingenious form of marketing is typically low cost and is a wonderful tool for any company to utilize. The benefit greatly overshadows the cost or efforts to initialize this marketing scheme. Any website would greatly benefit that viral marketing.
Tell A Friend Script
One of the easiest methods in viral marketing is using a tell a friend script. This is a simple programming script that you can attach to the programming of your website. Generally, tell a friends script are installed in pages where a media is placed so that a person can easily send the media to any of his friends or his family members.
The basic concept of a tell a friend script is a script wherein a person may input his name, e-mail address, the recipient’s e-mail address and send the media to the intended recipient much like an e-mail with an attachment. As the recipient receives the e-mail he wouldn’t think of the mail a spam mail because he would see the sender’s name as someone he or she knows and trust.
Tell a friend script eliminates greatly the chances of being blocked because they use the information inputted by the sender. This allows for wider spreading of this marketing method. It can be quite sneaky but it is very effective.
With the e-mail sent and opened the sent media will either be read, viewed or played. Also along with the mail would be a brief description of the company or site that sponsors the media sent. This allows for the introduction of either the site, company name or its products. The along with it is another tell a friend script.
Then the process begins again. As more people use the tell a friend script, more and more people will know of the existence of the sponsoring company or site. People who read the ads inside the mail who liked what they see would go and click on the link and visit the site. This drives traffic into the site resulting to great number of potential customers.
Tell A Friend Script Availability
A tell a friend script is very simple and does not require a complicated method of programming. In fact, you can copy paste a script and simply put it on an intended page. Finding one is even simpler. All you have to do is go to a search engine and type in the search box “tell a friend script” then press enter or click go.
In the search results page you will see many links that will direct you to a site where you can get a tell a friend script. It would just be a simple matter of looking and searching for the script and copying it to your intended web page.
With a tell a friend script viral marketing strategy you can drive traffic into your site which could potentially spell profits. This is a simple harmless script that offers great benefits for low cost paired with great creativity and foresight.
It is imperative that you have patience in using a tell a friend script. If your chosen media doesn’t get the mileage that is expected of it, it may take some time before it gets spread or shared. But surely many people will see your ads and there is great probability that they will visit your site increasing your traffic flow.
2 Surefire Ways To Maximize Your Adsense Earnings
Most webmasters know that Adsense generates a sizeable source of additional advertising income. That is why most of them use it to go after high paying keywords. They have with them the lists that tells what the keywords are and have already used various methods of identifying them. And yet, after putting up these supposed-to-be high paying keywords into their pages, the money they expected to come rolling in is not really coming in.
What is it that they are doing wrong?
Having the pages is with the proper keywords is one thing. But driving visitors to those pages is another matter and often the factor that is lacking.
The thing is, to get visitors to your high paying keyword pages, you need to optimize your site navigation.
Stop for a moment and think about how visitors are using your website. After a visitor has landed on a certain page, they have the tendency to click on another page that sounds interesting. They get there because of the other links that appears on a page that they initially landed on. This is site navigation. It is all about enabling visitors to move about your site. And one way of maximizing your Adsense earnings.
A typical website have menu links on each page. The wording on these links is what grabs a visitor’s attention and gets them to click on one of the links that will take them to another page of that website. Links that have “free’ or “download” are oftentimes good attention-grabbers.
This navigation logic can also be applied to driving traffic to your high paying pages. There are some websites that are getting a lot of traffic from search engines, but have low earnings. The trick is to try and use come cleverly labeled links to get the visitors off that pages and navigate them to the higher earning ones. This is one great way of turning real cheap clicks to real dollars.
Before you begin testing if this same style will work for you and you website, you need to have two things. Something to track and compare and some high earning pages you want to funnel your site traffic to. An option is to select a few of your frequently visited pages. This is ensuring fast result to come by.
Now, the next thing to do is think of ways to get visitors viewing a particular page to try and click on the link that will take them to your high earning pages. Come up with a catchy description for that link. Come up with a catchy and unique description for the link. Think of something that people do not get to see everyday. That will trigger their curiosity enough to try and see what that was all about.
You can also use graphics to grab your readers’ attention. There is no limitation to what you can do to make your link noticeable. If you are after the success of your site, you will do everything it takes just to achieve that goal. Just be creative. As far as many Adsense advertisers are concerned, there are no written and unwritten laws to follow regarding what they write. Just as long as you do not overstep the guidelines of the search engines, then go for it.
Also remember that it is all about location, location and location. Once the perfect attention grabbing description has been achieved, you have to identify the perfect spot on your page to position that descriptive link to your high paying page.
There is nothing wrong with visiting other websites to see how they are going about maximizing their site navigation. “Hot pages” or “Most read” lists are very common and overly used already. Get to know the ones that many websites are using and do not try to imitate them.
Another way of doing it is to try and use different texts on different pages. That way you will see the ones that work and what does not. Try to mix things around also. Put links on top and sometimes on the bottom too. This is how you go about testing which ones get more clicks and which ones are being ignored.
Let the testing begin. Testing and tracking until you find the site navigation style that works best for you site.
Guidelines and Characteristics of Bad Web Hosting
It is of utmost importance that a website is hosted professionally in order to be able to make a mark in the online business and sustain the existing tough competition in the hosting industry. If you opt for a bad web hosting company, it may affect the growth of your business and subsequently your revenue generation to a much greater extent.
Good web hosting is the most essential factor for the successful functioning of your website and your online business. A good web hosting service offers the minimal downtime for it makes use of multiple servers to keep up with their own development. Minimal downtime ensures that your customers remain more inclined towards your website on continual basis, as they would rarely face a downtime or come across an error message that the website will be up soon.
A bad web hosting service does not offer a good consumer support service, which can only run into huge business loss than lucre. Without a proper consumer support service, the bad web hosting company takes very long time in responding to the clients for any technical issues. And anything query if takes more than 48 hours to be adhered to through phone or email, it is definitely not a good web hosting company. A good web hosting company is expected to respond to all email inquiries within 24 hours.
A bad web hosting company may spam you about their service on email which would serve as a red signal intimating you to avoid them. Such companies make fake promises and then fail to deliver. Bad web hosts may pressurise you to make direct full payment. They might not provide complete information about the service, quality, etc. Certain bad web hosts may even try to set something which could restrict the bandwidth usage in the contract.
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In order to find out more on Hosting Uptime and similar website and webmaster related guides, check out Webhosting Reviews.
Source: http://www.articletrader.com
RoboForm
Here is a Handy Little eTool
Actually, it’s more of a “Must Have” etool.
Like us, you probably have more usernames and passwords than you can remember? Well, here is a great tool for storing all those usernames, passwords and other data.
RoboForm is the top-rated Password Manager and Web Form Filler that completely automates password entering and form filling. RoboForm was named PC Magazine Editor’s Choice, and CNET Download.com’s Software of the Year.
RoboForm allows you to:
Manage your passwords and Log In automatically.
Fill long registration and checkout forms with one click.
Encrypt your passwords to achieve complete security.
Generate random passwords to maximize password strength.
Back up and Synchronize Passwords between computers.
Fight Phishing and Defeat Keyloggers.
Honestly, we couldn’t live without it here at Just Web hosting these days and we don’t know how we survived before RoboForm. It really is so quick and easy!
The great thing is they have a free version. Works as well as the paid version, but it does only hold a limited number of passwords.
If you don’t have RoboForm yet, we suggest you start with the free version and try it.
