As a business owner you know the importance of marketing your
products. Some companies go to great efforts to brand their
business image in various forms of media. Newspaper, radio and
television are a few of the old standards. Now we are in the
digital world with instant content delivery to your customers
and 24 hour access to your business information. So why are a
lot of businesses not making it on the net? It's plain and
simple, they lack the knowledge and experience that has been
acquired by other advertising mediums with very long track
records.
Lets look at some mistakes made by business owners and there
websites.
Navigation
This is one area that many business owner and new web designers
miss the mark on. Navigation is nothing more than a way to tell
your visitor where everything is located on your site. Some
basic rules need to be applied to this area to ensure your
visitor does not get frustrated and leave. Keep all navbars
(Navigation Bars) located on the left side or just below the top
of the header (Masthead). These are standards that have been
around for a very long time and viewed by many surfers as the
first place to look and any other method of navigation might
confuse them. A site map is also a very important page. This
will allow your readers to go to one page and see links to every
page on the site. For a large site with a lot of content,
something else you should consider would be a search feature on
your page. Do all you can to make the site easy to navigate and
you may just find a relationship building between you and your
customer.
Page Sizes Broadband is growing but is not number one yet!
Remember that a lot of your customers will be using dialup; the
old 56k connection has served us well, but with the advent of
high-speed net connections it seems a lot of web designers and
business owners have forgot about 70% of the population are
using dialup!
Couple points to consider: 1Dont load your page with too many
pictures. If you require a lot of visual content make sure it is
optimized. 2Keep the graphics to a minimum. Make sure you
incorporate your company logo, but remember, a lot of
unnecessary graphics will slow down the load time.
Most companies when getting their first site done want to have
everything they possibly think of on their page. Do not make
your page cluttered; this makes it hard for your customer to
find out about the products and services you sell. Make the site
logical; use good navigation. Dont write paragraph after
paragraph of useless information. You want to hook them with a
bit of information and then have them inquire about more of the
features offered with the product or services. Make sure you
publish your contact information. That includes phone number.
Would you want to deal with a business that does not include
their phone number? The most important thing to do is think like
the consumer. Look at some of the big companies and how they do
it. You will soon see that cleanness and proper navigation will
keep your customers coming back.
Copyright 2005 Terry Henry, all rights reserved
About the author:
About the author Terry Henry is operations manager for Henry
Marketing and Development (www.hendev.com) and the PowerZone
Hosting Group (www.powerzonehosting.com)
Terry can be reached at terry@hendev.com
