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Archive for January, 2010

Designing User Friendly Websites

Mail Icon  Posted: Monday, January 25th, 2010  Clock Icon at 2:16 pm

Whenever you start an online business, a killer website is one of the must-have things on the cards. Driving a lot of traffic to your website is definitely pretty difficult, but that’s not the only consideration that should be kept in mind.

The most important aspect of a website is its visual appeal and user-friendliness. Remember, getting repeat-visitors is all about providing seamless website user experience. Folks prefer to browse website that have unique looks, and present the needful data in a convenient manner, rather than browsing through one of the countless websites that appear to be a replica of the existing big names over the internet.

Designing user-friendly websites is all about understanding what keeps a visitor glued on to the website, and what really makes him/her leave it. It is a bitter truth that plenty of websites have tons of useful information to entice the visitors, but these websites don’t present the same in the desired manner. As a result, the only thing that the visitors do, after going through the topsy-turvy non-sense presented on these websites is a tap on the ‘back’ button of their browser.

One of the crucial things that should be on top of your list while designing a website and running a PPC campaign is the first time user-experience. As the good old saying goes – ‘first impression is indeed the last impression’ and this holds true literally in case of those visitors who arrive at a website after performing a search on a particular keyword in the search engine.

For instance, a user searches the keywords ‘book hotels in Miami’, and visits a Florida hotel booking website. Having searched for ‘hotels in Miami’ on the search engine already, if the visitor is again presented with area-wise listing in Florida and made to select ‘Miami’ in the category option one more time; there are good chances that he/she may not want to go through the hassle of doing the same thing over and again.

More so, your website’s homepage isn’t really the best landing page for a visitor who arrives through a search engine. Therefore, it is imperative that you create sufficient web pages on your website targeting different products/services that you wish to offer to your visitors and potential customers.

Furthermore, using too much of JavaScript codes on your website may again not be a wise decision, as it hurts the loading time of the website significantly. Hence, if you wish to incorporate any contextual advertisements, banners or product promotion services on your website, you should prefer usage of HTML codes, so long as you can help the cause.

It is a well known fact that visitors hate to wait for more than few seconds (max 3-5seconds on an average) for a website to load. And, if your website takes over 10seconds to load, then you’re most likely to loose 50-60% of your targeted traffic right away!

Keeping these aspects of web design in mind can help you improve your online business manifolds.

Are You Still Stuck in the Web 2.0 Era?

Mail Icon  Posted: Monday, January 25th, 2010  Clock Icon at 2:06 pm

Sure thing, Web 2.0 was the buzzword some time back; but the online world is ever evolving. Now, everybody is making a transition to the Web 3.0 era and the social media is ruling the name game.

As a result, the standard features seen on a website have changed to a significant extent. And, today even the big guns in the industry are busy with tweeting and building Facebook groups. What’s more, links to Twitter and Facebook profiles can be easily spotted even on the homepage of several corporate websites.

There was a time when the corporate websites had just plain HTML pages filled with informative text, and few links. Things soon changed over time as interactive websites came into existence. And, soon came in the RSS feeds, and a number of new concepts that marked the beginning of the Web 2.0 era.

But, just as most of the websites made a transition to the Web 2.0 era, social media started dominating the online world. To keep in pace with the latest developments, many of the big guns made a transition to the Web 3.0 era, but not everybody was ready to make another major transition so soon.

However, this time those had already suffered enough by not making the transition to Web 2.0 era, had fastened their seat belts to make a quick transition. As a matter of fact, nobody really loves to visit the boring copycat websites that don’t have a great visual appeal and anything unique.

Therefore, it is important for those who’re stuck in the Web 2.0 era to make a quick transition to the Web 3.0 era, and build up their businesses with social media, and networking concepts.

More so, those who’re on starting a new website today should take utmost care to incorporate all the latest aspects of web technology in their website, to make a strong entry in the online world. By doing so, they can even score over the existing ones who haven’t yet made the transition yet.

Lastly, when you look for a website design company, you should take a look at their portfolio and check whether they’ve been building websites compliant with the Web 3.0 standards or not. After all, paying money for getting an age old website made for your business isn’t simply a wise decision.

So, keep an eye on the latest happenings in the online world and ensure that you have that cutting edge over the rest.