Are Your SEO Efforts Going To Waste

December 26, 2008 at 12:17 pm · Filed under SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a long and complicated process that can be highly rewarding if done correctly. SEO is not a waste of time, but can be if your site doesn’t appeal to visitors or function properly. Your potential customer will be turned off if your site lacks trustworthiness, an eye pleasing color scheme and easy to use navigation. Why lose visitors and possible sales because of a small design flaw or unappealing color scheme? Those visitors could have resulted in sales if those small imperfections were fixed.

As I arrive from your high position in the search engines looking for your product, I want to be able to trust the company I am buying from. People are very leery with making purchases on the Internet, and even more so from sites they don’t know a great deal about. You want to gain trust from the visitor with guarantees, a professional design and color scheme, testimonials and by any other way. If your site doesn’t boast its trustworthiness and make me feel secure, do you think I will purchase your product? No. Visitors are especially leery when they are required to give credit card information. Make them feel protected, boast about your privacy policy, encrypted servers and whatever else you have set up. Be enthusiastic about your site’s security.

I need to be able to find what I want and navigate to where I need to go FAST after I arrive at your site via the search engines. Some visitors get lost and frustrated with poor navigation and will leave your site without a second thought. Do not leave your visitor with a bad taste in their mouth! Allow them to flow through your site with ease and comfort. If your navigation is confusing your potential customer will likely leave and travel to one of the other three billion web sites on the Internet. Speed is also a factor in navigation. Visitors don’t want to sit there for twenty or thirty seconds while your page loads. Don’t make them wait. Cut down on the size of your pages and graphics.

The colors you choose for your site also impact on whether the visitor will make a purchase. A color scheme that hurts the eye will turn visitors off which will lead to lost sales. Visitors may also question how accountable your site is. You cannot have a black background with white, yellow or neon green text. It hurts the eyes. Color schemes such as that scare visitors away. With professional colors visitors will likely feel more secure and relaxed while surfing your site, which will lead to more sales.

A top position in the search engines can provide huge amounts of sales, if your site can be trusted and appeal to visitors. With a defective design and color scheme, slow loading pages or lack of trustworthiness all of the time spent performing SEO could go to waste. So get out, fix those flaws and discover more sales!

About The Author

Derek Croote is a SEO, web design and usability enthusiast. He practices ethical search engine optimization and strives to make sites across the web better for visitors. Derek is the webmaster of the http://www.saratogalakesideacresassociation.org/, a small homeowners association. You can reach him at dcroote@gmail.com.

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Why Not To Use Web Design Templates For Your Website

November 11, 2008 at 3:01 pm · Filed under Web_Design

In today’s age of fast food and high-speed Internet, a business may be tempted to take the “more convenient” route in launching a website - buying a template and customising it.

Website design templates are like off-the-shelf websites and are targeted at people who believe that launching their own, unique and differentiated website is costly and time consuming, which need not be the case.

But what happens when you buy a template, and when looking up your competition on the web, you find that they are using the same template as you! A good example of this happening is the highly competitive real estate business - I have personally discovered 6 (six) South African real estate businesses using the same design template for their website.

Using the example of the real estate business, let’s imagine a guy called Adam wants to look for a new home by looking at several websites.

After browsing a few sites it occurs to Adam that the interface of some of the sites was the same, although the colour scheme may have been different.
After looking at, say six different web sites, he’s decided that he is highly interested in one particular home.

However, poor Adam is at a loss - he can’t remember which real estate company was offering this home! The layout and navigation structure of all the websites are the same and all the websites feature homes for sale in the same format.

None of these real estate businesses benefited from Adams interest in buying a new home - they simply wasted his time and made him feel frustrated. On the bright side, at least Adam won’t remember which real estate businesses made him feel this way!

John Simms is an Internet Marketer for Eiledon Solutions, a website development & design company in Cape Town, South Africa. Visit the website for more info.

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Web Design With Free Hosting

July 31, 2008 at 8:10 pm · Filed under Web_Design

Are you looking at lowering your annual hosting costs? Are you fed up with having to pay hosting fees? Are you unsure which company to use to host your new website? These are questions that many people would answer yes to. I myself have a large number of websites and the cost of hosting them all, does at times annoy me. In this article I look at alternative options that I have recently heard about which could be the answer to some of these hosting cost frustrations.

The popularity and demand of web designers has never been greater. More and more people are looking into the benefits of having their own website/s. This could of course be used to promote their own business and to even sell their products online. It could just be a site to promote their sports/social club or just a website about their family. A growing number of people are looking to make money on the internet by selling advertising space on their site, this could be in the form of a program like google adsense or some other form of adverts. As you can see lots of people want an online prescence for lots of different reasons and web designers have never had it so good.

All of these people once they have had their site built then need to find a company to host it for them. This area can seem like a minefield with so many different options. Should you just simply go for the cheapest price? What is the difference between all of the companies? Should I stick with a UK company or should I go with a US company? Most people find all of this hosting business quite confusing and quite a pain. What people need is a simple solution.

A few months ago I heard about a company who was combining web design and web hosting under one type of umbrella. They basically stated that they would be a happy to build a site for so much money and would host if for you for free. This is a great idea and the price they quoted was very reasonable. I looked at their portfolio and was very impressed, I will be recommending them to many people in the future.

This is what could be the future of web design and web hosting. It certainly would make it a lot easier for the average man on the street.

Stephen Hill helps to promote a number of websites including:

stuttering information

cheap hosting

best hosting rates

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