This video shows how web developers can get paid faster, help their clients grow their websites and tap into a second income source.
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Building a Professional Website – Part 2, Design
This is the second part in our series on how to build a professional website. It takes a lot of work to build a website from scratch that’s capable of being your sole source of income and it’s all the little things that make the difference between a website succeeding or failing. The goal of this series is to help readers avoid several of the more common mistakes and start out on the right path to success. In the previous part we covered how to find a great domain name. In this part, we’re looking at design.
Making sure your site has an excellent design is extremely important and for more reasons than you may think. Here are a few:
1. It’s the first impression you make on your visitors and often determines whether they stick around to find out more.
2. It makes a strong impression on how credible you are. Even if you are an individual running this site by yourself, that typically isn’t the impression you want to leave on your visitors. A professional design can make visitors feel there is a much larger organization behind this site.
3. It makes visitors feel safe. I can’t count the number of times I’ve shied away from making a purchase on a site or from giving them my contact information because of a bad design. It leaves the impression the site is just out to make a quick buck and has probably put as little effort into securing my data as they did the design. That’s assuming the whole site isn’t a scam to begin with.
4. It improves conversion rates. There is more to a good design than just looking nice. It should help funnel your visitors towards the product you’re trying to sell and make it easy for them to find the information they are looking for. This makes for happier visitors and a happier website owner.
There are lots of common mistakes people make when designing a site. The website WebPagesThatSuck.com highlights a lot of them, but usually it comes down to people insisting on designing the site themselves. I don’t care how good you are with Photoshop, unless you are actually a professional designer, you’re better off swallowing your pride and letting someone else do the design.
Use Two Designers
This may seem counter intuitive, but don’t use the same person to design both your logo and website. There are excellent logo designers who don’t make very good websites and vice-versa. If you hire someone to do both, you’ll most likely end up with mediocre results.
Logo
The two biggest mistakes people tend to make on their logo are trying to cram too much into it or on the other extreme, adding no styling whatsoever. Your logo should be SIMPLE and elegant, preferable with a graphical element that helps to convey what it is you do, rather than simply looking cool. It should be something that can appear on a black or white background with minor or no changes and something that still looks nice when printed in black and white. Also make sure it is designed in a vector graphics format that can be scaled indefinitely, such as with Adobe Illustrator. A simple gif or jpg may look nice on your website but with become pixilated and distorted if you try to enlarge it later on.
Website
Wait until your logo is complete before having your website designed. This will give your designer a great starting point when it comes to knowing what kind of style and colors to go with. Before handing anything off to your designer you should already have a very good idea of what kind of content your site is going to contain, what the navigation structure will look like, what the key areas are you want to drive visitors to, what to highlight on your home page, etc. Hopefully you did all this before even making the final decision to launch this website. Document all this and provide it to your designer so that he/she knows what your goals are and can design a site to suite those. Trying to cram these in after the design is done usually doesn’t result in a site you are happy with.
You want to make sure your site will look nice at most resolutions so it should be designed to be no more than 1,000 pixels wide so that it fits nicely at 1024×768 resolutions. It should also elegantly fill any remaining space for visitors with higher resolutions. Flash elements on the page are ok, but avoid designing the whole site in flash or you’re likely to have problems getting search engine traffic down the road. Also be sure to design something that your visitors will be ok with visiting every day without becoming annoyed. This means avoid using a lot of animations, videos that automatically play, sound or anything else that is likely to become annoying after the first few times.
How to Find Designers
There are many great designers out there, but there are many more bad and mediocre ones and finding the right one can be quite difficult. I would suggest avoiding most design firms. They typically mark the price up significantly from what the designer is being paid which means you either end up overpaying, or the work gets sent over to a designer who works very cheaply and probably isn’t the best. The best finds are usually professional designers who do some work on the side, apart from their day job. You should expect to pay between $1,000 – $4,000 for your design when you go this route and it’s worth every penny.
Finding the right designer is going to require a fair amount of work on your part. You can start by just doing a Google search, looking at other sites you like (there is often a link to the designer at the bottom of the page), posting a project at RentACoder.com or asking for references from others. Regardless of which route you take, be sure to look over their portfolio to make sure they consistently produce great results. You don’t want a designer who is hit and miss.
Another great option is 99 Designs. This is by far my favorite and one of the more affordable options. They allow you to post a design contest which dozens of qualified designers typically compete in, providing you with 50-100+ designs to choose from. You choose a single winner who is awarded the prize money and hands over the license to the design. This allows you to see several ideas and you usually end up with a design you really love. Be sure to provide as much info as possible up front and feedback on exactly why you like or dislike each design so you can steer the contest towards a design you are going to be happy with. Again, remember to post your logo design and site design projects separately.
5 Reasons You Need Good Online Content
In real estate, the value of a property is all about the location. In the online world, it’s the CONTENT that really matters. A common saying around the internet is that “content is king” and for good reason. Here are 5 reasons why online content earns the right to wear the crown online:
1. Good Content Attracts Good Sites
One of the methods for building a successful web site is to find ways to encourage other successful websites to link to yours. If you have a website full of articles that can be found on every other website in your niche area, chances are you aren’t going to get many links to your site. On the other hand, if you’ve got quality content that is unique to your site – other good sites in the industry are going to link to you from their own site in order to provide their visitors with another valuable resource.
2. Good Content Gives You Better Search Engine Rankings
Search engines look at how many incoming links your website has when deciding your position in the search listings. If the incoming links your site has come from authoritative and credible sites within your industry, they’re going to carry more weight than the hundreds or thousands of links you might be able to obtain through link exchange programs.
Having good content on your website will improve your search engine rankings and increase the amount of traffic you have coming to your site.
3. Good Content Encourages Repeat Visitors
Some people focus on filling their website with articles having their keyword phrases used in every other sentence, to entice search engines to put them in a more prominent position in the search listings. What happens when a real person tries to read those keyword-stuffed articles? Most of the time, an article written with the focus on keywords will not read well to a “real person” and you’ll lose that website visitor. If the content you offer on your website doesn’t offer anything of value to your visitors, it really doesn’t matter if your site is in the first page of search engine results, does it?
Keeping good content on your website takes more effort than simply filling it with quick, keyword-stuffed articles, but it’s necessary to offer your readers information they find valuable. When website visitors learn something from the content on your site, you become the expert on the topic and chances are, your site visitors will bookmark your website to return to again and again.
4. Good Content Keeps Visitors On Your Site Longer
In addition to giving your readers a reason to return to your site to find out more information, having good content also keeps visitors on the site longer. The longer people spend on your website, the more likely they are to click on advertisements and sponsored links which result in revenues for your website.
5. Good Content Improves Sales Conversions
If you have a website that sells products or services, having good content on the site will go a long way toward improving your sales conversions. Not only can good content be in the form of sales copy; but the rest of your website can also encourage sales simply by being well researched, well written, informative, and help the reader experience the product or service you’re trying to sell. If you can make an emotional connection between the reader and the product or service, you’ll see a spike in sales.
Having well written content makes you more credible. Being more credible on a website that tries to sell products or services will result in web visitors who are more likely to buy your products and services.
Building a Professional Website – Part 1, Domain Name
When launching a new website, one of the decisions you have to make early on is what domain name to use. This can be quite difficult and frustrating because as this SNL video from 1999 points out, almost every great name you can think of is already taken.
We have a few tips that can help you make it through this process, but first, there are a few basic guidelines you should follow when choosing a domain. They are:
Get a .com – You may be tempted to go with a different extension because there better names available and there are several popular sites using non-dotcom extensions, or because it’s a f ew dollars cheaper – but don’t do it. Regardless of how much you try to drill into the head of your visitors that the extension is .net, .org or any other extension – at the end of the day, a fair percentage of them will type in .com anyways and you’ll be giving up your hard earned visitors to the competition.
Focus on keywords – Your domain name is one of the factors that goes into search engine rankings. Having your primary keyword(s) in your domain will be a great help down the line to getting your website in a better position in the search engines, and is something you should shoot for if at all possible.
Keep it short – People have to be able to remember the name of your website and type it, it’s important to keep the name simple and short, even if it means you can’t fit your keywords in.
Odds are you’re going to have a hard time finding an available domain that meets those criteria without help. Here are some excellent sites that can make the process much more simple.
NameBoy – This site will let you enter a primary and secondary word and come up with several dozen variations of those terms using synonyms and similar words. It will also check if each one is available so you don’t have to.
MakeWords – If it’s a short unique name to build a brand around that your after rather than one that communicates the purpose of your site, give MakeWords a try. It will generate 20 random names matching your criteria and let you know which are available.
WSMDomains – Thousands of .com domain names expire every single day because the owner chose not to renew it. WSM Domains provides a free list of which domains are dropping by day which you can search for keywords. It may take you a while to find the right fit, but there are several to choose from for most industries every day.
Sedo and Afternic – Many people register domains with the intent of reselling them for a profit. These two sites are the primary marketplaces for selling these domains. You will likely pay a couple hundred to a couple thousand or more for any name you find on these sites, but when all else fails, they provide a great way to find a good quality domain name.