|
How to Plan a Great Internet Site
One that attracts visitors, turns them into buying customers, and keeps customers coming back for more. Oh yes, and makes good money for you!
* Plan your site before designing it. Produce a rough plan of how you want the pages to look and how you wish to direct visitors and customers around your site. It's much easier to get things right before beginning to market on the Internet than to react later to problems, queries and sometimes complaints from visitors.
* Ensure enough incentives exist to attract visitors to your site and to make them want to keep on visiting. Such incentives include freebies, discounts, special time-limited offers, competitions, news services, time-sensitive information, and so on.
* Content is king. Always. Regardless of how pretty a site is, if content fails to interest visitors and buyers, they won't stay at your site. And they certainly won't return to it!
* Following on from the previous point, learn as much about your target audience as possible and plan your site to suit their exact needs. Visit sites targeting a similar audience and learn from their experience. Study what products and services they offer, what marketing methods they use, what special offers and site content is included to attract and retain visitors and customers to their site.
* Keep loading times to a minimum. Life today is fast, people won't wait for something to happen when a faster alternative is available elsewhere. So they won't wait several minutes for your site to download, especially people who have not visited you before and may have stumbled on your site by accident knowing little or nothing of what awaits them. Regular visitors are an altogether different matter and most will happily wait a little longer to access a site they know well.
* Despite what was said in the previous tip about regular customers, don't use them as an excuse to add bells, whistles, and such, and still expect them to keep on visiting. Remember the customer always has the option to vote with his feet - and move elsewhere to someone whose site is more user-friendly. Don't give the competition the edge!
Case Study of a Truly Irritating Site
I visited the UK 'Who Wants to Be A Millionaire' game show site the other day.
It's a pretty site with black background and glorious gold lettering and a smashing logo. Lots of great content too. Loads of it.
BUT
It was one of the longest ever sites to download, the text was barely readable,
and each new page sported a flashing 'downloading' symbol which
rolls majestically around the screen. Finding exactly what I wanted took ages, made my eyes sore, and told me little I didn't already know:
The flaming thing was STILL DOWNLOADING !!!!!!
|
|
