Low Price Web Design – Advertising and Marketing

Remember the famous line from the movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come”? In the world of Internet marketing, you not only want them to come, you want them to stay.

The Internet is fast-paced. Your visitors decide very quickly whether or not you have what they want. There are five strategies that will help you engage your visitors and encourage them to explore what you have to offer.

Make Your Site About Your Visitors Not You

In order to do this, you must clearly know your target audiences and what you anticipate they will be looking for when they visit your site.

For example, your target audiences could include the client groups you serve, potential donors, policymakers, members of the general public and the media. In order to get and keep their attention, you must quickly let them know that you understand their needs and have a service or product that meets them.

Remember, your visitors want to know what’s in it for them.

Make Your Site Easy to Navigate

Limit the navigation choices your visitors can make. One recent study found that many sites offer an average of 25 options from the home page. That’s too many. In addition, make sure the wording of your navigation bars gives your visitors a clear idea of what they’ll find. You want to make it easy for visitors to get the information they want.

Visitors who get confused or frustrated leave.

Make Your Web Site A Funnel

You want visitors to decide that they want to get to know you. Give them easy ways to learn that you can meet their needs.

Let me give you an example. If you provide health-related services, guide them to content that gives them health tips they can use. Then let them know that they can receive this kind of information regularly through your monthly e-newsletter. Give them an opportunity to subscribe. Then lead them to content that talks more directly about your programs, services or products and the benefits of what you offer.

Draw your visitors into the work of your organization.

Use Testimonials

Word of mouth is one of the best ways for people to learn about you.

You can get the same result with testimonials.

Ask your clients what benefits they got from participating in your services or activities. Ask board members to tell you why they chose to become involved with your organization. Ask your volunteers what benefits they get from working with you. Then ask their permission to use what they said as a testimonial and put those testimonials on your site.

Testimonials help visitors feel more comfortable with you.

Make Your Site Interactive

Use short assessments and other feedback mechanisms to engage your visitors. Offer opportunities to attend events or to volunteer. Make sure that visitors can easily contact you – both online and offline.

Interaction starts building a relationship.

Take a fresh look at your web site. Look at your site’s organization and content in terms of these strategies. What action can you take right now to encourage your web site visitors to stay?

Judith Rothbaum’s passion is helping nonprofit organizations thrive. She gives seminars, workshops, presentations and coaching programs nationwide with one key message – think boldly about who you are and the impact you have in your community. Visit http://www.datafordecisionmaking.com to learn more.

Creating a well-designed website is the first step in your internet marketing strategy. Once the website has been created and optimized, there are further techniques to employ that will drive traffic to your website for successful, long-term results. You wouldn’t consider opening a retail store in a major shopping mall without signage and you shouldn’t consider having a nice looking website designed without expanding your web presence in order to be found on the internet. But unless the website is designed correctly to begin with, follow-on SEO efforts will have limited results at best. The following strategy overview is designed to bring about productive SEO results:

- Create an attractive website that is complementary to your company image and provides your targeted audience with information about you, your company and your products and/or services.

- Design a website that has a call-to-action in the form of a purchase or providing you a contact, subscription or other commitment from your visitor.

- Create a successful marketing arm for your overall business promotion and marketing campaign to promote your business, products and/or services with the many follow-on strategies that drive traffic to your website.

- Become competitive in your industry and marketplace by meeting or exceeding the industry marketing standards and attracting a qualified audience for your products and/or services based on a strong reputation.

- Generate and maintain or grow internet traffic to your website resulting in a conversion of traffic into sales of your products and/or services by evolving as your market demands.

This search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is composed of several processes in three stages: 1) Good web design, 2) Attracting attention from search engines and directories, and 3) Creating long-term popularity on the internet. However, it all starts with good web design. Website design is the foundation and beginning of a successful internet marketing strategy. It is true that there are websites on the internet that are unattractive but somehow seem to work. If there are aspects of these websites that work, imagine how well they could do if they simply followed basic design implementation tactics that resulted in a good image as well as simply pushed information out to the viewer.

These basics are essential for Tier 1 success:

- Good web design will complement and enhance the company image and offline marketing campaign products creating a corporate branding if done well.

- Easy, logical navigation that leads the viewer deeper and deeper into the web of information provided by the website will keep the visitor on your site longer and give you more time to sell your products or services.

- Attractive but quick-loading graphics that are pleasing to the eye and meaningful to the website will guide the viewer along the route you decide is important for explaining what you offer.

- Keyword usage that is search engine-friendly depends on how the keywords are utilized, the placement of the keywords, the frequency of the most important keywords and their relevance to the website.

- Website coding that is lean, clean and without errors will keep the search engines happy and your viewer seeing exactly what you intended to offer.

- Relevance of content to the theme of the site is essential. Be concise, to the point and focus on your goals. If you have multiple themes and offerings, consider multiple websites to address the different markets, then tie each website back to the others by linking.

- Changing content that changes frequently and stays fresh keeps your viewer returning and prevents the search engines from treating your website as if it were stale news. A stale site will be ranked lower by the search engines.

Content is king — it’s all about content, content, content. But how that content is presented is what makes the difference.

(c)2005 TAO Consultants, Inc. All rights reserved.

Chesa Keane of TAO Consultants has been involved with the internet for 10 years
through internet consulting, web development and search engine optimization. Go to
http://www.computergoddess.com for a free Search Engine Optimization Checklist.

Have you ever noticed that some sites are much faster than others. Or that some specific websites take a notably larger amount of time to load than others? Have you ever seen a site that begins by displaying only the background, and then shows the text all at once several minutes later? This is the sign of a poorly designed website, and you should make every effort to omit this web design mistake from your own works.

Tables are frequently used among web designers for creating an attractive and effective site. However, rarely do web designers create new tables for the different segments of their content. Instead, they simply divide the cells into which they will be placing their content – the lazy road. While this may work very well if there are very few images – or no images at all – on your website, if this is not the case, then you will only be convincing your visitors to leave before they’ve even touched what your site has to offer them.

If your site has several images or is quite intense in its graphic usage, consider using separate tables for dividing your content. The reasons for this are many, but straightforward.

The first reason you should split your content among several tables can be explained by understanding the way that internet browsers read tables in a web site. Within a standard HTML site, the browser will display the text and the images as they load. However, when tables come into play, the browser will wait until the entire page has loaded before any of its contents are displayed within your visitor’s internet browser. All that is required is one large graphic to slow down the display of your entire site from within fifteen seconds to over a minute. Therefore, it is for precisely this reason that you should use separate tables to split your graphics from other elements of your site. Simply format the border, cell spacing, and cell padding at 0 so that the multiple tables are not visible to your viewers.

Using two or more tables is among the best ways to split up all of the data on your web site. The first table may consist of your logo and any header information that you wish to include in your web design. A second table can be the actual content of the site. If your page happens to be especially big, a third table can be added, for example for a particularly large graphic or other sizeable element.

This usually works quite well as the visitor will immediately be able to see your logo and some of the options offered by your web site as they wait for the rest of the page’s content to load.

You can also choose to split up your content by creating tables within your tables. This will allow the main table to load first, displaying its own contents while the tables within it continue to load. This makes the loading time of your page notably faster, and still provides the viewer with something to look at and read as the page’s sub-tables continue to load.

As an additional note, to continue to save on loading time, it is discouraged that you should use elements such as Java, Shockwave, and ActiveX programs within your tables. Instead, use JavaScript within your web page tables as it is much faster in its loading and its execution.

These techniques are highly valued by web designers who prioritize fast loading websites, and who understand how important it is to get your content in front of your visitors as quickly as possible in order to discourage them from going elsewhere to find a faster site.

Whenever possible, consider your visitors with slower connections – such as dial up – and test the speed of your site before finalizing its web design. Remember that most visitors find it much easer and much more appealing to simply click away from a slow site and find a fast one than to wait forever for a sluggish load. The rule of thumb is to have your first information up within 10 seconds for even the slowest connections, and then build rapidly from there, providing additional information and content before the viewer can become bored or frustrated.

Copyright 2006 Mark Nenadic

Mark is the director and face behind FifteenDegrees-North http://www.15dn.com
where you will find articles and resources to help with SEO, marketing and Web design.