The idea to good website design is to offer your viewer a logical flow while making it interesting and easy to understand. Lead your viewers to the starting point and then direct them through your site without confusing them.

Here are some excellent tips that can help you develop a user friendly site and please your visitors� senses. Give yourself a chance before they get away.

1. Use Lots of White Space
Don’t feel that because you have a whole screen that you need to fill it up with stuff. Your page should follow a clean outline. Include your site name at the very top. Below that list the subject of your page and below that expand on your topic. Leave adequate space between each section. Don’t cram a lot of pictures and ads. If you have an ad, keep it off to the side or subtly intersperse it between your text. The idea is not to overwhelm your reader.

2. Don’t Use Animation and Flashing Objects
As advertisers we feel the need to get our viewers attention. This is important but we need to do it gracefully. Flashing objects and scrolling images distract your visitor and take away from the content. If your product is better demonstrated with animation or some other multi-media, allow your viewer to select the option. Don’t force it on them.

3. Every Page of Your Site Should Contain an ‘About’ Link
The internet can be a rather cold and quiet environment. If someone can come to your site and find out about who you are and what you are about, they can feel a little better about doing business with you or taking advice from you. Always include your business address and telephone number and email address as well. This lets viewers know that you are serious about your business and that you welcome contact.

4. Include a ‘Privacy’ Link
Viewers like the reassurance that you have a policy that follows privacy guidelines. They want to know that you will not sell or give away their information. In these days of rampant sp@m, your privacy policy needs to be prominently displayed. Many viewers and business partners won’t do business with you unless you have it.

5. Always Keep Your Links in Blue
Why does that matter you might say? It’s an expectation that viewers have along with the links being underlined. There’s certainly no law that says they need to be as such but people spend a lot of time on the internet and it’s good practice to keep your navigation consistent and recognizable. If it’s not, you may be losing clicks.

6. Keep Navigation Consistent
Keep your site’s navigation consistent. What you do on your index page should be done the same way on the rest of your site’s pages. Keep the colours consistent as well. Don’t force your viewers to relearn each page of your site. Keep your navigation bars and links the same for each page.

7. Understandable Buttons and Links
Title your links appropriately. Don’t use cute or misleading names. For example, if you have a link to sports equipment don’t label the link ‘Great Outdoors’, call it ’sports equipment’. If you have a link to ‘cameras’ don’t label the link ‘hotshots’, label it ‘cameras’. Your viewers don’t want to waste time figuring out what things are. Be clear with your labelling.

8. Focus on the ‘You’, not the ‘Me’
Make it obviously clear to your readers that you are there for them. What can you do for your reader? What benefits are there for your viewer? How can you make their life or business better or more profitable? Request feedback on their success, find out what they want to know or how you can offer them what they need.

9. Make Sure Your Page Loads Fast
If viewers have to wait for a page to load they will go elsewhere. If a page doesn’t load in 8 seconds you forfeit 1/3 of your visitors. Here’s a great free tool to help you test your website’s load time: http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/tool.loading-time-checker.htm.

10. Use a Site Map
A site map will give visitors a “guide” on viewing your site and also eliminate confusion, especially with larger sites. It’s a road map for your visitors to follow while they are on your site. Sitemaps will also increase rankings and placement within the Search Engines.

By Elizabeth McGee

Everybody talks about the importance of testing your sales copy or a page layout. After all, proper testing can help you modify your page in a way that will drastically increase your conversion rate. In this article, I would like to describe a way to shorten the amount of time it takes to test your pages and to increase the probability of success.

Before I go any further, I would like to introduce a few concepts and notions that will be used in this article.

Attribute - a specific visual or conceptual element of a page, an ad creative, or a sales letter (used in fine-grained performance comparison testing). A few examples of what might be considered attributes:

- headline text
- headline font
- headline colour
- order button size
- order button colour
- order button text
Please note that even though those six things are related to only two elements, they are all separate attributes.

Attribute value? Some particular setting of an attribute.
Here are a few examples of values:
- order button colour, red
- order button colour, green
- order button text, “Buy Now”
- order button text, “Add To Cart”
I just listed two values for two separate attributes.

Significant attribute - an attribute that affects the performance of a page.

Insignificant attribute? An attribute that does not affect (or has little effect on) the performance of a page.

There are some obvious significant attributes that are universal for everybody. One example of such significant attribute is a headline.

It has been proven many times over that changes in a headline have a huge impact on the performance of a campaign or an offering, in any medium for any industry. You can find a lot of information about universal significant attributes in any book that deals with testing and response rates.

A much harder problem would be trying to identify significant attributes that are unique to your site, product, audience, or traffic source. As I described in my report called “How to Win the AdWords Game,” the famous 20/80 rule applies to attribute testing just as well as it applies to many other things in our lives. In other words, 20% of the attributes you improve will produce 80% of overall performance increase.

Out of 100 attributes you decide to test, testing 80 attributes would be a waste of time. This is the reason many people fail to realize the importance of small attributes.

After all, if you follow the conventional wisdom of testing only one attribute at a time, you end up with no visible results and a firm belief that small attributes do not affect conversion. It is only logical to quit after testing 10 different attributes, one at a time, and having to wait one week for each attribute. The truth is, you have most likely spent that 10 weeks testing your insignificant attributes.

Since there is no way to know in advance which ones of your attributes are significant, the only reasonable thing to do is to test. You need to test and find out which attributes have the most effect on your visitors’ behaviour before you start testing different values of those attributes.

Let me give you a simple example of what I mean:
You need to establish that a colour of an order button is in fact a significant attribute before attempting to find the best producing colour for that button. If you start testing different colors when that attribute is not significant, you just waste your time.

So how can you find which attributes are significant and which are not in a reasonable amount of time? It’s simple. You need to test in parallel. You need to think up as many different attributes as you can and create different values for each of them. After that, you need to present a random set of attribute values to each new visitor, and keep the same values for returning visitors. Once you do that, you need to collect and track your test data to measure performance based on the sets of values.

For example, let’s assume you tried the following attributes (with a set of values):
- a colour of an order button: blue, green
- a text of an order button: “Buy Now”, “Add To Cart”
- a colour of the font that lists the price: red, black

That way, one visitor might see a blue “Buy Now” button next to the red price, while another one might see a green “Add to Cart” button with the black price, and yet another one might see a green “Buy Now” button with the red price, and so on.

With this set-up, you get 8 combinations of three attributes.

Once you ran a test, you got the following conversion rates:

- order button, blue = 1.53%
- order button, green = 1.52%

- text of a button, “Buy Now” = 1.95%
- text of a button, “Add To Cart” = 1.01%

- color of price, red = 1.51%
- color of price, black = 1.49%

From this data, you can tell that you got the most performance difference by changing the text of an order button. This is your significant attribute. Forget about the other two for now and start testing the text of a button.

You can take this concept a step further and test combinations of attributes. You might find that changing a colour of the price together with a text of the order button produces better results than changing the colour alone. I will not cover this topic now, but will write about it in the near future.

For now, let’s just concentrate on picking stand-alone attributes that show to be significant to the performance of your page. Once you have identified those attributes, it’s time to start tweaking their values and test results, also in parallel. You need to apply the same concept, to testing values of attributes this time.

Keep in mind, that small attributes are often unique to your site and your audience. What might work for you, might not work for other people. Nevertheless, if you can correctly identify your small, but significant attributes, you should be able to increase your conversion rate. The effect of those small attributes might not be as significant as with headlines or other well-known attributes, but the more attributes you find and optimize the higher you increase the overall performance of your page.

By Konstantin Goudkov

Many of my clients and list members ask the same questions when it comes to generating website traffic. From the questions, I can sometimes pick up a thread of misunderstanding about website promotion. One of those threads surfaced last week and turned into this article.
There are actually two broad types of website promotion: Active and Passive.

Things that fall into the category of Passive are:
1) Search engine optimization
2) Writing and Growing Website Content (The pages on your site whether they be articles, reports, your weblog, or a forum)

Many more website promotion tactics fall into the Active Category:
1) Syndicating your content (like this article for example)
2) Paid advertising (Banner and test ads, pay-per-click advertising, ezine advertising, etc.)
3) Linking strategies (Reciprocal and non reciprocal linking)
4) Being active in your “community” (Posting to forums that your customers and associates frequent, for example.)
5) Doing tele-seminars
6) Offline networking
7) Joint ventures with businesses that have the attention of your target market.
8) Free classified advertising (Some people still see benefits from this type of advertising to this day online.)
9) Offline media advertising (Radio, TV, Newspaper, Trade Magazines and other publications)
10) Reports, software and other viral free tools that point back to your paid services or products.

The two types of promotion are also referred to as “push/pull” website promotion. Passive website promotion “pulls” traffic to your site while active promotion goes out on the web and “pushes” traffic to your site.

Looking at the two lists above, where do you think, if you had to choose between them, your time would be best spent?

I will never knock search engine marketing. That is a great source of sometimes massive free traffic. Sometimes. Unless you are in a niche that is very competitive. You see, if you are in a competitive niche you will always be out-spent and out-worked by companies with endless budgets and staff for the top positions.

Most mom and pop sites in competitive niches are not going to do well in the search engines if they don’t spend exorbitant sums of time, training, and money on getting their sites perfected just for search engines.

You should do what you can do with optimization. Do what you can afford in time and money. Realize that search engine marketing is an ongoing battle to get and keep good rankings. It is a long term, ongoing traffic solution.

But also realize there is a lot of active promotion you can do today to get people to your sites who are interested in your product/service whether your site is in the engines or not.

Most people still think you have to wait a long time to make anything happen for your traffic stats to start improving. That’s not true. You could get a boost in traffic in as little as a couple of hours using active website promotion strategies.

The simplest way would be to go to Google and start an adwords campaign. Simply meaning, it is easy to start with an account and create your first ad. But then more complicated in that you need to actively watch your stats and improve conversion rates to get the most return for the money you spend to get that traffic.

It’s a good strategy though, especially if you master the science of PPC advertising. I have a bonus in my Power Linking Course that was created by Jonathan Mizel and adwords guru Perry Marshall that breaks down exactly what it takes to win the PPC game.

But there are other techniques listed in the active section above that are free and easy to implement which can result in traffic immediately.

Each one of the things in both lists above can be broken out into much more detailed “plans” for your website marketing campaign. It depends on your goals, your product or service, and the amount of time you have to promote your site, which tactics you use and how much time you allocate to each.

I’ll give you a hint on one of the more powerful traffic and branding tools. You are currently reading one. I would sell a fraction of the number of my courses if people weren’t able to quickly and easily find several of my articles on hundreds of sites in the search engines.

Writing articles and reports and syndicating them is a short and long-term traffic and branding solution. I will caution you on this though: Don’t just write a slew of “words” and submit a cruddy article all over the net. You will be branded alright. Branded as a hack or a NON-expert in your field.

You have to care about the reader experience enough to give them something of value in each article you write. This is the only way you should proceed with becoming a writer and syndicating your content. The more you give your readers, the more you get from them in sales and word-of-mouth advertising.

After awhile, if you are good, people start seeking out your articles on your site or elsewhere on the web. This is the “sweet spot” of writing for the web. Writer’s Mecca. Publisher’s Valhalla, if you will.

Hate to write? Hire a ghost writer. At WebFoxMedia.com you can get 10 keyword optimized 500+ word articles written for you at a very good price. And you own the copyrights and can use the articles as content for your site (passively) as well as syndicate them globally (active promotion).

The best advice I can give you though is to become more active in the things that work. Just get going and set aside a real plan for your day-to-day promotion of your website. Don’t get into “quick-fixes” or let yourself fall for the latest traffic scheme.

If you read about a traffic gimmick that leaves you wondering in the least about its real efficacy in driving targeted traffic to your site, just move on to the things above and don’t waste your time on such things.

If website promotion was truly easy and effortless, every site on the net would have a tons of traffic and you wouldn’t be reading this article on how to get more of it!

By Jack Humphrey