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

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 29:
Contact Information Builds Trust Faster

If you expect people to buy from you, you’ll have to let them know you’re a real person. You really don’t have any other choice. If you’d rather they went to your competitor, you could provide them with your webmaster address and let that be the end of it.

That’s a handy tactic if you are completely overwhelmed with new business, and want to build up a wait list while you’re in such hot demand.

But if you’re not, you will want to put up every way that you can for your prospective clients to contact you. At least one email is good, because most folks won’t want to leave their internet experience just to contact you. A physical address is better. It says “We’re a real company and we won’t disappear as soon as you turn your back.” That means no PO Boxes – use real snail mail addresses.

Every new entrepreneur is afraid that some crazy stalker will get the information off their site and camp outside their house.

Well, A, that rarely happens. B, who told you to use your home address? Use your business location.

What can happen, is that you get Christmas cards from clients, and a little bit of junk mail. Fair trade to get more sales.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 28:
Appeal to Wants Instead of Needs

Television advertising does it to us all the time. We make jokes about the many prescription drug commericals, but they wouldn’t keep making them if they weren’t successful.

And how do they start out?

A restless woman tosses and turns in her bed. We remember that feeling of not being able to get to sleep. We know we probably don’t have a severe problem, most of us are getting enough sleep to function. But the commercial reminds us by the time it’s over how wonderful it is to have seven to nine hours of restful, rejuvenating sleep. Ahhh.

So how is that appealing to wants, and not needs? After all, everyone needs sleep or they’ll start to hallucinate and eventually die.

It’s the same with your business, if you think about it. Your clients probably need to take a break from working. But they don’t just want to take a few days off to stay at home, they want a vacation. To sell to them, you can’t just tell them they need to take a break, or that they might as well spend those use-them-or-lose-them vacation days at a luxury destination.

Instead, you want to find the need, and fulfill it by giving them the wants, the benefits, what’s in it for them.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number :
Keep Your Sticky Plan Simple

Now that we’ve established how important it is to have a sticky site, what can you do to get the stickiness going?

A great many things. But first, we have to go over the most important point again.

You’ll want to pick one or two ways for your site to be sticky and build on them. Once you have three or four ways to make your site stickier, unless you are starting a resource or community site rather than a commercial site, you will probably want to build another site.

To create a sticky site, you can do up to three of the following activities at once:

• Constantly add new content with a blog, an RSS feed, or a directory of your own articles.
• Give them a way to return to your site on every page – there should be a link to your RSS feed or newsletter on every page of the site. You’ll want to send out an update at least monthly, but weekly or daily is best if you can.
• Make sure your copy is readable and easy to understand. Use bullets and headlines throughout copy to draw attention. Less than 20% of your paragraphs on web pages should be more than four sentences long.
• Build interaction into your site. If you have a blog, allow comments. Forums should be moderated and all topics should be answered within a time frame that matches the action of the community.
• Provide as many resources as you can. Not all of these resources need to be on another site, or be free. In fact, for some sites it is better if there are just a few areas of free content, such as articles or blog entries.

Stickiness is important enough for your site and your business for you to consult an expert if any of these suggestions don’t fit your site. Fill out the form below to drop me a line, and remember to reference this post. I’d be happy to talk with you.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 26:
Plan to Keep Your Part of the Web Sticky

The concept of “stickiness” has evolved from a simple concept to the philosophy of the future web. A “sticky” site is one that can keep a visitor on the site longer, and/or keep them coming back more often, preferably both. With the evolution of the static World Wide Web to Web 2.0, it’s becoming more important to build a site that isn’t just an online catalog.

The hardest part of keeping visitors on your site longer isn’t actually finding a way to keep them entertained. It seems that way at first, but once you pick a concept, building on it and keeping it as simple as possible is usually enough to keep the stickiness going. It’s more of an issue to keep the execution of the idea simple, rather than creating multiple solutions that confuse your visitors.

We’ll talk about simple changes you can make in order to have a sticky site next.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 25:
Be Almost Painfully Obvious with Your Call to Action

Imagine this scenario. You’re interested in buying a new flat-screen television, so you go to your favorite store that sells them, which is having a sale with cheap places and is located close to your house. They even have free delivery, so you figure this will be a painless trip.

As you’re wandering around the store, you see all kinds of information about the television that you can read. You see charts with price comparisons, and way at the back of the store are places where you can even sign up to have the catalog sent to your house, although you have to hunt for it, and ask several of the sales people where to find it.

You’re starting to get annoyed, when finally you find the area where there are actually TVs on display. You pick out the one you want, and start looking around for the check out area.

Only you can’t find it. You look everywhere you can think of, and finally ask one of the sales associates about it on the way out. He stares at you blankly and scratches his head, and after much consultation with other associates, directs you to a tiny closet on the far right wall of the store, near the bathrooms.

By this time, it’s been almost an hour and a half, and you’re so freaked out, you just take all the research you’ve put together and go to your second-favorite store. In this one, the TVs on sale are well displayed, and the cash registered are right at the front of the store, the way they are in most department stores. You buy your flat-screen television set and go home happy in about fifteen minutes. You vow never to waste another second in the first store again.

What’s the moral of this story? There are three.

Make your call to action almost painfully obvious – though not obtrusive. No one can buy your products if they don’t know that you’re selling them.
Make the buying process as simple as possible.
Don’t be bashful about selling your products or services. If you are, there’s someone else who won’t be.

Many new webmasters are nervous about the fact that their site sells something, but they shouldn’t be – if your prospects are interested, they may become clients. Indeed, if they are targeted visitors, they may Want to become clients.

And since, on the internet, a person can arrive at just about any part of your site other than the home page, you should have your call to action – whether it is to subscribe or to buy – on every single page of your site, in a prominent, consistent location.

Nina

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

Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 24 : Freshness is Key

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You’ve heard, hundreds of times probably, that people come to the internet for information. But what we often overlook is that you and I come to the internet for fresh, updated information. The very nature of the internet implies that the latest thing is available at any hour of the day.

So do so few site owners update their sites on an on-going basis?

Not only should you be updating the content on your individual pages from time to time, you also want to keep adding new pages and sections to your site. The internet is quickly moving to a more dynamic nature.

Leading internet brands such as Google, Yahoo, Technorati, Amazon and Ebay, are all tending towards an internet that is constantly moving into the era of a web that changes on the fly. It is one of the reasons that updating web technology is so popular.

Blogs, content management systems, RSS and any other technology that makes it easier to update portions of your site appeal to this new trend of the web, and it is no accident that frequently changing sites are at the top of the search engines.

Static web pages and sites are becoming a thing of the past. If you don’t want your site to be a dinosaur, join the era of the dynamic web and update your site.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 23 :
Master the correct tone of copy for your audience

You will want to match the tone of your copy to the audience that is coming to your site. The vast majority of the time you’ll want a business casual voice that is conversational – the exception would be circumstances where your audience does not speak in a conversational, business casual tone. Very few commercial sites are going to fit this bill, but it’s not entirely unheard of.

For example, if you had invented a social software such as an instant messenger, while your company might be commercial, your audience speaks in a casual voice, and so should your copy.

Part of having a conversational voice is writing copy that imitates the way you would speak to your future client if there were some way for you to see them step into your virtual store. You will want to be friendly, but not overly intimate. You should use the same short sentences that you would when speaking aloud.

A good way to test your copy for a conversational tone is to open up a best-selling novel and look at a page of dialogue. Instead of actually reading the page, just glance at the layout and look at your site.

When comparing the two, you won’t be looking for an exact match to white space and use of pronouns. Rather, you’ll want to see that the layout of the page looks similiar. If you find too many blocks of text on your page or have copy that reads like an instruction manual than a letter to an aquaintance, you’ll want to have a web site designer or copywriting expert look at your page and give you some pointers.

Sometimes departures from conversational copy will be necessary – but if these are the norm at your site, it’s worth having someone give it a second look.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 22:
Learn the Attributes of Effective Web Copy

Effective web copy has a sole function, and that is to convert prospects into buyers. Your online copy needs to be persuasive in getting the visitor to register, subscribe, qualify as leads, and ultimately, buy from your web site.

Remember you are trying to get someone you can’t see and have never met take a step towards building a relationship with you or your company. Since statistics tell us that over 80% of all buying decisions are emotional, that means that you must make an appeal to the logic to get your visitor to see that they have a need for the product or service, but one that is heavily supported by emotion, to appeal to their wants as well.

You can read more about effective copy writing and web site design in our article section, including nine tips for effective copywriting.

Nina

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Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 21:
Pay attention to how copy is displayed

Visitors don’t like to see long lines of text because they want information to be concise and quick. They want easy-to-read material. Use short, punchy sentences. Break up large chunks of text into short paragraphs or use bulleted lists.

When you get into details, make it a hyperlink to a new page around that topic. The “click here” statement should be a hyperlink taking your visitor to another page focused on describing your products or services in more detail. Use teasers. Hyperlinks are used for easy reading. This keeps your content short so visitors remain focused, yet a detailed description is just a click away.

This especially applies to blog posts. Most posts to a weblog should be about a third of the length of a regular article. If you find that your posts are normally longer than this, try putting excerpts on the front page instead of the entire post.
Nina

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