HOW TO CREATE A SUCCESSFUL WEBSITE

■STEP 1: Start by creating a basic road map. This will set the tone for what you’re doing. Keep in mind that this is an evolutionary process. In the beginning, don’t try to be Amazon.com. (It took them years to become a web powerhouse.) Grandiose visions are fine, but you need to build up to realizing them. Start small and grow big.

■STEP 2: Determine what tools you need to help drive the right traffic to your site. The web is a very competitive space—today there are over 11 billion web pages, so you need to be strategic in deciding what works best for you. Some of these tools include search engine marketing, e-mail marketing and search engine optimization. This then is the time to decide how and where you’re going to spend your (limited) marketing budget.

■STEP 3: How will you determine what’s working on your site and what isn’t? Some industry best practices will work for you; others may need some tinkering. Deciding how to measure your ROI (return on investment) and other crucial metrics is key to the success of your business. The best way to find this out is through website traffic reports, but you should listen to your customers as well. They will let you know what market tactics are working for you, what ones aren’t, and how to improve your results. You’ll need to go further than that—but don’t worry, there’s a lot of help out there to make these tasks easier.

■STEP 4: Apply what you learn from your metrics. These include page views, length of visits, site traffic volume and trends, and you should study them to improve your site’s content, navigation and performance. This enables you to offer a better experience to your visitors.

Sounds simple, but like any successful venture, it will take hard work and refinements to ensure the success that you desire from your Internet presence.

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FIRST IMPRESSIONS COUNT FOR WEB

Internet users make up their minds about the quality of a website in the blink of an eye, a study shows. Researchers found that the brain makes decisions in just a 20th of a second of viewing a webpage. They were surprised as they believed it would take at least 10 times longer to form an opinion.

Speedy conclusions
The study, published in the journal Behavior and Information Technology, also suggests that first impressions have a lasting impact. The Canadian team showed volunteers glimpses of websites, lasting for only 50 milliseconds. The volunteers then had to rate the websites in terms of their aesthetic appeal. The researchers found that the speedily formed conclusions closely tallied with opinions of the websites that had been made after much longer periods of examination.

Gitte Lindgaard, of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, the lead researcher of the paper expressed her surprise at the results. "My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds," she told the website of the Nature journal, which reported the research. The judgments were being formed almost as quickly as the eye can take in information.

Lasting impressions
The researchers also believe that these quickly formed first impressions last because of what is known to psychologists as the "halo effect". If people believe a website looks good, then this positive quality will spread to other areas, such as the website's content. Since people like to be right, they will continue to use the website that made a good first impression, as this will further confirm that their initial decision was a good one.

As websites increasingly jostle for business, Dr Lindgaard added that companies should take note. "Unless the first impression is favorable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors," she warned.

Story from BBC NEWS, Published 01/16/2006

10 WORDS NO LONGER IN VOGUE

Here are a few terms that have faded from everyday use over the past 10 to 20 years and this info should be helpful for 20-somethings; when the more senior people in your life use one of these terms, you'll know what they're talking about. [1]

1. Intranet

Popular in the mid-90s, the term "intranet" usually referred to a private business network running the Internet Protocol and other Internet standards such as HTTP. It was also used to describe an internal Web site that was hosted behind a firewall and was accessible only to employees. Today, every private network runs IP, so you can just use the term virtual private network or VPN to describe a private IP-based network.

2. Extranet

An "extranet" referred to private network connections based on Internet standards such as IP and HTTP that extended outside an organization, such as between business partners. Extranets often replaced point-to-point electronic data interchange (EDI) connections that used standards such as X12. Today, companies provide suppliers, resellers and other members of their supply chain with access to their VPNs.

3. Web Surfing

When is the last time you heard someone talk about surfing the Web? You know the term is out of date when your kids don't know what it means. To teens and tweens, the Internet and the World Wide Web are one and the same thing. So it's better to use the term "browsing" the Web if you want to be understood.

4. Push Technology

The debate over the merits of "push" versus "pull" technology came to a head in 1996 with the release of the PointCast Network, a Web service that sent a steady stream of news to subscribers. However, PointCast and other push technology services required too much network bandwidth. Eventually, push technology evolved into RSS feeds, which remain the preferred method for publishing information to subscribers of the Internet. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

5. Application Service Provider (ASP)

During this decade, the term "Application Service Provider" evolved into "Software-as-a-Service." Both terms refer to a vendor hosting a software application and providing access to it over the Web. Customers buy the software on a subscription basis, rather than having to own and operate it themselves. ASP was a hot term prior to the dot-com bust. Then it was replaced by "SaaS." Now, the latest buzz is to talk about "cloud computing."

6. Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)

Coined by former Apple CEO John Sculley back in 1992 when he unveiled the Apple Newton, the term "personal digital assistant" referred to a handheld computer. PDA was still in use in 1996, when the Palm Pilot was the hottest handheld in corporate America. Today, the preferred generic term for a handheld like a Blackberry or an iPhone is a "smartphone".

7. Internet Telephony

You need to purge the term "Internet telephony" from your vocabulary and switch to VoIP, for Voice over IP. Even the term VoIP is getting old-fashioned because pretty soon all telephone calls will be routed over the Internet rather than the Public Switched Telephone Network. It's probably time to stop referring to the PSTN, too, because it is headed for the history books as all voice, data and video traffic is carried on the Internet.

8. Weblog

A blog is a shortened version of "Weblog," a term that emerged in the late 1990s to describe commentary that an individual publishes online. It spawned many words still in use such as "blogger" and "blogosphere." Nowadays, few people have time to blog so they are "microblogging," which is another word that's heading out the door as people turn Twitter into a generic term for blasting out 140-character observations or opinions.

9. Thin Client

You have to give Larry Ellison credit for seeing many of the flaws in the client/server computing architecture and for popularizing the term "thin client" to refer to Oracle's alternative terminal-like approach. In 1993, Ellison was touting thin clients as a way for large organizations to improve network security and manageability. Although thin clients never replaced PCs, the concept is similar to "virtual desktops" that are gaining popularity today as a way of supporting mobile workers.

10. World Wide Web

Nobody talks about the "World Wide Web" anymore, or the "Information Superhighway," for that matter. It's just the Internet. It's a distinction that Steve Czaban, the popular Fox Sports Radio talk show host, likes to mock when he refers to the "Worldwide Interweb." Nothing dates you more than pulling out one of those old-fashioned ways of referring to the Internet such as "infobahn" or "electronic highway."

[1] Source: Carol Duffy Marsan, 8/09

10 USABILITY PRINCIPLES FOR WEB DESIGN

1. Motivate – Design your website to meet specific user goals.

2. User Taskflow – What are your users tasks and online environment? For a site to be usable, page flow must match workflow.

3. Architecture – Build an efficient navigational structure. Remember if it can’t be found in 3 clicks; they’re gone.

4. Affordance makes obvious – Make controls understandable, avoiding confusion between emblems, banners, and buttons.

5. Replicate – and use consistent color, themes, and navigation throughout your web site.

6. Usability – Test users with prototypes early in the design. Don’t wait until the end when it’s too late.

7. Know technological limits – identify and optimize for target browsers and user hardware; test HTML, JavaScripts, etc. for compatibility.

8. Know user tolerances – they tend to be impatient. Design for a 2-10 second maximum download. Reuse graphics so they can be loaded from cache. Avoid excessive scrolling.

9. Multimedia – good animation attracts attention to specific information, then stops. Too much movement distracts reading and slows comprehension.

10. Use Stats – Monitor traffic through your site. Which pages pique user interest? Which pages make users leave? Adjust the site accordingly.

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What Makes a Website Effective?

3 things that make a website effective:

1. Keep it Simple

Use easy to understand English, instead of the nerd-jargon or inside lingo that is often seen and only understood by those most close to the subject. Provide a message that kids as young as 10 and retired persons in their 80's can understand and really know what you are trying to say and sell.

2. And Practical

Leverage your many years of experience to help filter out all but most essential parts of your message. Use graphics that are understandable and are on-point with respect to the products or services that you are promoting. Don’t overwhelm your audience and the internet with volumes of information that take time to be displayed.

3. And Concise

The shortest distance between to points is a straight line - draw that straight line for your website! By steering clear of long-winded discussions and useless nerd-theory and yammering, you have a much better chance of getting your message across.

People’s attention span is relatively short. If you don’t follow these basic steps, you will not get your message to your website viewers and thus your website will be mostly ineffective.

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A PICTURE IS WORTH 1,000 WORDS

This statement refers to the idea that complex stories can be described with just a single still image, or that an image may be more influential than a substantial amount of text. It also aptly characterizes the goals of visualization where large amounts of data must be absorbed quickly.
I completely agree with this principle and encourage clients to utilize graphics and photos in their websites. They are both visually eye-catching as well as informative.

However, one has to be careful that the beneficial use of graphics and photos do not pose the detrimental side effect of slowing down page rendering. Slow page rendering can be very frustrating and will surely drive Internet visitors away from a website.

Thus, care must be taken to ensure that images used on a website load quickly. To do this a number of considerations must be made. Image files should be as small as possible without dostorting/loosing resolution and clarity. There are a number of tools available that can be used to adjust images to provide very reasonable clarity and color and at the same time maintain a reasonable small size. Other tricks, where many images on a page are available are to pre-load the most importatnt images, e.g. headers, logos, etc., so that a viewer knows very quickly what he/will be looking at.

The truth remains that “a picture is worth 1,000 words” and even more so on the Internet where viewers are looking for as much information as possible in the shortest amount of time. When designing a website, one just has to apply a few techniques to ensure that the pictures show up on the screen in a timely manner.

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Build It and They Will Come... Almost!

If you are in business in this day and age, you must have a website to describe your products and services. You can be sure that your major competition is already using the Internet to promote their business.

The cost of developing websites is continuingly rising. Businesses are paying from $3,000 to $5000, to $10,000 to have their websites build today, depending on complexity and functionality.

However, even with a website, you still have to market your website. You have to have mechanisms that draw or send people to your website.

One such method is Search Engine Optimization, more commonly referred to as SEO. SEO is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. SEO will be the subject of future bolgs.

Another, surprisingly often overlooked method is done by including ones website address in their advertising, brochures and signage, stationary; any where that their business name is displayed. People then will know where to go to find out more about you, your business, and examples and testimonials of your work. It is amazing how people will spend time and money for the development of their website and completely forget that they have to let other people know that it exists and how to get to it.

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