If your viewer never sees your page, you have no chance to make the sale. The current best data is that you have about 5 seconds before the viewer becomes bored. Pages that have more than 35K of text and graphics will take longer than that to load.

Too much Java Script, fancy graphics or other slow features will make your site slow for some users, and your chance for a sale is reduced or eliminated before your prospect even sees your page.

If your page is large, make sure you have interesting content for the viewer to watch while the page is loading. If the prospect is not looking for what has not yet loaded, then your prospect will not become bored.

Eye Catching Look

Once your page has loaded it then becomes important to catch the viewers attention to the part of the page that your product/service/information offering resides. The 'Look' or design of your site is critical to perform this function.

Furthermore, many prospects will not make the decision to purchase the first time that they come to your site. To get them to come back they must be able to remember your site. One important technique to help your prospect remember your site is have an Eye Catching Look. They remember your look, which helps them remember you. 

Meaningful Content

Once you have your prospects attention, then you need to start to attract his interest. Interest is attracted only with the content that is found on the site. If you have a beautiful site that is without content, there is not much chance that your prospect will be interested in your offerings.

Content should also be written to generate desire for your product. People buy what they want. Write your copy to emphasize the benefits so that your prospects will want your product. 

Easy Navigation

Ease of Future Updates

The information on your site must be creditable. Old outdated information causes loss of credibility quickly. To make sure your site is up to date, it must be easy to keep up to date.

Updates will be of three types:

1. Product description updates that are made to the database that runs your shopping cart (e-commerce sites only). These updates should be able to be made without you needing to know any web language.
2. Content updates that effect only one or two pages. These updates should take no more than the few minutes it takes to make your changes in an editor. 
3. Navigation Updates that cause a change to be made to every page (or to a large subset of pages) on your site. When you add new pages that should show up on your navigation structure it is critical that you be able to change every page that has that navigation structure so that your sites look, feel and navigation is the same on every page of the site.

If these two types of updates are not easy to perform, then your site will cost you too much money in the long run.

Domain Name Selection

There are two important components to domain name selection.

1. Can your prospect remember your domain name.
2. Does your domain name help your site be found by the search engines.

Unfortunately these goals are often contradictory.

For a domain name to be remembered, it should be short (hard to do now) and/or catchy. For search engines to use your domain name to find your site your domain name should have your important search engine keywords contained within it, with the '-' character separating each word.

There are several solutions to solve this conflict. Call us and we can help you.

Search Engine Placement

Search Engine Placement is critical. If people can't find your site, they won't make a purchase.

Having said that Search Engine Positioning is important, there are other traffic generating techniques that are often even more effective.

We will be happy to help you build a site that works well on search engines, but we recombined that you make a complete marketing plan that uses more than just the search engines.

Mouse-over Effects

Mouse-over Effects (graphics that change when they are pointed at by the mouse) are often a highly requested feature. We will be happy to build your mouse-over effects, but in almost every case there is no data that indicates that they make your site more effective. In fact we can show you many cases where they make web sites less effective.

When a user is ready to click on a link (he has made a decision to act), he then points to your graphic. At this point your mouse-over effect becomes active, and distracts your customer, potentially making him forget to take the action. Your site is designed to encourage your prospects to take actions that encourage him to buy. Don't build distractions into your site. Build attractions to get actions. 

Eye-catching Animation Effects

Animations can have three problems associated with them:

1. Load time is often long.
2. Some animation techniques need plug-ins that people need to download.
3. Most animations do not contain significant information content about your products.

Thus many animations don't help with any of the goals of your site. They are fun (if people wait for them). They are like TV (which many marketing people have dealt with before), but you need to take a hard look at if they actually work on a web site when someone is working on a 56K modem, and maybe has not loaded all of the latest and greatest software.

Links Page

When the web first started, everyone loved to provide 'Links Pages'. They were viewed to exemplify the most important features of the web. However it did not take very long for web site owners to realize that links pages sent their visitors to other sites, never to return. Any link that leaves your site you need to consider very carefully. Don't send your visitors to other venues without a very good reason. Once your visitor leaves, there is probably no way to get him back.

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