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By Diane Standish
This may seem very basic, but if your site isn't pulling the
traffic or generating the sales you would like it to, it just
may not be the poor performance of classified ads, banner ads
or a similar service. The real reason for lackluster sales could
lie with your web site itself.
Telling someone their site has a lot of design problems is not
a very popular stance, particularly if that someone just spent
thousands of dollars to have it designed for them. Or, if they
gave up their nights and weekends to write it themselves.
The fact of the matter is, however, that the vast majority of
emails I get regarding lack of sales and consequent complaints
about other sites whose 'banner ads don't perform' or 'classified
ads don't work' have much more to do with my prospective customers'
poor web site design than the ad or banner service they're blaming.
Not popular, I know, but critical analysis is just that: critical.
This is one of the reasons why tracking statistics software
is essential to the health of a site. The site owner can track
exactly what's happening with an ad campaign and see for him
or herself what ads are working and how long someone stays at
a page. If a page gets lots of hits, but no one stays more than
a moment, chances are the page is suffering from the slow load
blues and no amount of advertising will generate sales.
One of the most common errors I see when analyzing other sites
is, unfortunately, what a new site owner wants most - lots of
graphics. Big, beautiful, full color images; spinning graphics
everywhere; animated images at every corner and on every line;
jumping, bouncing, flashing, bubbling images next to every paragraph.
Great fun, but the more images on a page and the larger the
size of the file, the longer it will take to load. Try to remember
not everyone out there has a 56k modem hooked up to their 400
MhZ, 164 MB RAM CPU.
Think content. A few images will spice up a page, and enable
you to "hide" valuable keywords for search engine
placement, but too many large image files will send your visitor
surfing before they even know what a great product you have
to offer.
A good rule of thumb: keep images under 12k and try to keep
each page limited to 5 or less files. A page should load in
15 seconds or less with a 28.8k modem. Again, it's content,
not cool, that will keep your visitors from moving on, and keep
them coming back once they've found an interesting site.
For instance, a customer wrote me and explained that he had
spent a lot of money having a web site written for him, but
he wasn't making any sales. He wanted to start a progressive
advertising campaign to promote the site.
However, when I visited his site I knew immediately that any
advertising dollars would be completely wasted. Images the size
of the Grand Canyon covered every inch of every page, and what
was worse, no image size specs (height, width) were specified
in the HTML. The pages were filled with very nice, but very
large photos, and very little text content. Even on my top of
the line system, his site suffered from slow loading, big time.
No matter what promotional campaign he undertook, and no matter
how much money he spent, he'd never make a sale with his expensive
site. Any visitors in their right mind would leave his site
long before ALL those truck loads of images loaded.
Bottom line: think content; keep it simple; avoid too many images;
avoid too many photos; keep animation simple - and limited.
Don't talk your web designer into putting a lot of large image
files on your pages. Then, and only then, plan your advertising
campaign. And then, keep updating your site's content to make
it dynamic, interactive and attractive to repeat visitors. If
your site never changes, if your content is never updated, what's
the incentive for a visitor (translate customer) to keep returning?
E-mail to use in print Reprint permission for Internet use (use
on web sites or in e-newsletters) is granted only if all information
below this notice, including the WWIO web site link and authors
biography are included as written.
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Diane Standish is Publisher of the eCave NetGazette. She has
15 years of marketing experience, both off and online in computer
and business services, and is founder and President of a multi-million
dollar service business. Reach her by email at
ezine@ecave.com or visit her
site, eCave Internet Services, at http://www.ecave.com |
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