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Let Your Little Website Shine Part 1

One of the great things about the World Wide Web is that even the 
"little guy" can be big.

Your website can give the appearance of a large organization, even 
when it's just you and the family dog, sitting in your kitchen in 
your underwear (not the dog, you in your underwear!). It's all 
about presence and appearance. This article discusses how to make 
your website look large, even when what is behind it is just 
getting started. The World Wide Web is making more millionaires 
faster than any other phenomenon in history.

ELEMENTS OF A WINNING SITE

The elements that make a website a "winner" are the following:

1.  Loads Fast
2.  Looks Great
3.  The links actually work
4.  Quick response when people request information, report trouble
5.  Is Useful
6.  Is Interesting
7.  Serves a great need
8.  Is Fun
9.  Offers lots of free stuff
10. Presents an appearance in keeping with whatever you are selling
11. Sells in a very subtle way
12. Is not like everyone else's
13. Does not use email addresses retrieved from its contents to 
    "Spam" people
14. Has some kind of newsletter that allows visitors to keep in 
    touch on an ongoing basis
15. Has clear navigation

Now we'll discuss these elements, one at a time. Miss any of 
these crucial elements, and your website traffic will suffer. 
Ignore none of them, if you want people to "show up". Just 
like a boring preacher has a hard time getting people to come 
to church, just providing good choir music is not going to make 
up for it. Your website may look good, but if it serves no
purpose whatsoever or is not clear in its message, it'll flop 
like one of those movies that doesn't make it in the box office 
because the first group of people to see it keep the rest of 
them from showing up.

The first thing you have to make sure of is that going to your 
website is not frustrating:

1. Loads Fast:  If your website loads so slow that people get 
bored waiting for it, your business will never get out of the 
starting gate. Large graphics, lots of those great java scripts, 
lots of background bitmaps, and a slow server to run on are some 
of the causes of this. No one will ever stay long enough to find 
out what you're selling if your pages are slow. The best way to 
test your site is to get on an average connection and time it 
with a stopwatch. You may be operating on a DSL or cable modem 
connection, so it's best if you can visit a friend who has a 
dialup and see how your website loads for him/her.

Make sure your web hosting provider gives you enough bandwidth 
and a fast connection. We experienced this problem (among others) 
while stuck in a 2 year contract with a hosting provider. We've 
since switched to another provider and don't have this problem 
anymore. See Web Hosting to find out where we went for better 
bandwidth. No matter what we did to make our Website load fast, 
our foundation was not good enough to make people want to come 
back. More than a few seconds to get to your website, and your 
site goes down in history as not being seen, along with all the 
websites hosted at places where websites are free. (You probably 
know who they are) If you have huge graphics and all kinds of 
whirlygigs and java scripts that would make a grown man cry, your 
site is in trouble again. Try to make all your graphics small and 
in a .jpg (jpeg) format.

If you must use moving gifs or other animated stuff, make it 
something useful that replaces text information. It must have 
some use on your page - not just to look good. And try to make 
it only one per page, if you can. If you love java, be aware of 
a couple of issues with fancy java scripts: Not everyone can see 
them if they don't have the right browser or the latest version 
of some browsers, not everyone is going to appreciate that their
mouse leaves "trails" across the screen, or that everything on 
your site is what they call a mouseover (where an image changes 
into something else when you run your mouse over it). Leave this 
stuff to your "other" site - you know, the one you wrote for fun. 
Try to keep this stuff to a minimum on a business website.

A plain white background is always better than some fancy, 
bandwidth-eating background bitmap image. If you must have a 
background image, make it a very small watermark-style image. 
Better to leave it plain. Makes it easier to read for many people 
who don't have the greatest video card or the best pair of eyes.

One side note: It's always good to test your website's pages in 
another screen resolution. If you like to keep your resolution 
(right-click on the desktop in Windows, go to settings, change 
the slide bar) at 1024x768, test your site using 800x600 and 
possibly 640x480. You can also put some javascripts that test 
the user's screen resolution and adjust accordingly, or you can 
put a disclaimer on your main page that says: "Best when viewed 
in 800x600 resolution". You decide how easy to make it for your 
visitors. Remember that things that may look great on your machine 
might look like crap to someone with their screen resolution set 
differently.

The next thing to make sure of after they actually get to your 
site is whether or not it looks good.

When I return, I'll discuss how to make your website credible 
with a great look.

====================================================================

Lynne Schlumpf is the CEO of Route 66 Cyber Cafe, Inc.,
http://www.r66cci.com,  a Web hosting and design company 
specializing in promoting websites for new owners, building 
affordable e-commerce sites, and providing reliable web hosting 
solutions as an affiliate of Virtualis Incorporated. She is the 
author of the forthcoming book "Let Your Little Website Shine", 
due out in publication approximately May 30, 2000.

Part I Content in TEXT format

Let Your Little Website Shine Part 2

Make Your Website Credible - Let Your Little Website Shine,
    Part 2 by Lynne Schlumpf

In Part 1, I discussed the speed of your website load, in today's
article we will discuss how to make your website credible with a
great looking design.

Please remember that this subject has so many opinions among so many
people that it really is up to you in the end of what you think looks
great, and what may look stupid or overdone to someone else. If your
getting criticism in your feedback from your visitors, keep it in mind
if it is constructive.

Today we will just discuss a few things that can help you decide for
yourself the best route to take in your own Website design.

====================================================================

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====================================================================

The first and best thing to do is to find out what the big guys are
doing. You know the sites that get huge hits. Study these sites.
What about them is pleasing to your eyes? Is it a certain way the
navigation links are presented? Is it the location of certain
elements on the page? What elements make up these websites that make
them easy to look at? Do they have really cool graphics? Do they
present the content in an easy-to-look-at way? Notice that they
don't usually overcrowd the page. A lot of junk crammed into one
page turns people off.

Are their lettering and graphics clean-looking, and without raggedy
edges (aliasing)? Keep their formats in mind when you design yours.
What colors do they stick to? How do they present their menus/links?
Time them, How fast do they load? What elements on each webpage
catches your eye first. Look at these websites with a different eye
than just somebody visiting there. These websites were designed by
professionals doing this for a living. What types of presentation
do they know brings people back. Look at it from an artistic and
marketing eye.  What about these sites provides a lot of marketing
material? Don't copy them, of course, but keep in mind where their
navigation links go, where the logo usually goes, how much content
is on the main page, how the navigation links they have are pretty
standard.

You'll notice that almost every really good page has some of the
following links in common:

- Contact Us

- About Us

- Help

- Feedback to Webmaster

- General Feedback

- Links to other sites related

- Home (on all pages except home, of course)

- Back Buttons, Next Buttons, Paging for pages that go together

- Search this site for....

These are just a few of the common links that you'll see on really
successful pages. Step back and look at your page from a marketing
and artistic viewpoint. Would you stay long?

If you need help with the "Looks Great" part of your website and you
insist on doing the design yourself, here are some pretty good sites
to give you help:

http://www.webmonkey.com
http://www.flashkit.com
http://www.macromedia.comSo

Make sure that the links in your Website actually work. I've
mentioned this in another article, but this is worth mentioning
again. Test and test and test your site for broken links. Put it
through some very exhaustive checks to make sure all the links that
people click actually go somewhere and make sure the places they
go when they click are where they were supposed to end up in the
first place. Have friends or coworkers test the links for you to get
a second, fresh eye to look. It helps to put an email link at the
bottom of each page that says something like: Problems with our
site? Email the Webmaster. This will correct more mistakes than
you'll ever correct on your own. People love to gripe about how your
website doesn't work as advertised. It's good criticism for you.
When responding to them, respond politely and thank them for
pointing out this problem.

When I return in Part 3, I�ll talk about how to make quick responses
to requests by your prospective customers. Thanks for joining me!

Part II Content in TEXT format

Let Your Little Website Shine Part 3

3.) Keep Them Coming Back - Part 3 of Let Your Little Website
     Shine

Thanks for joining me again for this series on how to make your 
Website shine! One more note about your website before we move on. 
To enable faster loading, make sure you designate the size of your 
graphics in your code and create alternate text (the alt tag) for 
those who don�t feel like waiting for your page to load.

====================================================================

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====================================================================

Now we move on to just plain good customer service:

Quick response when people request information, report trouble: 
This one pretty much speaks for itself, but it is worth mentioning 
a couple of things about this. Try, if you can, to check your email 
at least 3 times a day. Many people are shut-ins or retired or 
homeworkers, and they expect a quick response to their questions or 
complaints. If your Internet Provider can give you access to 
Auto-Responders, these are fairly successful in giving your website
visitors a quick response that says you've received their email
and will respond as soon as possible, but sometimes these 
auto-responders annoy people more than they put them at ease.

Human beings always prefer to talk to human beings. This is 
especially evident in the fact that people still consider voice 
mail and answering machines a necessary evil. Some may see your 
auto-responder as just that.  Auto-responders are more effectively 
used when someone wants some detailed information and wants it
immediately. If at all possible, ask for their phone number so you
can call them and give them answers live. I cannot count how many 
times I have answered our corporate line, only to hear a big sigh 
of relief on the other end, followed by the person saying,

"Wow, I got a live voice!"

Many people prefer not to be called on the phone, so give them a 
choice when they write to you. Some are paranoid that you're going 
to try to sell them something. If they email and expect email in 
return, make it polite, prompt, and helpful. If you are not sure 
what they're asking, don't try to create an answer from incomplete
facts from them. Ask them to clarify by return email so that you 
may answer their question more effectively. Customer service,
customer service, and more customer service will make you stand 
heads above your competition. Try a little experiment with some 
of your competitors. See how long or in what way they respond to 
a question about their site. As far as reporting trouble on your 
web page operations, this was mentioned in Element 3 above. If 
they are reporting trouble about a product or service you sold 
them, offer them choices of restitution. Most people will not 
want to return something if it can be resolved over the phone. 
Give them a liberal guarantee, like 90 days or something. They'll
appreciate this more than you'll know.

There is nothing worse than going to a website that you expected to 
find "content" in, only to discover it is just a bunch of garbage 
sales talk or just plain trash. This is usually the case when a 
company does not understand how to sell on the web or is just plain
too lazy to plan their content carefully. A website should be useful
to the target market of buyers you are aiming at.

If you are selling widgets, have a section of FREE information just
on everything you can find out about the history of widgets and all
aspects of using them. If you provide a service, have some 
information that is useful background for the buyers of that 
service. Sit down with a pad of paper before you ever design your 
website, and make a hand-written plan of how you want it to look.  
Include the elements described in this article. Giving something 
free on your site, like free information that is really worth 
something, will make them feel more at ease about purchasing 
whatever it is you are selling. If a website only sells something 
but gives nothing in return, it's just plain garbage. Many MLM 
websites are like this. (no offense to MLMs!).

In contrast, one couple decided they really loved peacocks, so 
they created a website based only on information about peacocks, 
such as how to raise them. The website started out as just a hobby 
type of site, but the end result now is that they sell more peacocks
than they can breed.  They are sold out as soon as babies are born.  
The other end result is that the CEO of the company wrote a 
full-length book just on peacocks and sells that on his website now,
too. Another example was a man who decided he was a pretty
knowledgeable government contractor. He wrote articles on his site 
about how to have the upper hand when it comes to being awarded 
government contracts. His site is now selling a lot of information, 
as well as providing it free. His company was recently purchased by
another company and sells books, CD-ROMs, and all sorts of other 
information about this subject.

These websites, in contrast to those websites you see that just look
like sales letters, are useful. They serve a purpose that keeps 
people coming back. No one wants to see a whole website dedicated to
"I love my company and this is what we do". They only care what you 
do if you dedicate one page to "About Us", and the rest of the
website keeps their attention with useful information. Plan your 
website around your expertise on a given subject. Eat, breathe and
sleep that subject. Learn everything you possibly can about the 
subject, and write about it. Gone are the days that you can have a 
website that just sells information. You've got to "give away" some
of your expertise, too, or your website hits are going to be pitiful
at best. You'll be lucky to get 10 people a day to come and look.

Enough said on this little pet peeve of mine!

====================================================================
Lynne Schlumpf is the CEO of Route 66 Cyber Cafe, Inc.,
http://www.r66cci.com,  a Web hosting and design company
specializing in promoting websites for new owners, building
affordable e-commerce sites, and providing reliable web hosting
solutions as an affiliate of Virtualis Incorporated. She is the
author of the forthcoming book "The Little Website That Could",
due out in publication approximately May 30, 2000.

Part III Content in TEXT format

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