HOW TO DESIGN A WEBSITE

WEB DESIGNING FOR EFFECTIVE SELLING

HOW TO DESIGN A WEBSITE

Your Affiliate Marketing website should be designed so as to please the visitors by it's appearence and contents. It should have easy navigation features and links for smooth operations of a visitor.

Keep your graphics lesser, and whenever you are using graphics, use it maximum compressed. Large graphics in a website will take more time to load and will attract lesser visitors. Unless they are given a chance to visit your website atleast once, they will have no opportunity to go through your contents. Lesser visitors means you are loosing a good income by various ways.

If you have Pay per click programs like Google Adsense Ads on your website, you get zero impressions and clicks which means losing large money you'd have earned without any effort; Your affiliate links will not earn anything for you; and moreover once tired of visiting your site, a visitor will not have a try on that specific Domain name again. You are loosing so much, Isn't it?

You are hosting a website for good income through affiliate marketing - and if you want to earn attractive income, the minimum of all rules followed by the experts in this industry has to be followed. After you have had sufficient experiences you can think of your own plans. Until then keep away from experimenting with website designs and it's contents.

The more people you can bring to your websites the more money you’re going to make.

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The designing of your website is an important factor in sales. Any visitor should feel it as smooth as driving a Cruiser. Easy navigations and links combined with good graphics will be excellent and impressive. If you are not familiar with designing, you will have to seek services of paid designers.

You can also design your own website through step-by-step methods very easily. Resources like "Become An Expert Web Designer" help you to easily build and design a website in minutes.

I could learn this easily from it . I had also visited many websites were I could get more tips on better designing.

The same procedures and rules apply for a blog or free website. Always choose the pleasing designs from their limited offered choices .

Having the right tool and the right product alone won’t ensure the success of your website. There are many factors to be considered while designing a site. Unfortunately, most of these are often 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. The need of targeted customers arise at this point. There are a lot of service providers offering targeted customers.

?? Navigation should be simple - Make site navigation easy and intuitive. Simple and smooth navigation adds to the convenience of the visitors. Add powerful search and catalog features. Visitors usually don’t have the patience to navigate through the whole website to find what they are looking for.

?? Consistency is the key - Make sure the site is consis

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END OF PART 3

tent 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 your website.

?? 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.

Navigation

The aim of a website's navigation is simply to allow users to get to the content they require. For sites that have a large number of sections and web pages (and information sites can be one of these) the navigation plan has to be properly researched and designed.

You have to consider different types of visitors and simulate the most common steps they would take to find what they want on your site, and the navigation plan has to optimize this movement.

For example, the steps required from searching a catalog of items, selecting from the catalog, adding them to a shopping cart, proceeding to check out, to entering the payment particulars is a specific sequence that should be facilitated by the navigation system. If the sequence is haphazard, it could lead to frustration or the user may miss an important step and you would have an aborted sale.

Color can be used. For example a different color background, contrast color or sidebar in each part of the site. To be really effective the color change should be reflected in the navigation.

Navigation Controls

Navigation controls are the main navigation links; they allow users to move around the site. Whether they comprise images or text they should be predictably located in the same place, and with the same appearance, on each page.

Remember that websites should not be designed for their owners - they should be designed for their users.

While websites have become far more complex, web users have become less experienced because more and more new people go online every day. It is a mistake to think that the majority of users will be web or even computer savvy and will understand subtle clues about content. Many won’t, so make your site as easy to use as possible.

A site will be generally usable if:
?? The content is good and relevant
?? The content is easy to find
?? The content can be found quickly
?? The page is pleasant to look at and cleanly designed

Good Content is Critical

A site with good content, regardless of its subject, is one that provides products or information that is useful or beneficial to users. A good usable site will make it clear what information or content is available and at what price AND what is not available. A good usable site should define clearly all subscription packages offered.

Ease of Access to Information

Good navigation, precise location indicators, secondary navigation, clear linked text and a well-organized structure all contribute to making information easy to find for a wide range of different users.

Quick Access to Information

This is the aim of the majority of web users. It can be broken into two important aspects:

Speed of Page Loading

This requires, in particular, attention to images to ensure they are properly optimized and do not excessively delay load time. It may also mean breaking up long articles and ensuring that important content is at the top of the page where it will load first.

Speed of Access to Content

This is where the 3-click rule comes in - no important content should be more than 3 clicks from the home page. Some standards even say that it should be no more than two clicks. One helpful way to speed access to content is to consider each type of user, select the content that they are most likely to be interested in and create links from the home page to one piece of content for each group. This will get them quickly to the appropriate part of the site.

Cleanly Designed Pages

Cleanly designed pages are pleasant to look at and easy to read. It is almost impossible to make a site with an image shown as a tiled background usable - the whole thing is too distracting and confusing. It takes no great design skills to create clean pages; it just requires thought and adherence to the principle that when it comes to design, less usually is more.

List of the Most Common Usability Problems

?? Poor navigation, too little navigation, too much navigation and, not uncommonly, no navigation at all
?? Bad design leading to poor readability
?? Discomfort due to ugly design or inconsistent design. Almost always because a designer overestimated their skills.
?? Irrelevance of content - for example the business site that includes biographies and photos of each of the board members. Happy egos on the board; bored website visitors!

Building Interactivity and Personalization

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 build a visitor’s trust and increase your sales. Personalization technology provides you the analytic tools to facilitate cross-selling and up-selling when the customer is buying online.

Graphics

Your site has to be aesthetically attractive with visually appealing organization and enticing images. Fashions change fast on the Internet, so when you come to choose a designer, make sure you take a good look at their portfolio. You want the user to just glance at your homepage and understand immediately who you are and what you can do for them.

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The page should be so clearly organized that, in seconds, visitors can understand and get convinced to buy your product and be able to anticipate where a hypertext link – or a “Continue” button – will take them. Studies show that “ease of use” is the winning factor on an ecommerce site.

Check on what your competitors are writing about, and watch for new trends. This will keep your website current, razor-sharp and unique. By keeping your eyes open, you will be able to grab an angle or niche that hasn’t been well covered yet by your competitors. Portray this angle or niche on your website.

Finally, be wary of broadening the theme of your site too much. Try not to dilute your product or service’s targeted niche simply to expand your base of merchant partners. Remember; focus on your selling your service. That’s where the “meat and potatoes” of your business will come from.

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This series is to be continued .... until all your queries are solved!!! So have a check on this column frequently.

Bookmark this page for your ease.

Until then, have a good time joining to programs and learning more from my website www.freejobservices.com.

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END OF PART 3

How To Create Your Website

Chapter 4:
How to create a website

The 6 STEPS to creating a website

Since we promised to take you through each step of being able to make money from the Net, we shall teach you how to make a website in seven steps ! This is NOT an advanced course on website development. However, we suggest you skim through the sections in this chapter, even if you don't need to learn about website development. There are a few Hot Tips, and THOSE should never be missed !!

This chapter will enumerate some How To's for creation of a website. We suggest that you read through the six steps of creating a website and come back later to revisit each step while actually developing your website.

STEP 1 - Plan the Site

Before diving headlong into HTML and tools, first sit down and lets think it through. The first question you need to address is :

Do you want to have a mini site dedicated to a single product ?
OR, Do you want to have a larger site with many products belonging to a similar category ?

THE FACT: Both types can and will be successful given proper product selection and marketing. Don't let anyone tell you that either of the above IS THE ONLY way to go.

There are many examples of profitable sites of both categories. However, what one would need to remember is that in the short run, mini-sites will probably be more productive.

At the time when you might be just starting off, it might be advisable to start with a mini site. That will let you be focused about product selection, content creation and marketing. It will also enable you to go through the entire gamut of affiliate marketing activities instead of spending a whole lot of time that will be required to create a bigger website.

Once you HAVE decided, lets move on to planning the site's navigation. How many pages ? What content ? What will be the flow ? Where is the content going to come from ?

Put the number of pages, the basic flow, the content for the pages, etc. all on a separate file or even on paper. Spend some time thinking on what you would like to see ( from the visitor's perspective) to be convinced that the product is worth buying, or even trying. Neat navigation and easy flow are always going to help.

Here is where we get to state the Internet's Most Oft repeated Clich� - "Good looks for the site is important, but Content is King !" One thing that we can never emphasize enough is the importance of content in any e-marketing. You might have a class product but unless you put its strengths through in words in an appealing manner, you are leaving closure of sales to chance.

Now here is where you might be wondering: "Why do I to worry about the content?" the Merchant will take care of that, right ?

Well, in most cases, YES ! But here, allow us to digress from the topic and share with you one of the secrets that are known only to experienced Affiliates !

Amazing as it sounds, as you start spending more time on the net searching for products for affiliate marketing, you will come across a few products that look good, but have not been marketed well by their own publisher. Now this is a FLIP, because most sites do a good job of marketing products which are not so useful or reliable or really worthwhile.

For these specific products, you will see hardly any content and will notice that not enough pain has been taken to describe the product, its features, etc. You will notice that the merchant's site itself has a lot of Don'ts of e-selling websites .

In such a case if you take the pain to use the product and create good marketing content for it, YOU could create a KILLER site.

The reason this works so well is that most affiliate marketers assume that the Product owner will have taken the pain to create good content, and hence most marketers simply do a cut and paste from the merchant's site.

So while the market will be driven to all the sites doing affiliate marketing for this product, sales will get closed more often only from yours.

It is a well known and researched fact on the Internet that the customer needs approximate seven exposures to a product before he/she actually buys. Most other affiliates for such a product will end up helping in sales for you, as they will only give the clients the exposures but NOT be able to convert Your site will be the one actually converting focused visitors to sales. And, as you get better and better closures for that product, you will start getting better deals from that merchant for doing so well for them.

So next time you see a decent looking product with a bad job of marketing, don't run. Use this knowledge to leverage as much as you can out of the situation. And be careful to copyright content and design of the site (with permission from the product merchant), else you will only end up having other affiliates steal the content from you.

However, keep in mind that the basic rules of picking the product remain the same, stick to those basics. Just because of this TIP, dont pick only products with poor content, and all products with poor content.

Let us now get back to 'Planning the Site'.

Assuming that the merchant's site has done a good job of marketing the product, you could pick up a lot from there, including images, and tweak it a little. You could use this content and images to plan your site now.

STEP 2 - Design the Website

Once you have the basic content and the images ready, you need to arrange them so that the web pages look neat, attractive and easy to read.

This aspect of website design requires some level of visualization creativity, so you might get someone to help you in the beginning. And remember, no matter how creative one is, it always takes people some time to get the hang of website creation.

Once you have the desing ready on paper or in your mind, it needs to be converted to HTML, which is the 3rd Step.

However, once again if you find yourself stuck at this particular stage and want to bypass it as fast as possible, you could use some sites that give you HTML templates that you could use for your website. These are reasonably priced, and might save you a whole lot of time if you DO NOT want to spend time on website design. One more resource that can help in website design is the following website which is a website for images that you could use for your site:

www.templatemonster.com

STEP 3 - Write the Code

HTML, the basic language that you need to learn to be able to create your webpages is NOT tough. But it still takes some time to go through the basic rules of HTML creation. If you want to learn HTML from the basics, you could use this FREE site:

www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu

However, you need not necessarily spend all the time and effort of learning HTML Tags. There are HTML editors in the market that can largely simplify the job of creating webpages.

One neat tool that lets you edit HTML easily and fast can be found on :

www.coffeecup.com/html-editor/

STEP 4 - Find a Web Host

OK. Now you have the site content, design and code ready. Unless you have your own web server and are capable of hosting the site yourself (in which case you would have skipped this chapter by now), you need to host this with companies that do hosting on a monthly paid basis.

In layman's terms hosting is nothing but keeping your files on a server that is connected to the Internet all the time. This machine will be running the HTTP or web server that will be able to understand requests to the various pages of your site and be able to respond with the correct files. Technically this might not be the best way to explain hosting, but we hope this conveys the spirit !

There are thousands of hosters out there, and quite a few of them do a reasonable job of hosting at a reasonable price. We currently host a lot of our websites with :

www.net4india.com

To find out more just click on the link and follow the instructions on the website.

STEP 5 - Upload the Site

There are multiple tools and ways of uploading the website you have created to the server. We will however, restrict our discussion to FTP.

FTP is an acronym for File Transfer Protocol. There are quite a few neat FTP tools out there. The one we use and with great ease is found here at:

http://www.cuteftp.com/cuteftp/

This is a very intuitive tool and should make the process of uploading sites regularly pretty painless. And it has a Free 30 day trial.

At this stage your site is ready and uploaded, and there is only one thing left to do....

STEP 6 - Test your Site

One would have thought that this would be a normal thing for all webmasters to do after uploading their site. Hardly worth making it a Step for website development.

Well, all we can say is - Please Do Test all the links in all the pages of your website. It sounds like a lot of pain, but take our word on this one. Do it.

A website with a few links leading to 404 errors or missing images within the pages create an impact of an amateur at work, and when one are trying to sell, one has to come across as an expert.

Testing is EXTRA important for an affiliate marketing website because you will get your credit for a sale only through the link that your affiliate merchant will provide you with, when you sign up.

Mess up with that and you end up only sending traffic to the merchant's site and not get any credit for any resultant sale. Also, only because of a few incorrect links, in the long run you might give up on a perfectly good idea/product. You are also going to carry the incorrect impression that there was something wrong in product selection or your marketing effort. This would hence effect your future decisions as well. How much worse can it get ?

Make sure that you budget enough time for testing each link, specially your affiliate links. If possible, get friends to help in some spare time. A fresh mind always tests better !

At this stage you have your Site Uploaded and Tested. Now what you need to learn (though you will learn a lot through experimenting yourself) are the various ways you would be able to market and promote your website. Your personal contacts and your address book can only get you so much traffic - and most of this will not get you sales, so you need to focus and learn other ways of getting meaningful traffic to your website. The next few chapters will tell you exactly how to do that.