infinite42

Are you in control of your website? Or do you feel like it controls you?

Does your site provide the profits that you want? Do you get enough visitors? Can you find yourself where you want to be on Google?

If the answer to these is no then I’m guessing you’re not getting the results you want from your site

What do you do about this? There’s plenty of help out there. 1000’s of websites and blogs and books all offering schemes to help you. Did I say 1000’s? Actually I meant millions.

And there’s the problem. Which tips and schemes do you choose? Which do you ignore? Which do you start first?

The solution is to read my guide. I’ve written about the ideas that I have used to make my websites work. They are all tried and tested and they all worked for me.

I’ll show you how to start taking control of your website and getting the results you want.

The guide is free and all I ask in return is some feedback from you and your email address so I can contact you.

So head on over to my signup page. It’ll only take you 5 minutes.

In this guide I’ll show you how to:

1. Build compelling content that search engines love and which keeps your visitors coming back for more
2. Get visitors to your site using AdWords without spending a fortune
3. Learn how to shape up your style - including the psychology behind great color schemes
4. Find out how all of this might be irrelevent if you don’t have a unique and compelling product
5. Stop losing visitors - improve your site navigation

Remember: you should be getting the results that YOU want from your site. It’s time to get back in control and get a Better Website

If you’ve never heard of the word webiste then read on.

A webiste is an artiste who works with the web. Its correct pronunciation is web-iste. It is often combined with other words like:

Webiste designer: an artiste who designs for the web

Free webiste: someone who does it for free

Family webiste: a webiste who is part of a family

Webiste development: what webistes do as they progress through their career

Do you believe any of this? I thought not. I invented the word purely to demonstrate that common words can often be spelled wrongly on the web. This happens a fair amount when people type queries into search engines such as Google. Why is this worth knowing?

Well, you can probably get a small-ish amount of visitors to your site by targeting a few common keyword mis-spellings. Webiste is just website with two swapped letters. There are a few searches performed each day on the mis-spelled version. Its only a few but this is a fairly common technique referred to as targeting the long tail of search engine enquiries.

Try targeting a few mis-spellings of you website keywords and see if you get any hits from the search engines. Let me know if it works!

Is your website design too complicated? Do you have too much technology? Or, is it easy to understand what your site is about and is it easy to use?

With all this web technology around competing for your attention its easy to get distracted by what you can put on your website, rather than what you should put on your website. These days it’s not hard to get some flash animation or even a soundtrack. But do these actually help your website? Do they help to attract and retain visitors? Do they help add lots of useful content so you’ll be indexed by Google and the other search engines?

Don’t get me wrong, some of the best websites are able to combine great technology with compelling content. They are also successful. For your website though, don’t be too distracted by these until you’ve made sure you’ve developed something that’s really useful for your visitors. They may be initially impressed by your flash intro (maybe) but it may not keep them coming back for more.

The saga completes tomorrow!

What happens next? Tune in to Part 2 Tomorrow…

How do you work out what to do with your vacation rental website?

Whether it’s Florida, Italy, Las Vegas or Kauai, one way to think about this is to imagine what you would want from a site if you were searching for somewhere to stay. I would look for:

• Great pictures
• Guest testimonials
• Availability information
• Information about the location
• An easy way to contact the owner

…and finally…

• Something unique that makes it stand out above the other dozen sites that I’ve already looked at.

Of course you need all the usual boring stuff like info on the rooms, price, location, etc, etc. You’d also want it to look professional but friendly. But these things don’t get you noticed and probably won’t convince your visitors to click the ‘contact me’ button.

How does your vacation rental website look?

Steven Spielberg talked about geography in movie making in a recent issue of Vanity Fair.

He was discussing camera angles and editing for the new movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. He referred to geography in terms of the viewer understanding where they are in relation to the shots and the actors as a scene develops. Clearly you have a lot of options when making a movie and the key is to make sure the viewers don’t lose track of what they are looking at.

How is your website geography? Do visitors know where they are when they arrive at your site? Do they know where to go to get what they are looking for? Don’t forget that search engines may bring your visitors into any of the pages that have been indexed. You need to make sure that these pages work OK geographically, so to speak. Do they arrive at a page with a clear description and navigation, or is it a sign-up form with no other website details and no clear exit route?

The best ways to check this are (a) get a friend to check out your pages for you or (b) check your site stats and see whether visitors move on successfully through your pages. If they can’t work it out easily, they may just turn back and exit the way they came in…

Matt Jurmann wrote a great summary on reasons to use CSS instead of tables in web design. Cascading Style Sheets (known in web-speak as CSS) is a language used to describe the style of a document: in this case a website. In modern design this is written in a separate file which is often only loaded once for the entire website. This is different to the old type of design where pages were broken up into tables and style information was added to each and every element of the table.

The main problem with the old style is that, basically, it’s a real pain to use. It’s hard to read, hard to get right and terrible to maintain and update. If you use CSS then it’s pretty easy to sort your styles out (fonts, colors, backgrounds etc) and any changes you make are (usually) made on only one file.

As a website owner or developer, you should care about this because it makes web development more efficient and it makes your websites easier to maintain and change. If you use a web designer then they should already be using CSS because it’s more efficient for them.

The bottom line is, use CSS and you’ll get a better website. That’s what really matters

What are you doing to welcome visitors back to your site? With today’s technology you can easily track return visitors and present them with a different experience to people who see your site for the first-time. You can do things like this:

• Take them straight to the content that they are interested in
• Show them a personalized welcome message
• Highlight any changes to your site since they last visited
• Give them some information that new visitors don’t see

This is fairly straightforward to build using cookies and if that doesn’t work then you can always offer a login page. Your web designer should be able to do this for you.

Why do this? It rewards people for coming back to your site. This will help them to feel valued (which they are, after all). If they feel valued then they are more likely to keep coming back.

What is a home page? Is it:

The page you spend most time developing, or

The page you spend the most time promoting, or

The page that loads when someone types www.yoursite.com, or

The page that people see first when they arrive at your site, or

The page with the highest PageRank, or

Your most popular page?

You might find that you get different answers for each of these. If so then you might not be making the most of your website. If a page is popular but doesn’t have much useful content, this can be improved. If visitors don’t arrive at the home page, you need to think about what they see first, and where they might go next. Make sure you don’t use up all of your best ideas and effort on the home page - other pages can be just as important.