Ten Basic Steps for Building a Web Site that Works
By: Lee Traupel

Assemble a Web site development plan that is integrated with your overall marketing processes. The content should be consistent with offline materials; the graphics/images don’t have to be identical with traditional media, but should be consistent with your overall branding, style guide, usage of colors, etc.

Hire a Web site design firm that understands your market position. Find one that won’t get “geek crazy” – meaning they are so in love with their own design capabilities, your site gets bogged down with graphics, plug ins, GIF garbage, etc. But, conversely, check your ego at the door when you work with your design firm – we’ve see so many good Web site designs ruined by clients who can’t or won’t listen to sound advice.

How to Create an Effective Web Site Navigation Structure-Part 1
By: Herman Drost

A ship captain traversing the open seas without a good navigation system will surely get lost. Maybe he’ll strike sharp rocks and his ship will sink. A visitor who arrives at your site and can’t navigate it for the information they seek, will surely get lost also and leave in frustration. Your ship (your web site) will also sink if this continues to happen.

Good site design means a good navigation structure for your web site. This means the visitor can find the information with ease.

Put yourself in the shoes of your Grandmother. Would she quickly and effortlessly be able to find the information she wants, or know what to click on to make the purchase? Don’t think that just because it is easy for you, it will be easy for others.

Visitors should not need to click more than three times during their navigation, to find the information they are searching for.

How to Create an Effective Web Site Navigation Structure-Part 2
By: Herman Drost

Searching for information on the Web has recently become like a mine field. You find the site you want, only to be greeted by pop-ups when you enter, pop-ups when you are on the site and pop-ups when you leave. Other sites use a flash introduction, make you wait several minutes (which feels like hours), until the page finishes loading. Heck, you just want to find the information as swiftly as possible without having to watch out for these mine fields.

A fast and simple navigation structure is essential for a successful web site. Visitors must have a good experience at your site, if you want them to return.

How to Design Your Navigation Structure

Flash Web Design: Pros and Cons
By: The Internet Digest

Flash is a powerful web technology that achieves a high level of visual impact from the graphical point of view. Unfortunately, it is widely misused in web design. There are still many problems with Flash, especially related to usability and search engine behaviour; we need to thoroughly understand what those problems are before we decide to use Flash for our site.

MS Frontpage
By: Clare Lawrence

Thinking of designing your own website?, MS Frontpage is a good starting point. It is widely available, well supported and reasonably priced.

Why MS Frontpage?

If you’re familiar with the other members of the Microsoft family such as Excel, Word or Powerpoint then you’ll find Frontpage easy to pick up.

A concept that most beginners find hard to get used to is that of client and server, in which the product only fully functions once published to a web server.

Frontpage copes well here, its preview function showing how the pages will look, once published.

Frontpage 2003 has improved its publishing utility and now incorporates many templates and wizards. So building a feedback form or question capture screen is very straightforward.

If you’re building a personal website or a corporate presence site, then frontage is great. If your planning a professional site or comprehensive e-commerce platform then a product such as Mcromedia Dream weaver maybe more suitable.

Features of Frontpage

Web tune up
By: Clare Lawrence

Are you dissatisfied with your websites current traffic? You wont be alone! In this brief article I give you advice on how to boost your traffic.

Content

A common mistake webmasters make is to misunderstand how search engines work and what they look for.

Google the leading search engine ranks sites according to there relevance to search phrases, so if your site is a domain registration service your pages need to include plenty of text about domains and registrations.

Your keyword density should not be too high or too low. I check the leading 10 sites for my chosen phrases and set my sites keyboard density using that as a benchmark.

Website Hospital
By: Clare Lawrence

Are you disappointed with your website traffic? Orders are not what you had hoped? This article suggests ways to improve.

Content
What are the keywords you’re targeting?
i.e. what phrases are your customers entering into the search engines?

Do they appear on your web pages, if so is their density too high or too low?

For most sites a density of 5 – 7% is disireable. Ie. Your keyword should appear 5 – 7 times e.g. 100 words.

Too low then your pages are not sufficiently relevant.

Too high and you may be tripping spam filters.

Meta Tags
Are you using your keywords in each of your tags, title, description and keywords.

Your own Ecommerce Website
By: Clare Lawrence

Thinking of setting up your own ecommerce or on-line store? I set my first site up in July 2002 and this article shares some of my experiences.

Research

Before you start, invest time in researching your market on line.

How many links do they have? Links are very important to success with Google.