Web Site Design: Frequently Asked Questions

I've just built a web site but don't have much traffic. What is the best thing I could do to fix this?

What is the next best thing I can do?

What does it cost to me to get a Web Site?

I have a Web site, am in the search engines, and watch my traffic with a counter; but the site still isn't working. What should I do?

I don't have a lot of money. What's the best approach I can take now for getting a Web site going?

To how many search engines should I submit my site?

What are the most important things I should consider in designing my web site?

I've just built a web site but don't have much traffic. What is the best thing I could do to fix this?

The best form of advertising on the Web is gnerally through the search engines. The best thing you can do to get high placement on the search engines is to find creative ways to build quality links from other sites to your site. You also need to make sure these pages that link to your site are in the search engine databases; that is, they have been already submitted. The search engines like to give prominent positioning to sites that have lots of links going into them. For example, if you have a handyman business, ask the local suppliers you use for your paint, lumber, and other materials to list you as a service provider for their products on their web sites. Show them how it would help their sales, as people who buy their supplies sooner or later will need more professional help. You can also swap links, adding a link to the supplier in return. We can help you with ideas for link building. If they do build the links but don't submit their new pages to the search engines, you can do it for them. You don't need their password or their permission or anything else to submit their pages - just do it. It's best to be sure you can find their pages with the link to you in the search engines before you submit your own pages. (It is best to have your link to their site in the engines before you approach them.)

Note: You don't really need to get their permission to submit their pages that link to yours. The search engines use spiders that sooner or later find those pages anyway. If company A has submitted their site and their site has a link to Company B, the spiders that do the automatic submission will eventually find Company B and submit it to the search engines. This could take a year to happen. If you are Company B you can speed your listing quality up by submitting Company A if they are not in the search engines.

If someone doesn't want their pages indexed, it is their reponsibility to put the proper metatags on their pages to prevent this. Otherwise, the search engines will eventually assume their page should be indexed. You should never, however, edit someone else's page without their permission.

Second, be sure your page design in your site is around quality keyword phrases that have a minimum of competition and are used frequently in searching the engines (see the next question). Your external links should link to your pages using thes same quality keyword phrases. We can show you how to do all of this or you can get our e-Book and do it yourself.

You should also consider creative ways to do off-line advertising. Put your web site address everywhere you can thing of - business cards, letterheads, t-shirts, library bulletin boards, ...you name it!

What is the next best thing I can do?

Have a professional define the best keyword phrases for your site, help show you how to use them in your page design, redo the page, and then submit your web site to the search engines. Over 85% of Interent users use the search engines to find what they are looking for. Quality search engine positioning is a very complex and competitive process. Without the proper positioning, you may have a wonderful web site, but nobody can find it. It's like building a wonderful theme park in a remote and exotic location, only you never built any road to it. Then you wonder why there is no traffic. Let's say you sell nutritional supplements on the web and you sell glucosomine (which is good for joint pain) as a product. You use this as a keyword in submitting your site so people can find the product. Unfortunately, most people will probably use "joint pain" or "healing joint pain" to search for the product. We can evaluate each phrase for its quality. You're not thinking problem to solution, and you can lose a lot of potential customers. Moreover, you now have a lot of competition in the search engines since your competitors are probably indexing on the solution instead of the problem. This is why you need professional help in planning and submitting. The keyword phrases you use are also important in the page design. Choosing the correct phrases is important at the very beginning of the design. Purchase our search engine analysis and keyword analysis service or our e-Book to accomplish this.

What does it cost to me to get a Web Site?

Wrong question. If you know anything about marketing, this is the last question to ask. The first question is always to define the problem. What is it you are trying to do? The Web site may not even be the answer to that! Try to define your problem you are targeting and then work to the solution. Bring us in as a consultant if you wish and we can help you work with the design and storyboarding. Start simple, and put work (and financial resources) into getting it well positioned on the search engines.

More specific to the question - we've started small businesses with about $600- $2000 in the Web site startup. We, of course, can handle large Web sites. We suggest at least $1500 - $2000 in the startup with some of that used for the initial search engine optimization.

What is a keyword phrase?

This is a short phrase of three to five words that is used in designing web pages for the purpose of optimizing the positioning of that page in the sites returned to someone using a search engine. Most people use keyword phrases when seaching instead of single words to minimize the site listings returned. Most web pages are optimized for a single keyword phrase and for a single search engine. An example of a keyword phrase might be "healing joint pain", which is more specific and targeted than "healing."

I have a web site, am in the search engines, and watch my traffic with a counter, but the site still isn't working. What should I do?

A counter really doesn't tell you much. Feedback on how your site is working is essential, and should be available at every step of the process. This enables you to correct the step where your site is failing.

First, you need to know if other sites are linking to yours. If they aren't, you can't expect others to find your site in the search engines. When we started our analysis, we found the pages of our site of 800+ pages getting the hardest hit were down in the site at a very low level and hadn't been updated in six years. A large number of other sites had linked to those particular pages (we didn't know this), and those pages were very popular as a result of these links. We can evaluate the sites linking to your site, and when we design a site we make sure there is at least one link to your site.

Second, you need to know if you are in the search engines and positioned well. If you aren't there, nobody is going to find you. We can evaluate the number of links to your site. We can also tell you where you positioned are in all the major search engines.

Third, you need to know if people are clicking through to your site from the search engines - what search engines they use, what keyword phrases they used in getting to your site, and what pages in your site are the doors they used. You need to know if you have the right keyword phrases. In addition, the search engine entries must be motivational and make them want to come to your site. You need feedback on which search engine entries are working. If your site is hosted by us ($20/month) you get this information at no extra cost.

Fourth, once they click through to your site, it has to meet their need or solve their problem and then call for action - the action you want them to take.

You need to be able to measure the success of each of these steps and take appropriate action where the breakdown occurs. We can help with this measuring each step objectively.

I don't have a lot of money. What's the best approach I can take now for getting a Web site going?

1. Purchase a domain name (about $20/year). The name you want may be gone tomorrow, so find the one you want and buy it today.
   
   
2. Purchase a site on which to host your pages. We sell hosting services for $15/month or $145/year. (See step 7). You save more by purchasing a year at a time. You want a site that can provide you statistics on referrals. We provide that for our sites at no extra charge.
   
   
3. Build a simple web site of only a few pages - maybe only a single page. It should define the user's problem or need, tell how you can meet it, how your solution is unique, and then call for action. Give them contact information. Want multiple pages? Create a home page, an About page (tell them about you & your company), a content page, a detail page on your solution, service, or product, and a FAQ page. The FAQ page establishes you as an authority and helps to bring them back again. These pages can often be done using a a simple HTML editor. In most cases make your site content-driven.
   
   
4. Upload your pages to your web site (we have free programs for this).
   
   
5. Put that web address on everything: business cards (print them yourself), stationary, automobile. Add it as a part of your signature on all your emails. Print mailing labels and use them for your return address when paying your bills. I read somewhere that approximately 24 people will see that return label as it goes to the recipient. Build as many paths as you can for advertising your web site.
   
   
6. Spend the money you do have on getting those pages high on the search engine. Purchase our service or e-Book for search engine submission analysis and for the submission. This service tells you what keyword phrases to use and how to incorporate them into the design of your pages. Edit your pages to take advantage of the result of this analysis and upload them again to your site. You then may wish us to do a professional submission of your site to the search engines. We can do that.
   
   
7. Make sure you have a method of analyzing your traffic. On all sites we host we provide at no extra cost an analysis tool that will return the hit rates of every page on your site along with a lot of other additional information. This enables you see what traffic you are getting and to fine tune your pages for even better results.

To how many search engines should I submit my site?

Many of the search engines - even the major ones - share common databases. For this reason, submitting to a large number of engines does not help much and is really not a good idea. Another factor is that most of the search traffic is really directed to the major engines. Google, for example, gets almost 40% of the traffic. The smaller engines often stay financially viable by selling your email address to the spammers. You give them your email address when you submit. The result is that your spam traffic dramatically increases after submission to these engines. The difference between the larger search engines is not the database, but how they search the database and make their positioning decisions. We know to which engines to submit, how often to submit, and how each search engine looks at your site uniquely.

What are the most important things I should consider in designing my web site?

We consider the selection of the proper keyword phrase and how this phrase is used in the design as the most important aspect of the design. This, along with the link popularity (quantity and quality of links to your site) determines your position in the search engines.

Jakob Nielsen, one of the foremost web site designers, says that the most important aspect of the design is for your web site to load quickly. At a 56K dial-up speed, the home page should load in 10 seconds or less. More time than that, and you can expect about 25% of your audience will surf off before the page finishes loading. Below that, and you only lose about 7%. At broadband, shoot for a 1 second loading speed. Most web site design tools will show, in the status bar, the current load time for the displayed page at a specified connection speed. This means the combined file size for the page and all graphics should be 40K or less. We put less attention to this today with the use of broadband increasing - the issue depends a lot on the audience.

The second important aspect is probably the content. In most cases you want your site content-driven. If you are the client, why did you go to your page in the first place? Does your site meet their need? One client with a popular product (solar equipment) wondered why he needed a web site. I asked him if he got the same questions over and over again. He said he did. For example, one popular question is how long it would take to amortize a solar heating system (for the house heating or hot water). Putting those answers on a web site could save him time as well as establishing him as an authority. Now when the local television statement interviews him, he flashes his web site to the audience for those wishing to know more.

Other things to consider are making your web site sticky (so the client stays there awhile, seeing your logo and branding over and over again). The site should also be dynamic, changing often so they want to come back. We have ways of doing this.

All of these issues are things that we can help you with, but notice that none of these require extensive graphic design, animations, and other fancy stuff. Those things are nice, but are not the key aspects of your design in most cases. In fact, animations can kill you. Not only are they slow loading, but the motion can draw the user's attention to the wrong place. If you do use animation, it should draw the user to the message, not to another page or advertising for someone else.