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NAMS Sale
Next month I am attending the Niche Affiliate Marketing Systems conference in Atlanta, Georgia. In order to raise some funds to help pay for the trip, I am offering a special on my design and development services.
Now through August 19, 2010 you can take 15% off any purchase of a design or development service. To take advantage of this discount, just follow these steps:
- View what services I offer and decide what you need
- Click on the order now bottom at the bottom of the Services Page
- When checking out use the coupon code E5D66
- After payment has been made you will be redirected to a client questionnaire
- Fill out the questionnaire, which will tell me what you need in detail, and I will get back to you within 24 hours to give you a turn around time estimate.
If you have any questions, just fill out the contact form or email me directly at support@courtneywebdesigns.com
Keep Your Visitors Coming Back
The success of a website is not only measured by the amount of traffic it receives but also by the number of repeat visitors. Returning visitors have trust in a site and are most likely to convert into paying customers. Below are some methods to help keep your visitors coming back to your site:
- Start a blog
- Start a forum or shoutbox
- Run a poll or survey
- Host a giveaway
- Keep your site up-to-date
A blog can add some interaction to your site. It also always you a quick way to keep your visitors and customer informed of important company news, sales and promotions, or to introduce them to new products and/or services. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.
A forum or shoutbox will allow your visitors to interact with other visitors and voice their opinions. This helps to build a sense of community and visitors might come back to your daily just to check out what is going on in the community.
Polls and surveys are another way to get your visitors to interact with your site. They provide a quick way for your visitors to voice their opinions and make suggestions. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.
By hosting a giveaway to your visitors you are enticing them to return to your site with the promise of a reward. The giveaway can be something as simple as a free e-book or a product and/or service you offer. You could even make a game out of the giveaway or just give away some coupons for use in your store.
No one wants to browse around a site that looks like it was created 5 years ago and hasn’t been updated at all. By updating your site frequently with fresh content you are giving your visitors a read to come back. This is also the most widely know and most effective method of obtaining returning visitors.
Improve Usability of Your Website
The purpose of your website is to inform your visitors about your business. It does not matter how beautiful and extravert your website is, if your visitors can not read your content, then you might as well not even have a website. Here are some simple tips to help improve the usability of your website to make sure your visitors are getting the information they need.
The first item you need to check on your website is the typography of you content. You want to make sue to use a font that is easily readable. Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text. If you have large blocks of text make sure to space them out. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be.
You also need to make it easy for visitors to find content on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Something as simple as a Table of Contents, Index, or Glossary, will help tremendously.
Ensure that your site loads fast. Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure the crème de la crème of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention.
Last, but not least, test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links, so be very careful about that.
Should You Hire A Web Designer?
Many online businesses have little or no money with starting. The business owner ends up having to do almost everything themselves including product preparation, developing a marketing strategy, and getting a website setup. As their business grows over the course of time the business owner may realize that their “homemade” website does not appear professional enough or needs expanding which is out of their area of knowledge.
Does this sound familiar to you? Are you an online business owner who started your business with no money too? Are you skeptical when it comes to hiring someone to perform a job for something that you could do yourself? When it comes to hiring a web designer there is a lot more to the job than you may realize.
By hiring a web design to setup your website you are doing more than just handing over the dirty work of coding. For a small fee you can let the web designer worry about the little things that crop up with websites. You only have to worry about the big picture and will be able to stay more focused and spend more time working on your actual business strategy.
Web designers are professionals and thus are usually pretty good at what they do. By outsourcing you website to a web designer you will not have to worry about problems that surface because the web designer will be able to fix it for you. Since they designed the website, they will be able to pin the problem and quickly solve it faster than you could do.
Another benefit to hiring a web designer is that your site will look more professional. Web designers have experience creating professional sites and do what they are doing. After all, they do web design wok for a living so they have to be good!
Outsourcing you web design can save you time so that you can continue growing your business not just working it.