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Think about your website layout

by Doctor Marshall

As an Internet based business, the layout of your website will quite obviously play a very important part in your success. A well laid out website with good looking, helpful content will not only please visitors to your website but by using some basic search engine optimisation techniques you can attract visitors in the first place. Conversely, a poorly laid out website with slow loading pages and irrelevant content will lead to very few or no visitors.

Homepage

. The homepage is essentially like the front office of your business. It is the first page that most visitors will see. The homepage should not only be used to introduce your company to prospective customers but should include information or offers that will draw them in further. Good content, a fast loading page and not too many relevant graphics and pictures will certainly help achieve this. The inclusion of your company logo is important for company branding while ensuring that the content uses good keywords on a regular basis means you will be noticed by the search engines. Don’t forget that traffic gained through search engines is effectively free and highly targeted, so it should be your aim to encourage the search engines to rank you well.

Products and services.

Your online catalogue is the page that displays exactly what you have to sell whether you are a service provider or you sell products. This page has to be clean and informative. If you are selling products you should consider having a short review for each product and then a separate detailed page that imparts much more information on the visitor. The short review will drum up interest and the detailed review will sell it for you. While being too pushy can scare some customers away this is your sales page, and it is vitally important that you use this page to effectively and regularly sell your products with good marketing copy and pictures.

Press room.

Many webmasters overlook the pressroom but used well it can serve several valuable purposes. Should the need arise journalists and other researchers can use this page to find out information regarding your business. This can prove very fruitful in the long run, especially once you start to drum up a little interest in other ways. Coupled with a good publicity campaign, the press room is a powerful tool that can rocket your website and hence your business into the news quickly and relatively easily. Remember to keep this page updated with any news and updates you have.

Employment page.

Trying to find the perfect candidate to fill a job role can be a difficult search; having candidates approach you is the most effective way. Having a link on your homepage not only lets interested parties find the details quickly but it also tells customers that you are a growing concern, making them more likely to entrust their custom to you. Don’t forget to leave a general enquiries email so that professionals can send you a resume; this way the next time you are looking for a new member of your team you may not have to look any further than the personal documents on your computer.

Contact us.

Persuading potential customers to trust you and your business is one of the biggest challenges you will face. By providing them with the opportunity to contact you the way they want to, you are building this trust immediately. You should provide as many contact details as you possibly can. You may even want to consider an online help feature that indicates when you (or somebody else within your organization) are online allowing your customers to talk to you immediately. This is the perfect opportunity to try out your toll free or local rate number, the electronic fax number and the mailbox you have purchased. Even if customers don’t need to contact you it is reassuring to them if they know they can should the need arise. Having no contact details instantly makes visitors suspicious of the level of service you actually provide.

Sitemap.

Internet surfers expect everything handed to them on a plate. If they can’t quickly and easily see a way around your website to the pages they want to visit they won’t attempt it. By including a text link sitemap you give visitors an easy way to access each page of the site and you also provide the same thing for search engines. By including a sitemap in this way search engines recognize that all of the pages on that sitemap belong to the one website and will index each page separately. This means that all of your website will be indexed by major search engines and you will attract visitors to various different pages.

About us.

An about us page provides you with the opportunity to present your customers with a wide array of information regarding you and your company. You can provide them with details regarding how long your business has been in service and exactly the services and products you supply. By including the ethos of your company and some general information as well you can effectively build a level of trust that is required between customer and business.

FAQ.

Do people really read the FAQ page? Well, yes, actually they do. When a customer visits your site some of them will undoubtedly have questions that you have not been able to answer in the rest of your site. Give a number of links to your FAQ pages where people might have questions such as the order page, the products page and the home page. By providing surfers with a useful FAQ page they feel you are giving them more information, and it all comes down to the trust issue again. Some sites use lengthier FAQ sections that are made up of content articles with good keyword density. This allows you the opportunity to use each FAQ to attract people to your website, because they will get indexed by the search engines and start to appear in the listings.

The contents of this page are Copyright © 2006, Doctor Marshall - All Rights Reserved. Copyright stored at the Library of Congress in the United States of America. This page is taken from Doctor Marshalls Book: The Red Handbook for Business on the Internet.

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