Website Design Website Content Basics
Website Content Basics
It is important to get into the mind of your potential customers to establish what they are looking for, so you can develop your website around those concepts. This extract discusses the various options to interest, entertain and capture your website visitors attention.
Designing Your Website To Attract Website Traffic
Inexperienced web designers will often theme their website around the name of an organisation, or a product or service, resulting in unsatisfactory search engine rankings. Poor Search Engine Ranking means less website traffic, therefore fewer new and repeat visitors.
Designing a website to attract internet traffic means identifying what your customers are looking for, so that your website can be engineered to arrive under those searches.
Statistics state that only a small proportion of internet users use the internet to seek out a Brand or Business name. The majority are seeking out information, a service or item type, which are interpreted as "keywords" or "key phrases" by Search Engines.
I will be offering tips and tricks on how to work with Search Engines later in this program under Search Engine Optimisation, however as this session considers the "design" and copy of your website to attract traffic and maintain visitors, it is important to plan for your keywords and key phrases now, as these must be incorporated in your copy, at least 4 times.
For example: Barnacle Bills Puzzles discovered that the keywords and key phrases his potential customers were using to find his type of business where: puzzles, free puzzles, childrens puzzles, gifts, online games, games, free games, free stuff, kids puzzles, online games, fun games, etc.
Excercise: Write a list of keywords and key phrases that your customers are most likely to use to locate businesses like yours, so you may incorporate these in your written copy and back-end coding later.
Less Is More
Short, Simple and User Friendly Web Pages Work!
Armani, the great fashion designer was famous for his philosophy of "Less is More" and indeed the same applies to a 5 Star Marketing Website.
Think for a moment ... when you visit a highly sophisticated establishment ... isn't it spacious, clean and uncluttered?
Forget the large graphics, fancy gifs, large flash movies and complicated java scripts that will slow down the loading of your page and have your future prospects tearing their hair out in frustration.
Be sparing with your graphics and banners, particularly for introduction pages.
Remember that search engines time and penalize slow loading websites, and that 70% of your viewers are still connected to the internet through broadband/pc technology that is three to five years older than yours. It is important to have enough words on your pages to insert your keywords, however over wordy websites are rarely read.
There is no bigger turn off to important future customers than totally wasting their time!
Planning For Website Content
Write down in point form the critical information that your future customers will need to know about your products and services, and any other pertinent information that will be valuable to them, e.g. Who are you? What are your credentials? Why would your customers choose your services over others? This information will be used to plan your summary front page and the content of other web pages on your website.
What else will you require to service your clients needs. A Request Quote Form? A Shopping Cart with Ecommerce?
Where do you wish your website to be found? What Countries, Regions and Towns do you wish to target?
What is more valuable than a new customer? A repeat customer! What ways do you wish to build a relationship and keep your customers coming back to your website? Autoresponder, newsletter, tell a friend link? etc.
On the next page we discuss "Relationship Marketing" in more depth, and provide examples of other inclusions that might be useful.
