"My website has been live for 3 months, but yet I get no traffic to talk about?"

Being part of the website design and web hosting business for over 5 years, I have seen countless clients cancel their hosting services, and even throwing away their domain names.

Personally I believe that there is no site that is designed, that cannot do well. Any site that has/can be made, can reach it's full potential on the Internet.

What the owner of the website does not understand, is that you can not just put up a website, and expect it to do well. Websites need to be nurtured, and marketed, otherwise they will fail!

Please view the 5 most important things to do, to get your website noticed, listed, and to make your website "work for you".

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Your web site should be-

• visitor friendly to navigate
• search engine friendly for the crawlers
• Automated with ecommerce and subscription forms...

Your visitor should get the feeling that you know your 'stuff'.

Here are few tips to show your web site professionalism:

1. Uniform Layout and colors:

When you see Arial font on one page, Verdana on another or some other on different page and top menu navigation on one page and sidebar navigation on another... How do you feel about the site? Immediately what strikes your mind is 'Newbie webmaster'. Keep a consistent lay out through out the web site. You can use SSI(server side inclusion) to update the whole site with in seconds. http://www.webmasters-central.com/wd/ssi-content.shtml

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In my last article, ‘Web Analytics – Getting It Right’, I discussed some of the powerful ways that web site statistics can be used to improve an ecommerce business. That article was about success. This article shows that no matter how hard you try, you can still get it wrong. This is a story about failure.

It is often difficult and embarrassing to admit failure and sometimes it is even difficult to see it, even when it is right in front of us. But only by examining our failures can we hope to improve and progress. Hopefully, this article will help others avoid the same mistakes we made.

Keep in mind that web analytics is not always about counting traffic. In fact, that is usually only a small part of it. It is mostly about offering better products and services, improving the website and making each visit to our website a more pleasant experience. It is also about building customer loyalty and confidence.

This incident started when we received a request to cancel web site tracking service for an account. This happens occasionally, but of course, a cancellation is never a welcome sight. Try as we might, we cannot please everyone. So we learn to accept these things; it is just business.

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Your websites theme is very important to its success. When your site is indexed by search engines, they actually review your sites theme as well as other content. The theme must be carefully planned. Here are some tips for developing a proper web site theme that will make search engines happy as well.

Choose a design that revolves around keywords and keyword phrases. For example, if your sites keywords are sporting goods, choose design elements that are associated with sporting goods. Use bright colors such as red and yellow. Use elements that are high impact and exciting, similar to thoughts associated with sporting goods.

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There are a number of ways guaranteed to turn-off visitors to your web site. These are worth considering as you either design a site, or revise a site. Turn-offs generally can be defined as anything that impedes the user from quick and easy (intuitive) use of your site. Turn-offs also are often the result of gratuitous use of technical 'bells and whistles'.

One of the major turn-offs is a sloooow loading site. There can be a number of contributing factors to this:

* Large graphics files (meaning the file size in bytes). Graphics files need to be optimised to reduce the file size to a minimum to enable them to travel through the Internet in minimum time.

* Splash Screens. These are often Flash graphics and can take a long time to 'load', especially where there is limited bandwidth. Bandwidth is the carry capacity of the Internet, the bigger the faster - a bit like comparing a fire hose and a garden hose. Unfortunately in Australia bandwidth tends to be at the smaller end of the scale. Splash screens also annoy repeat visitors, as they revisit the site and have to wait for the screen to load (not everyone knows how to properly Bookmark).

* Excessively long pages. Pages should generally be no longer than three screen-fulls (scrolls). Also, bear in mind that most people scan web pages rather that read in detail (until they find the specific page they seek).

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I’ve seen articles (and websites) that suggest you can buy a website template and skip the expense of hiring a professional website designer. Recently, I read several testimonials from the very satisfied customers of a website template vendor that mentioned how quickly they were able to get their sites done. The template vendor commented that he/she had known people to complete their websites in around two hours.

With experiences and statements like these, it not surprising that more and more people are attempting to build websites themselves. I think that’s great in a way. For those of us who are concerned about the trends in the web industry and community, it’s great to see more people becoming web oriented and involved.

However, I think there is a misunderstanding by many of these people about what a website template really is – and is not. At this point, I think it only fair that I should mention that I am a professional website designer (the person you supposedly don’t need anymore). I should also mention that this is not my sole motivation for questioning this idea of templates replacing web designers. As a matter of fact, I think website templates are extremely useful. I recommend using them to my clients as a way of getting a great graphical look for their site. What I hope to convey is that template consumers need to know what they are and what they aren’t getting with a template.

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Are you fond of applying and scrambling old and new design clichés in one helpless web page? Are you one of the thousands not yet enlightened that ‘too much of a good thing is bad’? Are you too engrossed in improvising other designs and not coming up with your own?

Being a design dinosaur is a common sickness among designers who tend to be exposed and awed in latest design clichés coming out and copying or improvising them to concentrate on making his / her original design. But this practice isn’t entirely wrong, though. There’s always some "monkey see, monkey do" in the design world. Someone comes up with a great logo, Website, package and the next thing you know, they’re everywhere.

What’s bothersome in using most design clichés is that it implies you're not using up your own talents as a designer. In graphic designing, the ultimate creation to make you cry “Eureka!” may come upon us on our thirtieth attempt. This moment will happen once you really challenge and stretch yourself.

Here, we give you several examples of design clichés which uses seem to have gotten out of hand:

• Swooshes – this logo was started by Nike and before we knew it, "swooshes" were everywhere on the Net. It’s obviously been successful for Nike. But if your Internet company try to use this swoosh along with thousands, we can’t guarantee if anyone would remember you.

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I’ve been asked, “How do I design a successful Web site?”

I often respond, “Do you know the fastest way to ruin a new Web site design?” As you might suspect, the answer is, “Lack of proper planning beforehand.”

Let's put it another way. In programming, there's an old axiom, which states: "The sooner you start your coding the longer it takes to finish."

Planning out your Web site before you build it is essential. To borrow a technique from the film industry, I recommend that you create a storyboard, which is a type of a flow chart of your new Web site design. You don’t have to be an accomplished artist to draw out your idea, but it’s essential to create it on paper first.

On each piece of paper, the goal is to have room for an image at the top, plus space underneath for writing down information. As you might suspect, the first page to start with is your home (or welcome) page, which will typically have the most information as it will contain the page the people visit before they enter your site and as people go through your site, the will encounter more information (in tiers) as they go down.

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As your Internet business grows, your free time will dwindle. Site changes will become time consuming and stressful. Automate your site and you can use your time for better purposes.

Automating

Automating a web site can cut out tedious tasks such as updating HTML, FTPing pages and changing site designs. Advanced automated web sites can send follow-up emails, send out newsletters, manage sales, do invoicing, track users visits and more. There is practically no function that can’t be accomplished.

There are many different types of automated web sites. Typically, the platforms break down into two categories, prepackaged or made to order. Automated web sites can range in complexity from simply using server side includes to full database driven sites. Server side includes are little snippets of code that allow content from one file to show on many pages. A database driven site, on the other hand, pulls content from an online database.

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Web standards are technologies, established by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and other standards bodies, that are used to create and understand web-based content. In order for the Web to reach its full potential, the most fundamental Web technologies must be compatible with one another and allow any hardware and software used to access the Web to work together. Therefore, to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential, protocols and guidelines have been developed that ensure long-term growth for the Web.

How does your business benefit from adopting web standards

-Lower development costs:

This is due to simpler development and maintenance using more semantic and structured HTML. The one site will work with all major browsers.

-Lower hosting costs:

Less HTML results in smaller file sizes and quicker downloads. Smaller file sizes mean lower bandwidth which will lower hosting costs.

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