Avatars are good because…

Some customers are auditory learners – Highly visual information just doesn’t suit some brains.

They can help you do complicated things – People learn best from other people, not necessarily from reading something, and avatars provide some of that interaction.

Avatars are evil because…

They’re creepy! – If you must have an avatar, I recommend having an ordinary video shot of yourself, rather than an animated avatar. Especially one with an electronic voice.

People don’t always have or like sites with sound­ – I’ll vouch for the truth of this – I’m one of them. I can skim read much faster than the time it takes for someone to have a casual conversation with me.

Bottom line? If you have a site where people might need to be walked through complex tasks, or if the avatar is opt-in rather than opt-out (by exiting the site!), then go for it.

Don’t have an internal site search bar? Why, if Jakob Nielsen saw you in the street he’d rap you across the knuckles, young whippersnapper! Seriously though, an internal search bar is vitally important to the success of most sites. Your web marketing effort and SEO will bring visitors, but if they can’t find what they want, it will all be for naught.  Here’s why a search bar should be your next website investment.

Because it’s actually pretty easy!

Ask your SEO firm for help if you aren’t sure how to get a ‘Powered by Google’ search bar, at the minimum. It’s easy!

Because if they can’t find what they want, they’ll leave

There are thousands of sites on the net, and quite a few selling the same thing as you. If you make life hard for your customers, they’ll go to a site that doesn’t.

Because it gets you lots of sweet, sweet data!

Want to know what language your customers use? What they really want when they come to your site? The data from a search bar tells you much more explicitly than any other analytics tool.

Because your customers are ‘the searching type’

If your customers found you through SEO and search, they’ll certainly appreciate the same convenience within your site.

Won’t people be able to tell that I’ve used a template?

Well, not necessarily. They might be able to tell that you’ve used a template … and if your audience is in the web design and build industry, or the IT industry, I wouldn’t ever recommend using a template. However, the majority of customers will not be the least bit interested in whether you used a template to build your website … they just want to know if you’ve got what they want to buy at a reasonable price!

Doesn’t it hurt your business credibility to have a website that looks like it’s come off a production line?

Not necessarily. People who study usability on the web agree that predictability is one of the major factors in ensuring that your website is user-friendly. Remember that if people can’t figure out what the heck your site is about, all the clever Flash tricks and pretty graphics in the world won’t stop them throwing up their hands in disgust…

What if something goes wrong with the site?

Many free templates and themes made for WordPress, Joomla and Drupal websites can be pretty buggy. And when you didn’t pay for something, you can hardly demand that the creator give you your money’s worth by fixing up the bugs . Do keep in mind that there are plenty of quite cheap templates, that are less likely to be buggy. Also keep in mind that the most reliable solution of all, especially if you want to have people intereact with your website in any way, or will be changing content more than occasionally, is to have the professionals build your site.

What about my web marketing?

Excellent point! The free websites that look the best may not always have an SEO-friendly structure … and if something so basic is missing from your website, your business is instantly and forever on an uneven footing with all the other businesses in your industry that have customised, search engine optimised templates. This final consideration is perhaps the largest…

Think carefully before you use a free website template. The usual objections might not be the ones that impact your business the most … but remember, you get what you pay for!

Does your web copy inspire trust?

Informational copy versus sales copy

The difference is not always apparent when you are the one behind the keyboard! As a general guide…

Informational copy

• Gives the reader information about a product or service, looking mainly at the features
• Usually doesn’t mention company names
• If a company is mentioned, there is no bias towards them in the copy. May mention several companies at once.

Sales copy

• Looks mainly at the benefits of taking out a product or service with a particular company
• Mentions only one company name
• Tells readers about how to take action towards purchasing a product or service

Benefits of informational copy

There is a heck of a lot of sales copy on the internet … and people really tend to distrust it. Anybody can write anything they like and publish it on the internet – there is little governance and few checks and balances in that regard. So sales copy is taken with an enormous grain of salt.

Having informational website copy makes your site seem much more trustworthy to visitors. You have no interest in giving bad information, because there is no direct financial gain to be had from doing so.

Additionally, people that aren’t ready to purchase will come to your site, building traffic and branding, purely for the information. However, when they’re ready to purchase (a week or year down the track), they’ll remember your site and trust it.

Benefits of sales copy
At some stage, if you’re selling something, you’ll have to tell your prospect about why they should buy from you rather than Joe Blow down the road. If you don’t let your customer know why your company is good, they might assume that it isn’t!

Several studies have shown that people have trouble finding products related to informational copy if there isn’t a direct ‘sell’ … and might then Google to find the very same product on the site they were already on … YOUR site! Thgis is one reason why some sales copy is essential.

There is a compromise between the two. For sales copy to be trusted and effective, it should have plenty of informational, factual backup – like user reviews, testimonials, technical data, etc.

-Nnnn- Flash is bad -nnn- does not compute

What’s the problem?

Before we can start extolling the virtues of Flash, we probably should run through why Nielsen famously said that it was 99% bad. Bear in mind that Nielsen is a web usability expert, and most of his statements are made from that position. His arguments against the use of Flash in websites were:

• The use of Flash in ‘forced’ intros
• The Back button doesn’t work, neither do link colours or the text zoom
• Just because we can animate something, doesn’t mean we should – Flash is distracting
• It is superficial – no concrete value

Another common complaint about Flash is that it hurts SEO efforts, as any text within Flash isn’t indexed by the search engines, and is therefore ‘wasted’ from an SEO perspective.

The Skip Intro button

This is not only available on the majority of sites with Flash intros, it is now also available as a page opening option from Google results. On sites that do force intros, users typically complain so much that they are taken down – forced Flash intros are certainly not regarded as best practice in web design nowadays. Problem solved.

Logistics

Yes, not having a back button, links that change colour when they’ve been visited, or text zoom is bad. But if you don’t make an entire website in Flash (not usually recommended anyway), this won’t be a problem.

Distraction

Yes, Flash is distracting, in the same way that animated banner advertisements are. Just use it for emphasis and attention, and don’t overdo it.

Flash …used on top ranking sites

There are hundreds of high profile, highly trafficked sites on the net that use Flash. They may use it for illustration rather than explanation and have it not as a core part of the site. Or, it may have concrete value -  the Barbie site with Flash games is one that comes to mind.

Flash and SEO

Lastly, without getting into the technical details, it is now actually possible to have Flash that is indexed by the search engines.

There are certainly some valid complaints about Flash … but don’t listen to that big meanie that says it is 99% bad!

Web designing has three common tasks. These include creating a new website, redesigning a site, and maintaining the existing site. Of the three, creating a new website is the most difficult and most tedious process because you will be starting from nothing. Redesigning is also difficult because you will be revising the content or perhaps, changing everything. Maintaining the existing site is the easiest task because the updating would depend on how often you like the site will be added with fresh content.

Creating a highly fashionable site is the goal of web designing. Employing flash objects and graphics may be difficult but nothing is more attractive than this tool when web designing; the result is that the website would look attractive to internet users. However, the flash objects are not readable by search engines. What good would it do if your site is attractive when it is not visible in search engines?

There are alternative for flash, you can use video that can be embedded on your site page. Videos are highly spiderable and would optimize your site for keywords that you use.

~oOo~

Contact Web Marketing Experts (webmarketingexperts.com.au) for more useful SEO tips and other relevant points of view.

Search engine-friendly domain names are already a proven effective SEO technique. This is done on-page. If you already got a website with domain name that aside from difficult to remember, ruins the relevancy aspect of what your website is all about, you got to have changed it. If you want to rename your domain name, choose domain names that are easily crawled by search engines. You can have URL-keyword or a URL with abbreviation of some words into numeric forms. You can also do the following:

(c) Since domain name also serves as the brand, you should take into consideration is “memorizability.” To achieve that, you should create the shortest possible domain name. Very long URL syntax is really hard to recall; visitors can easily forget your site.

(d) Use popular top level domain or TLD for your website as many as you can. For instance, if your current domain name is www.yourdomainname.com, you can also have www.yourdomainname.net, www.yourdomainname.biz, www.yourdomainname.org, and more. However, your other websites with different TLD must contain unique content for each; or else, Google will penalize you.

(e) Use dash or minus (-) sign in between words with your URL syntax contains two ore more words. This is to make your domain name readable by humans and search engines. Also, this is to prevent misspelling.

~oOo~

Contact Web Marketing Experts (webmarketingexperts.com.au) for more useful SEO tips and other relevant points of view.

In designing websites, looks and content go hand in hand. Having a highly acclaimed web design is not enough to attract users that help in increasing the visibility of your site in the search engine rankings. The usefulness of a site is not just measured not on how it appears on the screen but also how the users will benefit from the information that you put on your web pages. Injecting the right description, keyword meta tags and title can optimize your website and it is important that these things are incorporated with your design. An effective design is all about being user friendly and search engine friendly at the same time.

Staying on top of search engine rankings will help to benefit much from your online venture. That is why it is important to consider web designs that bring out the full potential of your website. In such a way, attracting possible customers and generating profit is a lot easier to accomplish.

You might be wondering why I am recommending to have your friends as the judge. With friends, asking favor is easily and immediately responded. Having other people to do the task for you is quite difficult. Strangers are usually not committed when you ask them favors. They may perform the favor you asked for but you are not getting anything that would benefit you and your web design project; not unless you have to pay them. This process is tiring aside from being costly. Having this done with friends is a “no sweat.”

If you think the feedback is good, then you have to make a checklist. Let them rank your site in terms of performance and look. You can choose a scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 10. This is to check also your performance as a web designer. If you think the result of your web design is just average, it’s time to have yourself educated more to improve more.