Thursday, May 8, 2008

Web Marketing Strategies Profit BY Applying A Top Web Page Design

By Trisha Frauenhofer

Your web page is your internet business' front to the world, and the impression it makes is what will make or break your business. There's been an awful lot of design thought put into making web sites more attractive, some good - some bad. Here are a few Web Marketing Strategies we've learned since the web first started going commercial in 1993.

In addition to the colors being consistent, the theme and layout should also remain the same throughout the site. This is part of your image and you want it to be consistent.

Worse yet, it makes it seem cluttered. Look to Google for an example of a de-cluttered web site. It's got a logo, a text box and three links on a plain white background, and it's the most widely trafficked web site in the world.

OK, now that we've de-cluttered the site, let's look at navigability. Most readers won't scroll past the third screen full of text. So if it's going to be important, put it on top. Use the journalist "inverted pyramid" and start with the most important information at the top and work your way down to the minutia at the bottom. While you're at it, make sure your lovingly search engine optimized content isn't written as gibberish for web spiders, but still makes sense to human beings.

Your theme choice and color scheme will compensate for missing out on the snazzy gee whiz options. It will do you more good in the long run to focus on the message, on the content, within a decent framework that won't cause your readers to stick their eye out with a fork.

Because content is king, invest early on in tools that make updating and maintaining your content easy, whether it's as simple as a Wordpress blog, or a full on content management system like DruPaul. Use cascading style sheets (yes, they're a pain to set up), because they make changing the look of your site a lot easier down the road. Most of those sites that look like they date back to ancient medieval times do so because changing them is a hideous amount of work.

You want to reach as large of an audience as possible, so communicating clearly is crucial for web marketing strategies. Communicating on your web page is much like conversation in real life. If your information and what you always have to say remains the same, people will get bored and probably not engage you in conversation much with you. The same applies to your web page.

Maximize your audience potential. Focus on clarity of communication above all else, and focus on human readable web pages. A lot of internet sites focus on Search Engine Optimization to the extent that while web spiders get lured in, human readers hit the back button fast. It's your information that's pulling people in and making them read the site. Cater to that. Lastly, update, update, update. Remember the mention of a content management system? The purpose of that is to make sure that you can update the site painlessly and easily, and give people a reason to come back. Always be on the look out for a new informational value add for your site which is one of the top web marketing strategies.

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