How Internet Marketing Can Increase Your Sales
Page 4

Now you need to focus on the final goal, which is to make it easy to navigate your site and find the information the prospect is looking for and make it easy to act on your call to action. This is a topic aptly named web site architecture and it is a very detailed and complicated subject. However there are some common sense rules to follow:

Understand your audience and prioritize the information that the majority of your visitors will find important, i.e. the information that is most important should appear as the top menu item or on the home page.

Make your navigation simple, logical, and clean. Don’t add 50 links down the side of the page leading to every piece of information on the site. Instead make 4-6 major categories with sub menus.

Effective page layout is critical. Don’t have too much going on a page, graphics scattered around, buttons in weird places, text in strange configurations, etc. A clean easy to read page without too many graphics will go a long way.

1. Avoid using a lot blinking banners, JavaScript effects, and animated images. These will immediately draw attention and may distract the visitor from where you want them to pay attention.
   
   
2. Use a color palette that is web friendly. Some sites use wild and bright colors that completely distract the visitor and make it difficult for them to concentrate on what you want them to accomplish.
   
   
3. Be careful with background images and designs. Sometimes your font on top of these images or designs is difficult to read.
   
   
4. Use a nice clean easy to read font. My favorite is a Verdana 11 point. It looks clean, is easy to read, and looks sharp on a well designed page.

These are just some basic guidelines and common sense things to make sure any site has. Web site architecture or usability is the topic of literally hundreds of books, papers, and focus group studies. This topic deserves some very careful thought.

Once you get the site created that meets all of these goals you need to make sure the prospects who it appeals to find there way to the site. How do you do that? Online marketing and search engine positioning strategies. These strategies are beyond the scope of this article, but understand that doing this is going to be critical to generating the traffic needed to produce high numbers of interested and qualified prospects. Our company helps businesses that need these services get traffic to their site. If you would like to learn more about this topic contact me directly.

Last Page - Next Page

© Copyright 2004 - 2007 by Michael Temple