Tips for a successful web site

• Quality Photographs -  to convert visitors into clients
  Save a thousand words with a good, high-quality photo. Bad photos reflect poorly and good photos augment your site immeasurably, don't stint here! A few quality pictures beats quantity every time. Too many photos makes for long downloads - many of your potential clients have dial-up -  guess what happens when they get tired of waiting.
  One quick way to higher conversion rates is good quality photos.
   

• Relevant and Rich Copy
  Your potential clients can't fondle the merchandise, so you have to stroke them with relevant inforamtion - that's what they want, all the info required to make a buying decision with confidence. Remember this or perish - address the wants and needs of your customers.
  
   

• Graphics
  If you don't have a corporate logo - get one. It ties everything together and is not expensive. Many sign companies and graphics companies can do this for fees from $250-$450 or so. Major corporations wouldn't think of operating without one and the same principle applies directly to your business, big or small. Having some extra graphics for your site tied to your logo as a theme can be a good cost cutter here as well - use it on your print ads, too. Corporate/business identity and branding is a required part of advertising success. Whoever makes your logo should furnish them in eps, jpeg and gif formats. The eps is for he printers and has great resolution, the jpg and gifs are for fast downloading on your site
   

• Add a Resources  Page
  While we don't recommend "link farms", exchanging links with other sites can be a good way to drive highly targeted traffic to your site and if the sites are similar, web search bots love your relevant links and this may drive your rankings higher. The days of grabbing any link you can are just about over, look for Google in particular to make major changes in their ranking algorithms to recognize relevant links and discard the rest. Too many sites with numerous inbound links are getting ranked where they shouldn't, and when the search results aren't relevant, the search engines loose consumer confidence.
  
   

• Meta Tags
  Yup, we use 'em, but do not rely on them. Simply making your page title, description and content match will help your rankings a lot. This is not rocket science, search engine robots can't "read", they basically look to see if your page title and contents match. Reinforce your title and keywords in your content. A bit of an art, but doable. Metas are generally ignored by search indexing bots. If you hire a company to change/edit your metas, you are foolish.
   

• Compare
  Look at the competition and see what they are doing that you aren't - especially if they rank higher.
   

• Search Engines
  Concentrate on Google, Yahoo and MSN, pretty much forget about the rest. These search engines constantly change their algorithms that they use to "rate" how high they will rank your site, so your rankings will bounce from time to time. The actual parameters the search engines use are not known - so anyone that tells you they have it all figured out, look for a bad experience in the future. Most pros have a pretty good working idea of the parameters and can get you ranked.
   

• AdWord Campaigns
  They work, there is a bit of a learning curve and some experimentation involved, but the ROI can be attractive and help your sales. You can find companies (like us) that will manage these campaigns for a fee.
   

• Paid Inclusions
  Paying another site to place a link or banner to your site can be great for business and can be tracked to check results. if you are one of the many site owners that feel you don't have to do this and refuse to part with a few dollars here and there, I'll eat your lunch with my competing site.
   

• Bells, Whistles & Flash
  Don't add a lot of fancy graphics and scrolling text, flash buttons, JavaScript options, etc. just because you can. Other than media sites, motorcycle sites and gamer sites, who needs that stuff? Don't put a lot of fancy junk in the consumers path or you will pay dearly for it.
   

• Last but not Least
  Design the site for the consumer, not your CEO or marketing group - pretty doesn't always get you what you want - and that's sales conversions. Web search bots don't know from pretty, they want content, and so do your clients. 
  
  More little tidbits:
  
  Don't assume that there are people out there that can't afford high speed Internet and therefore you can ignore them, for most part, they have no high speed options available (it's changing for the better, and fast). Keep your pages so they load fast or build a separate version for dial-up, why blow off almost half of the market?
  
  Monitor your stats - a very valuable source of info on what works and what doesn't.
  
  Monitor competing sites - look and learn - or perish. If you are outranked, you only get what's left.
  Be the big pig at the trough or you won't get much.

In this site, even if you don't hire us, you will find a good solid primer on just what a web site can do. Feel free to explore and learn. You can always contact us via email or phone, we will be happy to hear from you.