Friday, June 22, 2007

10 Web Design Tips For A Professional Looking Niche Web Site

Web site design is a critical element in niche marketing.

If you want to build your reputation as a Professional in your niche, you need to project a professional image from the moment your visitors reach your web site. Like it or not, first impressions count and no more so than on the Internet. Your web site is the only way that visitors can judge you and your product. Give them the wrong impression, make it hard for them to find the information they're after and chances are they will click away into cyberspace and never come back.

To avoid this happening to you, here are ten web design tips to help ensure that your niche web site projects a professional image :

1 - Use the KISS approach - Keep your web design simple and straight forward with clean lines and a suitable colour scheme. Avoid distractions like Flash presentations, animated gifs and audio which loads as the page opens.

2 - Visibility - Design for a screen resolution of 800x600 pixels and a maximum page width of 760 pixels so that your web site visitors don't have to scroll from side to side to read your content.

3 - Graphics - Keep your graphics down to one or two smallish ones and optimise them to load quickly (You can optimise your graphics at www.netmechanic.com who offer a free facility to do this). Always add "alt" tags to each image, with a concise description, so that people who surf with graphics turned off and the sight impaired, who use text readers, know exactly what the image is.

4 - Load time - Aim to have your pages load in 8-10 seconds on a 56K modem. You can do this by keeping your page size down to about 10k or less.

5 - Use CSS - CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS enables you to define the look of your web site with various style elements like font type, size and colour, backgrounds, Hyperlinks and a lot more. By linking your HTML pages to a Cascading Style Sheet you can reduce the amount of code on your web pages and speed up load times.

6 - Navigation - Make sure your main navigation links appear in the same place on every page so that your visitors don't have to hunt around for them. Your visitors should also be able to see at a glance exactly where they are on your web site, so include "You are here" links at the top and bottom of each page showing the path from your Home page, for example :

"You are here >> Home > Widgets > Redwidgets"

In this case Home and Widgets would be linked back to the relevant pages.

7 - Site Map - Include a Site Map on your web site listing the title of each page with a short description and a link back to the relevant page. Not only will this enable your site visitors to find their way around, it will also help to encourage search engines to spider your entire site.

8 - Readability - Avoid dark backgrounds and fancy font styles, if you have a lot of stuff to read on your web pages it is better to stick to a white background with black print as that is less fatiguing to read. Arial, Verdana and Times Roman are the most common fonts to use and the easiest to read. Oh and one other thing - not everyone has 20/20 vision, make your font sizes big enough for those people to read comfortably.

9 - Test - Test your design in as many browsers as possible. Although Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser, don't ignore alternatives like FireFox, Mozilla, Opera, K-Meleon, Netscape, Safari, etc. they may only constitute 15%-20% of browsers, but that's still millions of potential customers you might otherwise miss out on.

10 - Relevance - Don't cover more than one major topic per page, this will help you get your message over more easily. Make sure that everything you are going to include on your web site is relevant to the niche market you are targeting. For example if your site is about golf, don't include links to a dog training site (unless it's about training dogs to find lost golf balls:-).

Copyright © 2005, AndrĂ© Anthony Niche Market Know-How

André Anthony has been running his own businesses on and off the Internet since 1983. He owns and operates Niche Market Know-How a resource for beginning Niche Marketers. Visit http://www.nichemarketknowhow.com today to find strategies, tips, tools, products and resources for effective niche marketing. Get his free Niche Market Know-How Course here: http://www.nichemarketknowhow.com/course.htm

By: Andre Anthony

Niche Web Site Design Tips for Targeted Niche Marketing

Niche web site design is first step in a strong niche marketing campaign. Niche marketing isn’t something that everyone that runs an online business automatically knows and understands. When it comes to web site design, keeping your focus on your niche target is critical to effectively marketing your business online. Niche web site design essentially means one sharply focused theme throughout your website. The best place to start planning your web site is your ideal visitor.

Your ideal customer will have built in visual expectations. Take the time to brainstorm about how you want to pull in your visitors with color, graphics, logo and layout of your web site. Choose a niche theme that is not based on what you happen to like personally but actually what your ideal customer expects. The important thing is to choose a strong targeted niche theme for your web site then keep it consistent throughout your site.

Remember…the more focused the theme, the better your visitors will respond to become customers. It’s very easy to get temporarily sidetracked and get caught up in adding another related theme without maximizing the niche theme you started out with originally.

Once you have settled on a targeted niche, you can outline the subcategories that fall under your web site theme. Keep a tight rein on your products, articles, links, services and affiliate programs on your web site to ensure that you don’t move away from the niche theme that you created in the beginning.

Why?

A web site that carries one theme, one voice, one focus and resources all geared to meeting the needs of THAT target market – has a better chance of success. Think about it. The more specialized a business or practice, the more faith you have in what they deliver.

Niche Web Site Example

You offer baby slings. You may offer other baby related things on your web site but the main baby product that you market is your baby slings. You will choose colors, logo, graphics and pictures with a mother and baby theme. The articles and product descriptions will be targeted toward both experienced moms and new mothers. You can write articles on attachment parenting, frequently asked questions about baby slings, safety and how to use baby slings to develop a stronger bond with your newborn. From your articles to product descriptions you will want to use the keywords that draw expectant mothers to your web site.

Keep this in mind ~ even link exchanges on your web site will bring visitors if you choose your link exchanges to be useful resources rather simply a trading of links. When you consider the main theme of your website and the potential visitors, you will know what they are looking for online. Become a useful resource for them and they will come back again and again.

A tightly focused niche web site that presents itself as a major resource for information as well as quality products will bring you the traffic and sales that a broader (almost diluted) website cannot deliver.

Already have a web site? Do you already have a broad range of products or services? Simply look objectively at your web site, target your niche market then match one of your product lines to THAT market. Once you have chosen one product or service to market, dig down deep create a theme that will draw visitors for the market you want. Fully address all these areas above for that one chosen product.

With each aspect of your web site design, keeping your focus on your niche target will guide your decision making AND bring you the results you are looking for with your online business. To hit the bull’s eye, you need to have a clear target. Knowing the visitors and customers that you want to draw will help you create a niche website that becomes a valuable resource on the net to your visitors. Remember - Success is in the Niche.

Tammy Ames is the owner of WAHM Connections and publisher of Work at Home Connections Ezine Read the latest issue online and subscribe for helpful business building resources each week. To learn more about creating your own targeted niche web site, discover Ken Envoy’s Site Build It!

By: Tammy Ames