Archive for July, 2006

Web Site Design : If Hit Counters are Out, What’s In?

Friday, July 14th, 2006

Posted in Web Site Design, Website Design Trends, Website design tips |

In vogue for web site design where statistics are concerned, are keeping your numbers relatively private, and putting the focus on the quality of your site. Learn more about common web statistics terms mean, and learn how to see what they mean for your site.

A hit, for example, is generated by each object that loads on your pages and registers with a web browser. That means if you have 5 graphics on a page, each one of them will register a hit. More important is a web page view, or page view for short. That measurement tells you that the page loaded successfully in your visitors browser. If you have an informational site, it may be important to have more page views – no one wants to have a resource site that people immediately click away from, for example. Conversely, if most of your blog readers follow you by your feed, you’ll only get a page view registered for each time they access your feed, no matter how many entries they read.

In these cases, it’s even more important to count the visitors. The visitors are counted by the number of times a unique address, computer or person visits your site. Sometimes, the address that would normally determine one visitor is shared, so when visitors go by unique IP address, as they are called, it isn’t always accurate.

It may under-estimate how many visitors, in the case where an Internet Service Provider such as AOL, may use the same IP address to represent all the visitors from one particular area. It may over-estimate how many visitors are coming to your site in the case of an auto-surf program or purchased visitors that aren’t generated by re-directed expired domains or manual surf exchanges. Your web visitor log or statistics program may register thousands of visitors from thousands of IP addresses, and yet none of them view your site.

A more reliable way to measure is by a program that places cookies on a remote user’s computer to track their visit, however some visitors don’t like them as much and may block them. The Google Web Analytics program uses cookies to track visitors, and is free.

If you have visitors that you think will have a problem with cookies, add the purpose of the cookie to your site’s privacy policy. Before you use a program that includes cookies, weigh the probability that more sophisticated users will block them, or not use your site, against how valuable having that data will be in helping you server your clients better.

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Web Site Design : What’s Out and What’s In

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

Posted in Low Cost Web Site Design Secrets, Top website design trends, Web Site Design, Website Design Trends, Website design tips |

Over the next few posts we’ll be talking about what’s sooo 1998, and what’s the next new thing in web site design.


Hit Counters

Any site created past 2002 should not have a hit counter that shows how many visitors have been to the site at the bottom of the page.

First of all, the number is not accurate. Hit counters count “hits”, not visitors, and not page views. We can go deeply into the differences another day, but suffice it to say that the number of “hits” says almost nothing about the success level of your site. Displaying it on your page screams “I’m a newbie!”

And your site, especially if it’s professional, should Never say that.

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Web Site Design: Connecting to Your Visitors with Clarity

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

Posted in Web Site Design, Web designer, Website design tips |

One great way to establish a connection with your website visitors is to tell them why you exist, up front. You should have at least one line that states your purpose, preferably on the home page of your site, like a tag line under your title, unless of course the name of your website implies its purpose. EzineArticles.com tells me why I’m there are soon as I arrive.

When you create this statement of purpose, remember that you’re supposed to be telling a story from your visitors point of view, not your own. You don’t want to say “We’re the sausage company. Our company was founded in 1980.” Aren’t your eyes glazing over right now.

How about this, though?

“Fat, juicy, ready-to-eat sausages. Delivered to your home overnight or available for pick-up, right now.”

Think about what the biggest and most immediate benefit a client would get from visiting your site. Then talk about it on your home page – it’s not often where visitors land, but it is where they go when they don’t understand where they are.

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Web Site Design : Does the Function of Your Website Determine Its Design?

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006

Posted in Functionality in websites, Web Site Design, Website design and function, Website design tips |

Yesterday we concluded a 30 part series on low cost web site design secrets. You can always read the entire series by going to the low cost web site design category.

Today, we’re asking a different question – in web site design, does function influence design? The short answer is yes. The long answer is “yes, but” and we’ll get into that in a moment.

First, let’s look at why we’re asking the question in the first place.

Many times, when people come to me for a unique web site style, they aren’t in the right part of the process to be looking for a designer. Either the site is already built, and they should have found a real designer before deploying the site, or they are still at the stage of thinking where they know that starting a new business means that they need a website, but they don’t know why.

One of the questions you need to answer before you go to a web designer is, “what will this website do to increase profits for the company?” The answer may be an indirect correlation – better public relations. In that case, you may need a design that incorporates a forum or a weblog. Or you might realize that you can capture leads or make sales directly from the web.

A public relations site is going to have a different format from a leads capture site.

Now we get to the “yes, but”. You might find out that you need more than one site, or a site that is built with expansion in mind. For some businesses, it is smarter to have one site for capturing leads, and another for getting visitors from search engines. Or you may need to have one purely commercial site, and another that simply exists to inform, which drives traffic to the other website.

If you aren’t sure why you need a site in the first place, or what you want your site to do, one solution is to have a short consultation with your web site designer and your marketing department before moving forward. Between them, they can come up with a plan for executive review.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secrets Part 30

Monday, July 10th, 2006

Posted in Low Cost Web Site Design Secrets, Web Site Design |

The Low Cost Web site Design Secrets series concludes today. You’ll always be able to click the link to the entire series below.

Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 29: Keep Testing and Tweaking – Your Site Changes and Grows with Your Company.

While it’s search-engine suicide to have under construction signs on your site, your site is always under construction. When your company grows, or changes, so should your site. When you’re mentioned in the press, there should be a page about this on your site, preferably with a link.

Not only does fresh content help you get better search engine results, it helps the brand image of your site. An updated site ss to your client “we’re keeping up with the times, and are abreast of our industry’s technological changes.” Whether that means showing a client’s home in a real estate video podcast, or using the best reseal bags for your clients to take your cookies home, the update frequency and modernity of your site is a reflection on your company.

Don’t be afraid to explore new technology – but don’t be afriad to know when to draw the line either. Just because you can do Flash doesn’t mean you should make your entire site a Flash presentation. The fact that you can use RSS doesn’t mean you should if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Test everything you can on your site. Study the results and do some market research. The roll out new and improved versions of your site periodically. At bare minimum, add new pages of fresh content as frequently as your web site designer advises.

Nina

Ask Nina a Web Site Design Question
Web Site Design Newsletter
Web Site Design Services

Read the Rest of the Low Cost Web Site Design Secrets Series

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