When breaking into website design, there are five rules you need to follow in order to ensure you optimize your website’s performance.

1. Do not use splash pages

Splash pages have no purpose other than to be a pretty introduction to your website. They are pages that usually say nothing more than “welcome” or “enter here” but take a long time to load and contain none of your website’s content. When trying to optimize your website’s performance, it is important to stay away from any superfluous text or images that don’t show a visitor your site’s value.

2. Refrain from banner advertisements

Banner Advertisements appear to be nothing more than a waste of website space. Most visitors have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements anyway, and even those that have not only see banner ads as a desperate attempt to make more money at their expense. Since they are rarely appealing to anyone, it is best to avoid them. Good website design has nothing more than the content it is trying to provide. If you are searching for extra ways to make money with your website, strategically placed affiliate links are much less invasive.

3. Have simple and clear navigation

The navigation menus you use are vital as you optimize your website’s performance. They should be simple and easy to understand, so much so that even a child will be able to use it. Complicated Flash menus or dropdown menus detract from your site’s content. And since these features also make website design more difficult, avoiding them will not only keep visitors from leaving your site, but will also save you time. There is never a good reason to make your site difficult to navigate, no matter how attractive you think it looks.

4. Make it clear which page the visitor is on

If your site has several pages, you may want to ensure that they always know which page they are visiting at that moment. By doing so, you give the visitor their own history, so if they need to navigate to or away from that page, the entire process will be seamless. If your visitors are confused, they may leave your site.

5. Website Design and Audio

Audio can be an annoyance to visitors, especially visitors that are going to be staying on your site for a long time. Audio looping can cause frustrations, and if you are trying to optimize your website’s performance, it is important that you do not have excessive amounts of audio. If you insist on adding audio to your site, make sure the visitor has some control over it, either by changing the volume or providing a mute button that is easy to locate and works immediately. Don’t forget, some of your visitors may be at work, or other public places where the audio can be a tremendous distraction.

Discover more information and resources that will create immediate results, visit Larry’s site at www.elitewebtactics.com.

Copyright 2008 Larry Lang All Rights Reserved. Lang Enterprises Inc. Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article as long as you leave all of the links active, do not edit the article in any way, www.elitewebtactics.com

Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign. The success of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals. Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business.

If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, there are steps that you can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors over a given period of time, say a month.

However, just because hordes of people have visited your site, this does not necessarily mean that your site is successful. It is equally important to monitor the people that actually performed the action that your site was set up for and figure out the ratio of people who visited to people who took action. This is called your conversion rate.

To find your site conversion rate, take the number of people who performed the desired action on your site and divide that number by the number of total visitors to your site. Then multiply that result by 100. For example, you had 2000 visitors to your site in a given month. 25 of those visitors performed the action desired on your site. Your conversion formula would be (25/2000) X 100. In this case, the conversion rate would be 1.25%.

Another important rate to track is your sales conversion rate. If the desired action on your site is to provide a name and email address, how many of those people actually bought your product? Not everyone who provides their name and email address will actually buy.

After tracking these rates, you may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you are not getting good results. One way to boost your rates is to get increased traffic to your site. This can be done by launching a search engine optimization campaign so that people can find your site more readily.

Another factor to examine is the ease of use of your website. If the goal of your website is for a visitor to fill out a form, is the form easily accessible and understandable? If it’s not clear or if the visitor has to perform multiple steps to accomplish the goal, they may just move on to another site.

Finally, you may want to have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure.

Evaluating your website performance is an ongoing process. Constantly tracking your conversion rates and analyzing your marketing campaigns can make the difference between profit and loss in your business. The biggest marketing mistake you can make is to just put up your website and forget it!

– Resource Box –
This article may be distributed freely on your website, as long as this entire article, including working links and this resource box are unchanged. For more tools, tips, and tricks of the trade, go to: www.elitewebstrategies.com – Empowering You to Empower Your Business. Copyright 2007 Larry Lang All Rights Reserved. Lang Enterprises Inc.

When developing your website, think how to structure your website directory, where to locate your web pages in regards to the index.htm (home page) file. Place the more important files in the root directory. Then create other directories under your root directory in which to place other web pages that are not as important. By doing so, it is easier to find files you want to edit, delete, or move somewhere else.

Put all of your image files into an image directory and then create sub-directories under that. An example would be to have a directory called photo and place all photographs of business associates in it. Also make a sub-directory called banner and put all of your banners, logos, and ebook covers in that directory.

Below is a simple example of a directory structure:

It is a good idea to have a “download area”. Since you will have several different kinds of downloads, the areas will be different. For free reports or viral e-books you will give away, don’t be too worried if someone figures out where they can download all of them without your knowledge.

Some say to place downloads into weird directories and change the names every month. In my opinion, this is a lot of work to protect downloads you will give away and are viral in nature.

When it comes to downloads for which you will be charging money, I recommend checking out the software at Elite Web Solutions. This software creates a very secure area. The customer receives a link to a download page after the sales confirmation information is processed and authenticated. Pages may even have time limits set on them. After a certain amount of time, the link to the download page is no longer valid. This software also collects the e-mail address and name of the person purchasing your product. It places that information into an auto-responder file format, allowing you to export the file into your regular auto-responder.

If you are using a shopping cart, such as Kick Start Cart, Kick Start Cart has this function already built into it on a limited basis. So, you are all ready to go.

You will not stop people from sharing your work or giving it to friends, but you can control how and when they get it from you.

– Resource Box –

This article may be distributed freely on your website, as long as
this entire article, including working links and this resource box are unchanged.

Copyright 2006 Larry Lang All Rights Reserved.
Lang Enterprises Inc
www.elitewebstrategies.com