Every day hundreds of new web sites come on-line, as companies, organisations, and personal web sites and go-live. The principle of “If you build it they will come” is not true when it comes to web sites and web traffic. Web site owners must invest time, effort and sometimes money into promoting their web presence on-line and also off-line. This investment is not only to bring people to the web site but also to encourage web site visitors to remain on the site and also make a purchase or an inquiry.

Keep your web site sleek and fast loading

Broadband, Broadband, Broadband – that’s what everyone thinks will help their site be bigger and bolder than the competition. The reality is for some countries with less developed digital infrastructures that broadband is not as widely available as is believed. Many users still use the old fashioned dial up, with more major companies using ISDN connections.

Visitors don’t want to wait for long downloads, or sites which take a long time to appear – only use large downloads where they are imperative to your web sites message. If your web site does not appear within 15 – 20 seconds most visitors will leave the web site and go else where. Having a sleek, quick loading website is essential.

Get listed on Search Engines, Web Directories and Related web sites

Your web site should be fully optimized for the search engines. Google is the Number 1 Search engine giving some websites over 90% of their search engine traffic. You should ideally be listed on Google, MSN, AltaVista, DMOZ (the open directory) and any related search engines and directories in your country. Your web pages should be search engine friendly, with all the relative META Tags for keywords and descriptions.

If you find that your website is in a competitive area or requires extra exposure at the early stages after the launch of the website, then Pay-Per-Click may be a good idea. Systems such as Google’s AdWords program allow you to specify which keywords you are listed for, and how much you wish to bid for your click. You can also specify how much you wish to spend per day and which sites you wish to appear on. PPC is a great way to get targeted traffic to your site but can be expensive in the long term.

Another technique is related links on website in your business area. Therefore if you sell PC Software, having a link on a PC hardware company in your country would be a very good idea. However, try avoid the whole reciprocal linking with sites which are either unrelated or are simply a big list of links, these link farms are not usually a good idea.

Maintain a Professional Image

It simple – your web site should have a professional image in order to portray your business image in a good light. Home made web sites don’t usually look as good as one developed by a professional web designer. By developing your site with a professional look and feel, your business will appear to the public to be well run and one which can be trusted.

Also, part of that professional image is that your website is constantly being updated with the latest news, new products and services, and special offers. Business websites should really avoid items like visible web counters, Guestbooks and common clip-art – as these are dated items which really do not reflect well in the B2B world.

Keep things simple and easy to use

Don’t make your web site overly complex. A website which is difficult to use or difficult to navigate will result in poor website traffic and poor sales conversions. A professional web developer will ensure that the web site visitors needs are put first. The most critical information should be within 2 or 3 clicks from the main page – make it easy for people to buy from you.

By maintaining a consistent look and feel on the web site, users can navigate the site, find the information. Flashing graphics, rapidly spinning animated GIFs, badly contrasting background and foreground text, MIDI files playing in the background – none of these demonstrate a professional image and should be avoided. Don’t start confusing your website visitors by using animations or sounds just for the sake of it, only use these if they are illustrating something on your web page.

Browser Testing – Maintains Uniformity

Before launching your website you should have it tested in all the major browsers and on different types of computers. This ensures the site looks the same on different platforms. For example if you used a certain font on your website, this font may not be available on somebody else’s PC, PDA or Apple – therefore your website will look vastly different in this case. Also certain browsers don’t follow the exact same rules for CSS Style Sheets and this is another reason why testing is important.

Inform and Empower your website visitors

Content is very important on a website, however, if the content is not well written, not informative or not up-to-date people will not read-on and will possibly leave your web site. On your web site, make sure your customers know exactly what it is that you do, what products or services you offer and demonstrate to them the benefits which you or your product/service can bring to them. By keeping the content up-to-date you can also make sure that web site visitors will bookmark or return to your site.

Allow your visitors to keep up to date : E-mail them

One marketing technique which really works is an opt-in e-mail Newsletter or E-Zine. This allows you to keep in touch with your web site visitors who subscribe via your website. In these E-Zine Newsletters, you can offer information to subscribed visitors relating to new product information, special offers, and the latest news from your company. Newsletters are an excellent way of driving quality traffic to your web-site, keeping your customers informed on your success and to ultimately increasing your on-line sales.

Target your market through your website

Make sure your web site is built with a target and a vision in mind. Don’t try to be all things to all people. If you sell PC Software, then your site should be aimed at this market. Know who your market is and ensure that your web site is aimed to their needs. Therefore if you are selling B2B then your website may be different in appearance, style and content language than a B2C aimed at teens. Also, if you sell different products, target each product by placing the content on a unique section of your site – don’t attempt to sell all your products on the one page.

Use Viral Marketing and use it well

Viral Marketing is a very powerful tool and you usually need to do very little for this to work. Simply, this is where a website visitor finds your web site and then emails the link to a friend. This can then appear on your site as a “Send to a Friend” section on your site. Web visitors will fill out their email, name and possibly a short message and this information along with a link to your web site will be sent to the recipient email address.

Done well this can add valuable traffic to your web site and it can get your web address well known and remembered in the right areas of the market. Other ideas along this line include free downloads – all downloads would be set up so as to have your logo and web address somewhere on the downloaded item.

Analyze your website visitors.

By analyzing your web site visitors you can find out, who is visiting, where they came from, how they found your site, what web browser they are using, and what pages they found most interesting. Web site analytics are very important to discovering if your web site is working for you. If you constantly have low traffic on the site, then something is wrong. You have to start asking questions like … Are you on the major search engines? Are you search engine optimized? Are visitors not progressing past the first page?

There are some excellent free website analytics systems available, such as Google Analytics, which at this time is by invitation only. Basic system such as StatCounter or ShinyStat can give some information on web site visitors, but if you have a web server then your server may have a system such as Webaliser or Analog Stats.

Conclusion

If you follow even a few of the above steps then you will be after making a start on an improvement to your web site and its marketing. None of the above steps are difficult to get in place. If you don’t know how to do something, simply get a professional to do the job for you.

Put simply, you should build a fast, clean, professional looking, search engine optimized, easy to navigate web site with processes in place to monitor web visitors, allow for newsletters and viral marketing.

What Should Be Applied For Designing Perfect Interface?
1: Keep the interface minimalist:
2: Create evenness and apply regular UI components:
3: Be planned before designing a page design:
4: Deliberately use relevant hues and textures:
5: The proper use of typography to make a chain of transparency and importance:
6: Ensure the output system’s communication:
7: Study the defaults:

Hold and grasp the basics and the building blocks of the responsive web design – The grid systems, queries by media and the open-ended and adaptable content – in order to create the type of responsive web designs and layouts, which are able to change or hide the items on the screen based on the device used by the visitor.

Many people like to work by making checklists about the tasks they are trying to accomplish. I also prefer to work by making checklists about my work. The main reason behind that is the checklists organize our goals about a task. They also give us a step by step representation about what we need to do first. Checklists are amazing at adding simplicity to extremely complicated as well as overwhelming tasks just like creating a website into easy steps.

All we need to do is ahead of us like an organized algorithm. Therefore, it takes away all the thinking required to create a website. If you don’t have any idea about where to start about creating a website you have selected the right article. The checklist given below will tell you:

1: What you need for creating a website, as well as

2: What you don’t need for creating a website.

But if you have already studied and you also have some ideas about the requirements for creating a website, the checklist given below will really take your skills to another level.

Assumption vs requirements in web development

The most common error website developers usually make while creating their first website is that they try that their website does too much. As we all know the old saying that excess of anything is bad. What people usually end up with is a big list of infinite things they need to do and things they need to pay for.

And in the end, they get overwhelmed by excessive work and end up doing no work. I hope this sounds familiar to many people reading this article. You must be wondering how I knew about this, the reason is that I myself have been there before. Just like you, I was also completely clueless because of lots of questions and options while making my first website.

After making my fair share of mistakes, I realized that we should start with basics to create a website. After we are done making a basic website, later on, we should add new features from time to time as our website grows.

We can say that the reason behind this is that we don’t have an idea about what we don’t know. Let’s say that have we ever done packing for a place where we have never traveled to or for a place about whose environment, we have a little knowledge.

A couple of years ago we went to India during the summer season for vacations. We usually don’t like traveling to areas where the climate is hot and which has humidity in the air and where we feel that we are in a dire need of a chilly bath after every single hour because of sweating. We went to the seaside and wanted to do some water sports.

Like all the other excited tourists we purchased a lot of water outfits we assumed we are going to need. Surely 80 percent of things we purchased we never used again are rotting in attic. We believed we needed them because of what we saw on different T.V programs. Just like picking up things we need to travel for a new destination, how do you know that what specifications and functions you are about to use for your first website?

1: Do you really want to waste your valuable time and precious money in creating a website with tools and functions that have no use in your website?

2: Or did you really want to spend a lot of money to make a fancy website with a lot of functions knowing that these functions don’t have any use for the target viewers?

3: Do you want to waste all the time you spent on creating a website by redesigning because your first custom design was not working?

So, to avoid anything like that from happening start with the basic type of website you assume you will be needing. Then test what is working and what is not, with a small amount of time and by investing little money. Once you got the idea about the requirements you can work smartly on features you desire.

Requirements for building an effective website

9 basic Things You require to make a great Website

1 – A basic domain name.

2 –The separate business email address for a website.

3 – A good website building software.

4 – The website hosting.

5 –Good template design for a website.

6 – An attractive logo design.

7 – Attractive high-quality content related images for website.

8 –Good quality image editors.

9 – Effective google analytics.

By following the above steps, you will be able to make a great website in your very first attempt!

A basic domain name.

The domain name is the most basic and compulsory requirement of a website. Just like your house address, it is the web address of your website used by people to access the website. There are many domain name providers available. Most famous providers are GoDaddy, Domain.com, and NameCheap. Anyone can easily find out the name they want for the site and the total expense required for it.

The separate business email address for website.

For building a serious business a business email address is required. People usually don’t trust things on the internet. Making a reputation for your business on the internet is a very difficult thing. When people saw businesses using free email accounts, they assume it as a scam. This results in creating unnecessary doubts in the mind of people.

The first-time visitors of your website will notice every single detail of your site so they can create doubts more easily by not seeing an authentic business account. Well if you are serious about building your reputation then get a business email it is easy as well as cheap with Google’s G Suite.

A good website building software.

All of us have heard about the tools used to build a good website. Let’s talk about some of the best tools that are used in the market to build a professional website. WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly are some of the good tools for creating a website.

Many people use website building software even though they can code on their notepad. The reason behind that is the ease, yes, it is amazingly easy to code using a tool and it is a very good shortcut for creating a good website easily.

Depending upon your caliber and skills of coding as well as the type of features you want some tools to work way better than their counterparts. For example, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly are some of the good tools for creating a website. WordPress is a really flexible tool but it is not easy to learn for newbies.

Squarespace is a really fascinating design-oriented tool. It has some really good templates. Weebly is the easiest website creating tool even for the newbies. Wix is the most versatile tool and is often the first choice for developers. It has a drag and drops features.

Website hosting.

Nowadays getting a good website host is compulsory. It is basically a storage unit that stores the data or content of your website online. Each time someone opens your site his browser will collect the data of your website from your website host.

You must choose your hosting according to the number of visitors you are going to have on your website. Usually, the cost of the host increases as the number of visitors increase. As the number of visitors increases you need to switch from the basic level hosting to an advanced one.

Generally, website hosting can be classified into 4 major types:

1: Shared hosting

This is a type of hosting in which you share a server with other websites. Or we can say many websites having a single or common server. For example, the university students who live in a hostel have rented separate rooms but share some parts like the kitchen and toilets as well as living rooms.

2: VPS hosting

In this type of hosting the server is shared just like the shared hosting but the major difference is that it has a bigger capacity to handle more visitors. Let’s say you share a building with your friends as you are still sharing but now you have a completely furnished room only for yourself and you are separate from others.

3: Dedicated hosting

In this hosting, you have the server and you don’t share it with anyone.

4: Free hosting

It is for the above-discussed drag and drop website builders. You can use it as long as you want and when you feel like the number of visitors is increasing on your website you can upgrade it to VPS.

Hosting for the WordPress

Basic

you are going to find a wide range of website hosts on the internet. I would recommend you to start with the Bluehost. It is really reasonable and affordable as well.

Advanced

But if you are running a larger website that requires a faster loading, then I would suggest the WP Engine.  It is a really secure and advance host for websites.

Good template design for the website.

Just like many built-in templates are available in Microsoft word, a website template is also an already created website design ready to use. They are really useful as you don’t need an actual website designer to give your website a professional touch. I would recommend everyone not to spend money on a website designer.

A good website is based on real data about how your visitors experience your work, what are their likes and the way they interact with your website. Without having this important and useful information your work would be based on your own assumptions and will not be effective.

So, by hiring a website designer you would waste a lot of money with applying your own assumptions instead of making it user-friendly. Many people use self-hosted tools like WordPress and if you are one of them then you’ll find some great templates at WooThemes and Mojo Marketplace. If you are working with a fully managed website creator tool then they will give you built-in templates now how good is that. I would suggest you all use Wix because of 500+ professionally designed templates that are ready to use.

Weebly is also a really good tool because of its ability to allow access to codes. By this, you can easily make custom changes to your website.

An attractive logo design

Logo plays an important role in the attractiveness of the website. They are the trademark of a website. All the good websites have a specific logo. You can easily design your business logo in two easy steps even though you have no clue about designing.

1: You can get your logo designed by a professional graphic designer. For that, I would recommend 99 Designs as they give you direct access to 950,000+ designers. You can post the project online and you can pay if you are satisfied.

2: Or you can simply use a logo generator tool to create a logo in just a single minute. They give you the freedom to create high-quality logos even though you don’t have graphic skills. It is a good option if you don’t have time to post an ad and wait for a response or if you don’t have enough budget.

Some of the good logo generators are Squarespace logo generator which is absolutely free and TailorBrands which is paid but it’s worth it.

Attractive high-quality content related images for website

Another thing that would bring great attraction and visitors is the graphical content of the website. They are really helpful in promoting the website as well as they also give a professional look to the website.

As we have all seen that a website that has some blurry images of random models it deeply affects our opinion about the website our business these photos represent.

Well lucky for you there are a lot of options on the internet for amazing photos for your websites some of these are:

Unsplash it is a free platform for pictures.

500px.com it is a platform consisting of both free and paid images depending upon the quality.

GettyImages.com it is the well-known site and the first choice for many websites. I t is a paid platform and is worth it.

ShutterStock.com just like the Getty images it is also a paid platform for high-quality images.

Good quality image editors

It is one of the most basic and most compulsory tools and I must suggest that it is the basic requirement for any website owner. Now some must be thinking that they don’t have graphical content in their website well even though you don’t have graphics but still you’ll need to crop rotate and resize images at some point. Tools like adobe premiere pro and photoshop are difficult and expensive to use.

That is why free online image editors are effective. Yes, I know that they won’t be able to do what full version of photoshop is capable of doing yet still they are remarkable in helping.

Some of the online editors I would recommend are

Pixlr we could say it is master copy free version of the giant tool photoshop. Major drawback is it has a slight learning curve not good for everyone. It lacks in the preset tools as well.

PicMonkey it is one of the simplest tools to use. It is good for the purpose of creating some unusual ads. Its tools are really simple and easy to use you can color outside line and it will fix it himself! It is really user-friendly.

BeFunky it is also a great tool consisting of a lot of preset tools. It has all the features offered by Pixlr and PicMonkey. It has an extremely user-friendly interface that makes it an ideal choice.

Effective google analytics

Google Analytics is a must for anyone taking his business seriously and having a goal to grow his website and number of visitors. It is a data analyzation tool that allows the owner to understand how visitors interact with his website.

You can get knowledge about how many visitors you have on your website as well as the pages that are most visited and their duration of stay on each page etc. and many more things. Using all this useful information you know in what areas you need improvement.

Let’s just assume visitors visit page 26 very frequently but don’t stay there for long and it’s a pretty important page then you can figure out the problem about the page easily. Frankly speaking, it might not give you all the information but it is definitely a good place for a start.

Frequently asked questions about the discussed article

How can we purchase a domain name for our website?

Easy just purchase it through your website building tool or by a third party like GoDaddy etc.

Please tell us more about the hosting?

The place where all the data of your website is saved online is called its hosting. Drag and drop builders usually have their own hosting even on the free plans.

What is google analytics?

It’s a tool for getting knowledge about how people usually interact with our website. You can get knowledge about how many visitors you have on your website as well as the pages that are most visited and their duration of stay on each page etc. and many more things. Using all this useful information you know in what areas you need improvement.

What should we keep in our mind while choosing a website?

I would say that before choosing a tool for building sites take a rough idea by visiting 2 or 3 tools and look everything like price, are they user-friendly and their templates as well.

Also, check how much your website can grow by the tool you are going to use.

Can you please suggest me a tool that has a user-friendly interface?

Weebly is a good tool for newbies. It is really easy to use and has a really great user-friendly interface. It could be really good for those people who are not good with modern-day technology.

Which website creating tool has the set of best templates?

It is really hard to tell because everyone has its pros and cons. But the Square Space is the best choice as it is a good design orientation website tool. Its templates are really professional and they keep it up to date according to market demand.

Give us an idea about the number 1 drag and drop tool?

Wix, in my opinion, is no doubt the best because of its amazingly advanced user-friendly features. Its ability to integrating with social channels gives it a major advantage above other tools available in the market.