Your Web Site:
First Impressions are Everything
By Diane Standish This may seem very basic, but if
your site isn't pulling the traffic or
generating the sales you would like it
to, it just may not be the poor
performance of classified ads, banner ads
or a similar service. The real reason for
lackluster sales could lie with your web
site itself.
Telling someone their site has a lot of
design problems is not a very popular
stance, particularly if that someone just
spent thousands of dollars to have it
designed for them. Or, if they gave up
their nights and weekends to write it
themselves.
The fact of the matter is, however, that
the vast majority of emails I get
regarding lack of sales and consequent
complaints about other sites whose
'banner ads don't perform' or 'classified
ads don't work' have much more to do with
my prospective customers' poor web site
design than the ad or banner service
they're blaming. Not popular, I know, but
critical analysis is just that: critical.
This is one of the reasons why tracking
statistics software is essential to the
health of a site. The site owner can
track exactly what's happening with an ad
campaign and see for him or herself what
ads are working and how long someone
stays at a page. If a page gets lots of
hits, but no one stays more than a
moment, chances are the page is suffering
from the slow load blues and no amount of
advertising will generate sales.
One of the most common errors I see when
analyzing other sites is, unfortunately,
what a new site owner wants most - lots
of graphics. Big, beautiful, full color
images; spinning graphics everywhere;
animated images at every corner and on
every line; jumping, bouncing, flashing,
bubbling images next to every paragraph.
Great fun, but the more images on a page
and the larger the size of the file, the
longer it will take to load. Try to
remember not everyone out there has a 56k
modem hooked up to their 400 MhZ, 164 MB
RAM CPU.
Think content. A few images will spice up
a page, and enable you to
"hide" valuable keywords for
search engine placement, but too many
large image files will send your visitor
surfing before they even know what a
great product you have to offer.
A good rule of thumb: keep images under
12k and try to keep each page limited to
5 or less files. A page should load in 15
seconds or less with a 28.8k modem.
Again, it's content, not cool, that will
keep your visitors from moving on, and
keep them coming back once they've found
an interesting site.
For instance, a customer wrote me and
explained that he had spent a lot of
money having a web site written for him,
but he wasn't making any sales. He wanted
to start a progressive advertising
campaign to promote the site.
However, when I visited his site I knew
immediately that any advertising dollars
would be completely wasted. Images the
size of the Grand Canyon covered every
inch of every page, and what was worse,
no image size specs (height, width) were
specified in the HTML. The pages were
filled with very nice, but very large
photos, and very little text content.
Even on my top of the line system, his
site suffered from slow loading, big
time. No matter what promotional campaign
he undertook, and no matter how much
money he spent, he'd never make a sale
with his expensive site. Any visitors in
their right mind would leave his site
long before ALL those truck loads of
images loaded.
Bottom line: think content; keep it
simple; avoid too many images; avoid too
many photos; keep animation simple - and
limited. Don't talk your web designer
into putting a lot of large image files
on your pages. Then, and only then, plan
your advertising campaign. And then, keep
updating your site's content to make it
dynamic, interactive and attractive to
repeat visitors. If your site never
changes, if your content is never
updated, what's the incentive for a
visitor (translate customer) to keep
returning?
Brought
to you by: World Wide Information Outlet
- http://certificate.net/wwio/, your
source of FREEWare Content online.
Diane
Standish is Publisher
of the eCave NetGazette. She has 15 years
of marketing experience, both off and
online in computer and business services,
and is founder and President of a
multi-million dollar service business.
Reach her by email at ezine@ecave.com or visit her
site, eCave Internet Services, at http://www.ecave.com
|