AVOID COSTLY WEB DESIGN MISTAKES

Website Design
When designing a web site you must consider the follow:

1. What will your home page layout look like?
2. Choose your keyword phrases.
3. What will your home page text consist of?
4. Secure a domain name.
5. Design your sub-pages.
6. Get a merchant account (if needed).
7. Get tracking software.
8. Create meta tags.

Home page purposes & elements

• There are 2 purposes of a home page:
  1. To get people to it.
  2. To get people past it.
• There are 3 elements that make up a home page or web site:
  1. Navigation.
  2. Graphics.
  3. Text.

What are keyword phrases?

• If someone were to sit down on their computer and try to find your site, what words would they type in to the search engines? These are keyword phrases. Internet shoppers use keyword phrases to search for information and products. Keyword phrases can be anywhere from 1-5 words long, preferably 2-5 words in length because one-word keyword phrases are too general.

Home page text elements

• Title - The title is the name of your website / company.
• Headline - The headline is like a slogan of your company.
• Introduction - The introduction is a 25-word or less description of your business.
• Preview - The preview outlines the main theme ideas for your site.
• Body - The body is where you expound on the preview; tell about benefits and advantages of your business.
• Conclusion - This is a statement or a call to action. Get your visitors to do something.

Domain Name

• A domain name is the address that someone would type in to find your web site. It is the www.pittmanunlimited.com you used to get to our site.

Explanation & format of the sub-pages

• Sub-pages are the pages that are linked from one of the navigation buttons on the home page.
• The format of the sub-pages will essentially stay the same as to the home page.

What is a merchant account?

• One essential step in setting up an effective website is to make sure that you have a merchant account, or an online credit card processing system.
• People shop on the Internet because of its convenience, and if they can conveniently buy with a credit card, they won't buy, so a merchant account is essential.

The importance of tracking your statistics

• Tracking statistics allows you, as a website owner, to track information regarding your site. Everything from what web site your visitors are coming in from to what page they are leaving from and how long they're staying at each page.

The importance of meta tags

• Most traffic that web sites receive comes through search engines. Therefore, having a search engine presence is important to having a successful web site; however, it is not a do or die method of marketing a site. This will be cover more in our marketing tip.

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