Your website is the heart of your online business, it is the virtual representation of your company whether your company is a traditional "brick and mortar" location, or exists solely on the Internet. When you are doing business online, people cannot see you in person as they are able to if they are dealing with a physical location. Therefore, people do judge you by your cover. This is why a good design is important.

Imagine if you were in charge of an actual physical store. Would you allow your salespeople to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they are dealing with your customers? By having your staff dress professionally, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. This works simply because first impressions do matter.

Your website works the same way. If your website is shabby or looks stock, with no personalization, you're telling your visitors that you are not professional and you do not care for quality.

On the other hand, if you have a personalized, well designed looking website layout, you are letting your visitors know that you care about professionalism. You are organized, focused and you really mean business.

All of the extras you work on for your website become like all of the extras you would use in a real life store. Displays, brochures, business cards, its all there. The better it looks, the better your visitors will feel about doing business with you.

It is important to practice good design principles to make sure your site appeals to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

A good hosting company will have tools and templates for you to start out with, but as you learn more and take control of your own design, keep these things in mind.

Be sure you have clear directions for the navigation of your site. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and easy to read in order for your visitors to know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Keep the number of images on your website at a minimum to start with since they can make your site take too long to load. If you think any images are essential for your site, make sure you optimize them using an image editing program so that they have a minimum file size. For a more information on resizing images for websites, see Optimizing Images for the Web.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks won't be too large. This is important because blocks of text that are too big will discourage visitors from reading all your content.

Make certain that your website pages comply to the web standards at www.w3.org and be sure they're cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but is hard to read in Firefox or Opera, you'll lose out on many prospective customers.

Experiment on test pages closed to the public and try to use as many different browser and operating system combinations as possible to review your pages before publishing them.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it's absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Scripts arn't always supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to style your page content because they save a lot of of work by styling all elements on your website at the same time.

To learn more about (CSS) and web building, W3 Schools is a great place to start.

For anything to work well, care must be taken to make a firm, workable plan then follow through with it. The same applies to website designs. With a well thought out website design, you'll be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you. Many websites turn into online wastelands because they're not well planned and do not get a single visitor. Gradually, the webmaster won't be motivated to update it anymore and it soon turns into wasted cyberspace.

The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you would like to gain any income from it. Divide your site into major blocks, arranged by themes, then start making new pages and subsections in those blocks. For example, you may have an "accommodations" section, an "entertainment" section, and a "food" section for a tourism site. Then you'll be able to write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes searching for additional information.

When you have a broader, better defined scope of themes for your website, it'll be easier to sell space on your pages to people interested in advertising on your page. You can also earn from programs like Google's AdSense. The advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so themed pages fit that criteria perfectly.

Learn more about Google AdSense with Eric Giguere's Uncommon AdSense. Tips, Strategies and Techniques to Maximize Your AdSense Earnings.

Website templates are very affordable and they save you much time and effort when you would like to make a fresh layout for your website. However, many people make mistakes in the process of choosing and using a web template then wind 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 avoid is using a template that's very popular. If many people use the same template, your website won't appear the least bit unique and your credibility as a solid, different site will be damaged. In other words, you'll appear generic just like your next door neighbors.

To whole point of utilizing a template is to save time and effort. Just change the title and add your own content then you're finished. The greatest mistake you can make is to customize the template beyond recolonization. While that can 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.

On the other hand, if a template you use is appropriate but a few alterations must be made to fit your site's theme, then you'll have to take some time to make the modifications. For instance, if you find a very attractive template that suits your hobby site except the original designer had used images of coins in the header. You could find images of plants and garden tools to substitute for the coins to fit a gardening themed site. However, do only the most necessary changes and don't redesign the whole template.

In some cases, people simply make the wrong choice of a template. This is a very subjective issue, but you have to be careful in deciding on a template to suit your style and your audience. Don't just pick out a template simply because it is pretty, choose it because it serves your purpose.

Check it out! Get over 400 Joomla! templates in the Complete Joomla Tutorial Package!

There's no point building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet are search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live and so on. By designing a search engine friendly site, you'll easily rank in search results and attract more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list in their search returns. They follow links to a page, read the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listings to match users' inquiries.

If you would like to have your site easily indexed, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will confuse search engine robots, they may abandon your site. Frames also make it hard for users to bookmark specific pages on your site.

Don't present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your pages so if you have important words in Flash movies and images instead of in text form, you won't rank for those words.

Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so search engine robots know right away what each page is about and whether or not to index it. The proper use of meta tags, makes the search engine robots' job easier so they'll crawl and index your site more frequently.

Search Engine Strategies 2008: Find a conference or training session near you!

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It doesn't matter how great your design is, if it is hard to get to the content of your site then your site isn't very useful. Here are a few tips to improve your website and make it a place where people will return, and tell others about it.

Make it easy for visitors to get to the content they're looking for on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and someone wants to find a single article from that pile, you need to provide a practical way to enable visitors to do that without trouble. Whether it's an SQL-driven database, search engine, glossary or index of articles that you have, giving your visitors such a feature will ensure they can use your site with ease.

See to it that your site loads fast if you'd prefer not to lose visitors. Most visitors will leave a website if it doesn't appear to be completely loaded almost instantly, so be sure the best of your website is presented to your visitors asap to hold their attention.

Test each and every link on your site before it goes online, and try to make it a point to periodically go back and test them after you've published. There's nothing that'll be more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links, so be really careful about that.

Many successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a bulk of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers since the more they frequent a site, the more trust they'll have in that site.

Seriously consider having a forum. When you start a forum, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers -- other visitors of your site. As conversations develop, a sense of community will take hold and your visitors will return to your site often. Users will be helping you to maintain active content. Beware of the time it'll take to manage a forum. You'll want to keep up with the new posts, delete any spam or anything you may be held liable for hosting. As time goes on, you make be able to recruit top users in your forums to help moderate new posts.

Keep an online journal, more commonly called a blog, on your site and keep it updated with the latest news about yourself. People are naturally curious and will keep coming back if you frequently post interesting things. You'll also expand your credibility because your helping them to them to connect to the real live person behind the site.

Polls or surveys are another form of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick, fun way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved with site. Be sure to have polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target audience of your site to keep them interested in finding out about the results.

Update your site frequently with fresh content. You want your visitors to find something new as often as possible on your site. This is the best way to attract returning visitors, but it is also the least followed because of the laziness of webmasters. It's alright to maintain an archive of your best articles, especially of they continue to be popular, or are back linked by other sites, but keep adding fresh content to your site.

Whether you are looking to write better articles or ebooks, you need to learn the 7 Secrets To Effective Writing by top writers.

Get content help from ClipCopy Content Solutions!

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