Web Site Development Tips For
Better Internet Business Cash Flow

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Update your site often to encourage repeat visitors. Plan on a periodic update schedule. The less frequent the updates, the more general the content should be. Use randomizing techniques to serve up fresh content each time a visitor arrives at your site. Also reduce the number of outside links to avoid the inevitable broken links.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Surfers won't usually wait more than 20 seconds for a page to load and generally only stay 20 to 60 seconds. Home pages and index pages must load quickly. Large, slow-downloading pages and cutting-edge technologies should be buried down a level in the site rather than kept in the home page or primary index pages. For example, a full screen photograph should be accessed by clicking a 2nd image, which is a much smaller and faster-loading thumbnail. A large Java applet should be accessed by clicking a link to it while first telling the surfer what to expect and how long to wait.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Studies show that the most important things to your visitors are fast-loading pages and useful information. The least important things are "bleeding-edge" technologies, flashy animations and non-functional eye-candy (unless that is what you are selling and what your buyers are looking for.) Know your intended target audience.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Learning web programming is very easy; the hard part is learning how to do it right, learning what not to do and usually learning the tasks that normally are performed by a whole team of specialists (designer, copywriter, marketer, programmer and graphics artist to cover just the basics.)

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Never play music files. Music is very personal in taste, and most surfers hit the back button rather than the volume. They will count in your logs as a hit but you've still lost them forever.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Flashy animations and eye candy usually are only interesting once. You must rely on fast-loading useful content. Allow visitors to bypass your Flash animations and splash screens.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Do not use frames. They cause more problems than they solve, unless you really know what you are doing.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Every page of the site must be consistent and intuitive to navigate. More and more web surfers are computer illiterate. Make it easy for everyone to understand and use. If you are selling something, you must remove all obstacles to the sales process and make it easy for customers to do business with you. Prices must be easy to find, and the order form must be easy to find and use.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Commercial sites must do everything possible to establish trust (full disclosures and policies, contact information, secure ordering, professional look, third party endorsements and testimonials.)

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

The best sites on the Internet contain lots of useful content, content being useful information freely distributed. To get the best return for your investment you must include information relevant to your audience (i.e. how-to articles, tips and tricks, industry related news, etc.)

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Your most qualified leads will come first from non-web advertising and/or highly targeted on-line advertising, secondly from links from related web sites, and from search engines thirdly. You must take advantage of all of these marketing methods and keep up with trends in the industry. Push content has come and gone, banner advertising is on the way out, pay per click programs are on the way out, affiliate programs are now in. Keep up with the changing face of the Internet; it evolves rapidly. What works today may not work next month.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Web site traffic starts slowly for a new site, builds up, plateaus, and then declines. To get the best results from your web site, you must market constantly and update regularly to build the traffic and prevent it from declining. Encourage return visitors.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

If selling something, you must make it as easy as possible for the visitor to make a decision and make a purchase at that point in time without having to contact the company. Many sales are spur of the moment and will be lost if you don't allow a visitor to immediately order a product at 2am with a credit card. Many people will not buy only on price; they will look around and return to the sites they feel they can trust the most. Customer service is imperative to your success. Gather opt-in e-mail contacts however many ways you can with their permission so you can follow-up.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Your site must be designed with your visitor's needs and capabilities in mind. Pages must be fast-loading and contain useful and relevant content. Products must include full disclosure of information. Sites must provide a quick and convenient method of purchasing without requiring the visitor to have to call or mail the company. Slow-loading, flashy eye candy, animations and music are the least important things to your visitors unless you are selling tools to create these effects. If you must use them, then they need to be optional components the visitors have the option of turning on themselves. The best way to turn away your visitors is to make them wait or make them listen to your musical preferences.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Make the links in your site informative. Let your visitors know what to expect and give them a compelling reason to want to click your buttons and hyperlinks. If it is a link to a download or a large photograph, tell them how big it is first.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Design the web site with room for future growth without requiring major changes to the navigation systems.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Design the site so that, at the very least, people on 14.4 modems and those that may be behind corporate firewalls can quickly view the major sections. Some technologies like Java Applets and pages without RSACi ratings may be filtered out and unavailable to many users even if during your testing it works just fine. RSACi ratings (which are just single meta tag lines in your page header) can allow your page to pass parental control filters as well.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Be careful of using frames to frame other sites pages or content within your site. It can be construed as a copyright violation. Even linking into some sites sub pages has been known to get the linking site in trouble.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Study and emulate other successful techniques and tactics. Do not copy other people's work, be unique, stand out and do it even better. Study catalog design. While printed catalogs are better suited for easily flipping through a lot of product choices, you can get valuable tips on how to write short ad copy, lay out photographs with bullet points, list prices, make special offers, etc. Did you ever notice how catalogs tend to have a special deal or closeout price on almost every page to entice people to order?

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Do not add visitors' or customers' contact information (names, e-mail addresses, etc.) to your contact lists without their expressed permission. Do not grab visitors' e-mails from their browser as it is commonly considered to be a violation of privacy.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Write positive statements about the products and services, not what they do not do.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Personalize your messages to your visitors and customers using mail merge templates. You can give automated immediate e-mails during interactions with the web site (opt-in, ordering, affiliate sign-up, etc.).

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Include calls to action to prompt visitors to order, give them reasons to act soon (like expiring offers and discounts.) Upsell accessories or higher-priced items. Use lots of bullet points for people to quickly scan, and use longer sales copy for extended reading.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Design your site the way people are used to processing information. People read from left to right, top to bottom (assuming you are reading in the same language as this document). The most likely places to be looked at are the top left corner, the top header line, the left or right top sidebars, the bottom trailer and the bottom right hand corner. Write bold headlines that can grab someone's attention. People recognize shapes first and actual words last and the mind narrows its focus on each page. The eye is drawn to sharp contrast and distinct patterns. Use animation, large fonts, red highlights, etc. sparingly and only to draw attention to something specific. Study the Web Style Guide by Harvard Press. This is a great resource for human interface design issues. Remember that a large number of web users are new to computers and the Internet. Many people have a hard time with basic tasks that web designers take for granted (like scrolling a web browser, changing screen resolution, installing a screensaver and clicking a graphic with a hyperlink.) Who do you think will be more successful - designers who accept the abilities of their audiences and work with them or designers with a condescending attitude to new computer users and who figure that it is "their problem."

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

The most important way to market a business may be with non-web advertising using the domain name. This is entirely the responsibility of the site owner. We can only give the tips above for the client to pursue as they see fit. Each site has its own best way to be marketed. What works for one won't always work for another.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Get other sites to link to yours. This is facilitated by having an open site and giving graphic and link information for other sites to use. It is very time consuming to pursue other sites for links and is entirely the responsibility of the site owner.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

An important method of marketing is to get listed in the various search engines. Good designers will create pages optimized for search engine placement and will submit the site per the specifications. The final results will vary over time. Search engine rules, rankings and listings vary over time and are out of our control.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

No matter how good a web site is, you must get it in front of people to get them there. Nobody will instinctively know you have a great site and just look you up out of the blue. If you only put up a web site and submit to the search engines, the site will most likely fail to generate significant traffic and results.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Remember that the Internet is just a new communications medium that adds interactivity. As a business on the Internet, you are still bound by the laws of supply and demand and it still takes marketing to be seen and salesmanship to sell. Concentrate on customer service and personal service. Use the Internet as a tool to communicate rather than a tool to isolate yourself from your customers.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Use advertorials and endorsements to market other site's affiliate programs that you really believe in, for example, books by Matthew Lesko on getting government grants. Make sure they can fit within the context of your site rather than being just a list of affiliate banners (commonly referred to as a banner farm.)

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Consider studying photography. Photography is a subtractive process whereas web development is an additive process. Too many people do not know when to stop adding to a web page. Photography will teach you to remove elements that are not necessary and that detract from the subject, a very useful concept for developing a web site.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Concentrate on useful content and information instead of hype and fluff. You should still follow the basic marketing guidelines that have always worked (benefits, features, solving peoples problems, using the right words and images to invoke the desired feelings, calls to actions, etc.) Give your audience what they are looking for, which is usually information that will help them.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Join the major web design and marketing newsletters and keep up with the latest tips from the web development communities. Find out about new trends, tools and resources.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Think in terms of end results and simple goals. Guide your visitors when possible and desirable to the end result you are after. No matter which page of your site a visitor enters, can you guide them to the pages you want them to see first such as product information then guide them through the ordering process while still allowing the immediate links to other pages. For example, if someone first enters your newsletter signup page can you get them to look at your main information page which then guides them to the ordering page and from any of these pages can they immediately get to your contact information page?

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Test multiple designs and pick what works best. The overall infrastructure and design for the sites developed by professional designers have been tested and changed constantly to arrive at the designs used today. Do not be concerned about not doing things right the first time. A complete redesign can also refresh your site and improve your results, even when the last design was great. It takes time to learn the nuances of good design. With photographs, the difference between a good shot and a great one is many times due to the subtle nuances. This applies to web design as well. When you see a great image or web site you first instinctively just know it. When you look at a good one, a few mistakes catch your eye and slightly distract your attention. When you look at a bad one, you know it quickly and it is usually obvious where the mistakes are.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Consider using an on-line database of information also as a set of static web pages. Static pages will add more pages to your site, which allows them to be indexed by search engines and easily bookmarked and linked to from outside sources.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

In general you should not use free services in a serious commercial web site. Would you be comfortable ordering from a company that has not invested $35 a year or even $20 a month to run their own web site? Would you be comfortable ordering from a company that did not offer even a simple secure on-line order form? There are always exceptions to these rules and you will hear arguments on all sides. Use what works for your business and your clients. Use the right tools for the job. If you are selling business to business, you should be as professional as possible. If you are selling business to consumer it will depend on your business.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Design your site from your customers' or audiences' perspective. Topics should be tailored to them, not to you. For example, a major telecommunications company made the mistake of dividing their major web site topics around the divisions of their company, which was not customer-oriented. It was subsequently redesigned based on how customers broke down what they were looking for.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Use powerful words in your copy such as: you, your, money, save, free, now, how-to, quick, new, exciting, love, secret, reveal, discover, improved, guarantee, latest, amazing, offer, important, revolutionary, powerful. Read some catalogs and study the copy on the products you buy every day to see how they use calls to action, buzz words and power words to effectively communicate. Just like animation and red highlights, use power words one at a time and sparingly, they lose effectiveness when used in excess. Do not forget that on the Internet you also need to concentrate on more real information. Most people do not buy on first contact. Sell to them on first contact when you can and try to get information from them (with permission) so you can follow up and close even more sales.

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Avoid using words and phrases with negative connotations such as: but, try, could have, would have, should have, cannot, not. This can put the reader in the wrong frame of mind. They human mind is also much better at resolving concepts with fewer choices. A good example of this is to tell someone to picture a rose that is red vs. a rose that is not white. Give your visitors a mental picture of a clear goal to reach in the present. If you speak in the past tense, it can sound old and out of date. If you speak in the future tense, you may invoke feelings that you are not quite there yet. Read your copy carefully to make sure it invokes the feelings you intended. Read your site multiple times over the course of a few days or weeks. You will find things you overlooked when you were "too close to the chalkboard."

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT TIP

Use a common frame of reference to introduce a new concept. It is easier for people to understand a new idea or concept if they can relate it to something familiar. For example, if you are trying to explain how having your own affiliate program or network marketing program can create generational residual income, relate it to something familiar. For example, Elvis's family will always be wealthy because every time a song is played they get paid. Every time a new media comes out, his songs are reproduced and resold again and again, each time paying a royalty/residual income to the Elvis estate. The songs were recorded once and they get paid each time they are played or sold. If you are renting a house, at the time you leave you have nothing to show for it except a stack of receipts. The owner holds all the assets. You built wealth for the owner. If you work only for a paycheck, you are renting your body to your employer and when you quit or leave you have no assets to show for your work. You built wealth for your employer. If you own the house, you have an asset that can appreciate in value and generate income. It can be passed on to future generations (generational wealth.) If you own the business or affiliate program, it can increase in value, creating residual income for you. It can also be passed on to future generations. These are concrete examples that can be related directly to a new concept such as an affiliate program being an income-producing asset.