Designing a Web site

When designing a web site you need to keep in mind the needs of your customers.

Your web site needs to be user-friendly not fancy and confusing. You need to plan a

navigation that compels your visitors to click and buy. Too many people make the

mistake of spending thousands of dollars making a web site look fantastic but hard to

navigate and difficult to follow the sales process. The result their visitors end up

leaving and there is no sale. A lot of sales are lost because people can’t find what they

were searching for.

The Headline

Internet buyers are unforgiving. Read my article on sales copy. You only have precious

seconds to convince your visitors to buy. A Headline is your attention grabber. It has

to compel the visitor to read your sales copy and buy! Simplify the process. Study your

competitors or similar sites to get an idea of what is a good web site. It is a good idea to

draw on paper a list of all the content, images, products etc you want to include on

your site. Draw your homepage etc and lay them out on a table. Then pretend you are

a visitor and ask yourself was this easy to navigate? Was I compelled to buy? Get other

people to test your design as well.

Build the website

So how will you build your site? There are plenty web designers eager to build your

web site and most are expensive. Nevertheless, you only need to do a simple site. You

could learn basic HTML and build it yourself or better still buy something like

Microsoft FrontPage which allows you to build professional looking web sites

effortlessly. Believe me it’s a simple process. Building it yourself is the best way to go.

You have complete control and you can maintain the site yourself. Furthermore, many

web hosts provide an online web site builder that are easy as 1 2 3. They are

WYSIWYG, (What You See Is What You Get). They also supply free shopping carts,

scripts for Pay Pal and so on.

Hiring a web designer

If you have big budgets then hire a web designer or web master. Be aware this could

cost you an unnecessary fortune. If you do hire someone make sure they create a basic

site with a professional looking logo, graphics and payment features you need. Also,

make sure you have complete control of your web site. Otherwise, you will have to hire

them for every little update. My Tip: Go to your local University or College and hire a

talented student. They will appreciate the work and you’ll get a great web site for a

fraction of the cost.

HTML online resources

There are many great online resources to teach you HTML. It really isn’t that hard.

Check out these FREE HTML tutorials. www.davesite.com/webstation/html or

www.htmlgoodies.com The important thing to remember is to keep your web site

simple. You should focus on the sales copy not a flashy beautiful web site. Having

fancy graphics and banners with flash is a waste of time. The text should do the selling.

The sales process should run from top to bottom.

Test your website

Now, its time to upload your web site to your host and test it. You will need a FTP

program such as CuteFTP to upload your web pages. Your host will provide

information on how to do this. Finally, you should test your web site on various

browsers such as Internet Explorer, Netscape and FireFox. If possible try to test it on

older computers with older versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer. There are still

many people out there with old computers and old operating systems. You should keep

this in mind when designing your web site. The whole idea is to get a sale not

entertain. Keep it simple and you should succeed