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Make Sure All the Links on your Website are Working

There are a lot of things to check when building a website, like checking to make sure all of the links on your site are working correctly. Once your website is live you can check the links by going to the W3C Link Checker website .  This site scans through all of the pages on your website and lists pages that have broken links or other errors on the page.  This is a great free tool that can go through your site in minutes.  Don’t let broken links and errors stop people from being able to browse through your site. 

How Effective is Your Website?

Find out with Go Daddy’s Traffic Facts.  You can view important statistics about your website visitors.  There are reports on Daily Page Views, Hourly Page Views,
Keyword and Key Phrase Searches, Referring Domains,
Referring Search Engines and much more.

These reports are easy to read in either table or chart form and the data can be exported into Excel for you to analyze.  When used correctly, this information can help you make informative decisions about internet marketing or website enhancements.  For $2.99 per month prevent yourself from wasting money implementing programs based on assumptions and get the facts.  It is well worth the extra expense.

Creating a Cascading Style Sheet

Does your website use Cascading Style Sheets?  If not, how come?  A CSS file allows you to select your font style (bold, italicize, underline), size, color, and other elements for your website in a single place.  This greatly helps with consistency and editing of your website.

Creating a CSS file from scratch can be a pain if you’re not familiar with writing code.  Web Safe Fonts is a useful website that provides the code you need to stylize your font exactly how you wan t it.  Not only does this site provide code to create your CSS sheet; it provides a list of many web safe fonts and an area for you to test your own content.  You will now have all the correct code for the exact style, size and color of the font you want.

If you're familiar with CCS files, how do you work with them?

The importance of standards, placement and icons

Throughout most of the world it does not matter when driving if you speak the language or not.  A red octagonal sign means stop, a yellow triangle means yield, and so forth.  The same is true for website development.  This morning I needed to place an order for more toner.  I was brought to a Japanese website.  Not an English word in site.  However in the upper right hand corner was a small world icon and when click opened an interface that allowed me to select English and complete my order. 

Why did I look in the upper right-hand corner?  I don’t know, however that is where I expected that type of info.  Visitors have expectations where to find various bits of info; navigation should be located on the top or left side; search fields are usually near the upper right; logos placed in the upper left; ads tend to be placed on the top or right side, etc. 

An interesting test (Provided by Human Factors International) is to draw a 5x4 grid on a sheet of paper.  Give an ideal customer a list of items that you wish to include on your site and ask them to indicate which box each should go (more than one can be in a box).    Repeat with several others.  Look for consistencies and design or adjust your website accordingly.

Lastly sprinkle a few icons throughout your website.  The use of icons and color will help a person understand what a page is about long before they will read the content.  If it wasn’t for the small world icon, I would have been lost.

Keywords

Lee Oden recently conducted a reader poll to find out the Best Keyword Research Tool.  Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker rated the highest.  Keywords and more importantly keyphrases are one of the greatest overlooked areas when creating a website.  Find out what words and phrases your ideal customer is searching for and make sure that you integrate them throughout your website. 

For the complete list click here.

Dell: Giving Their Website a Greater Purpose

“Give Your Website a Greater Purpose” is not only our tagline but our central belief.  I bring this up, because Dell has done just that.  What does Dell do? Sell computer hardware, right?  I am not in the market for a server or computer system, so why would I spend a large amount of my morning at Dell.com?

Dell has begun Studio Dell: an online video resource broken down to 3 main categories; home, small business, and IT Pro and then further broken down to many sub categories.  This is a great example of giving a website a greater purpose while strategically targeting their audience.  In the end, I still didn’t purchase a computer (this time), however I did look to see what they are offering today.

Virtual Reward Cards

There are many traditional stores that offer reward cards: buy 10 get one free.  With each qualifying purchase a business card sized tracker gets stamped or punched.  Once the card is filled the next purchase is on the house.  As a way to keep visitors coming back to your website, try incorporating a virtual offer.  This doesn’t only have to apply to purchased items.  It could be with 10 posts on a blog, someone is able to download an ebook.  Get creative with ways to retain customers and your online business will increase.

Double-Up Drop Down

If you run an ecommerce website than chances are pretty good that you have a ship to form that includes drop downs.  If you ship internationally, you may even have a drop down to select the country to ship to.  Within the United States it is common, but not standard for American companies to list the United States first and then list the remaining countries in alphabetical order. 

For example:

1. United States
2. Afghanistan
3. Albania
4. Algeria
5. American Samoa
6. Andorra
7. Anguilla
8. Antarctica
9. Antigua And Barbuda
10. Argentina
11. …

However, for some visitors immediately scroll down the list.  When the United States is only listed in the first position and not within the alphabetical list, it can sometimes be difficult or frustrating to find.  Having it listed in both places will increase site usability and will not add discrepancies to your mail to database.  If you ship mostly to one state consider adding your primary state to the top and also within the alphabetical list.

Amazon.com is one of the few sites, I am aware of that lists the United States in both places.  They are also, one of the only sites I know of that lists Antarctica as a ship to country.  Do they really ship there?  If so, do they offer free shipping for book purchases over $25?

For a complete dropdown list of worldwide countries, click here to download Amazon's recommendation. 

Purchase Additional URLs

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing recently wrote  about the importance of your company name and how it should “evoke an appropriate emotional response from your target market.”  The same is true for your url.  Your url should evoke an approapriate emotonal response from your target market while reflecting your actual company name as closely as possible.  You should always be on the lookout to purchase new shorter versions for clients to be able to remember.   For example, www.visualcontentsolutions.com matches our official company name exactly, but it would be a lot easier for our clients to remember and go to www.vcs.com to arrive at my site.  When shortening names be careful not to unintentionally create a negative image of your company, for example www.visualcon.com is a shorter and easier to type name but most likely will not increase my customer base.

In addition to names that match your company, it is wise for companies to pick up urls that match their products names, services, or even personality.  Search out key phrases for your website that are still available as urls that can bounce/link to your primary site. 

Lastly, the price of a url has greatly decreased from 5 years ago, typically under $5 each, consider purchasing the .biz, .info, .com of your web address.  As these extensions become more popular it will become more of a necessity to own your name outright.

The PowerPoint & OfficeArt Team Blog

The other day I came across a great blog, “The PowerPoint & OfficeArt Team Blog” created by “the team creating PowerPoint and Office 2007's cool new graphics engine.”   The only downside is that it appears when Office 2007 got released the blog stopped receiving new posts. There are only about 20 and some are meant more so for internal use, however the other posts give an inside view of the new PowerPoint 2007.  If you are already using PowerPoint 2007 or simply curious about some of its new features this is truly a mini treasure trove of information and well worth the visit.