Your Quick Guide to Writing Killer Content
Your Quick Guide to Writing Killer Content
From Wix.com
Jump to: navigation , search Quality content is probably the most important thing a website should have. Without it, your site is
pretty much doomed. What makes content so major and how can you make sure your content is prime stuff? Read these guidelines and the rest will follow.
Contents
[ hide ]
1 Why Content is King
2 Planning Your Web Content
3 “What exactly do you do?”
4 “What are your customers’ problems?”
5 “What is your competitive advantage?”
6 “What should your customers know before making their decision?”
7 “Who are you?”
8 See also
Why Content is King
As a budding web wizard, you've probably heard that on the web, “content is king." There is a huge amount of information on the Internet for users to choose from, and sites with poor content are simply no match for the ones who know how to work it. That's why it is incredibly important to rise to the challenge of creating quality content that will interest your audience and place you above your competitors. One of the things that make content so brilliant, is that it's more than a mean to entertain your users. Content is also one of the best ways to bring traffic to your site. Search engines find and list all of the websites with content related to the keywords a user enters. If the content on your page is strong and on-topic, then your users will have no problem discovering your site through search engines. And that, dear friend, is highly valuable.
Now that you understand why content is king, it’s time to get started on organizing the content for your site.
Planning Your Web Content
If you want your free website to be a success story, it must contain premium content. Whether you are developing a new website or redeveloping an old one, one of the most important things on your checklist should be to create top notch content for your site. A jaw-dropping, eye-popping Flash website design is great, but it isn’t the primary element that will make your website successful. The most important thing is that your users will be able to easily find everything they're looking for, and that they will find the content interesting, useful and fun. If the users won't encounter quality content within few seconds from entering your site, they will simply leave, most likely never to return. That's why it is crucial to provide them with the appropriate content.
Before you begin creating content for your website, it is important to do some planning. These questions will point you in the right direction:
“What exactly do you do?”
Before you start writing like crazy, ask yourself what you, your company, your brand or your initiative is all about. Maybe you sell shoes, maybe you're running for mayor, maybe you illustrate children’s books... Whatever you do, the content on your homepage should clearly explain this in as little words as possible. Visitors should be able to quickly figure out what services they can receive from your site, or they will leave without looking back.
If you run a creative business, a Flash intro can be a good way to show your customers what you're capable of. As a general rule, though, Flash intros should be avoided on business pages.
“What are your customers’ problems?”
People will visit your site because they have a question and they want an answer, or because they have a problem and they're looking for the best solution. In other words, "people don’t buy products - they buy benefits.” Your site should describe the services or products that you are offering in terms of answers or solutions. Make sure that your content clearly answers the ultimate customers' question - “What’s in it for me?”
“What is your competitive advantage?”
Let your users know why your service or product is so much better than what the competition is offering. Your content should reassure them that they are making the right decision by sticking with you.
“What should your customers know before making their decision?”
If you've offered your products or services in the past, off or online, think about the most frequently asked questions that you've encountered. What do people ask before doing business with you? What do people call to ask on the phone? Make sure you include these questions and their answers in a “FAQ” section on your site.
It's also important to include all the information that you see fit or relevant, so that no questions will be left unanswered on your site.
“Who are you?”
If you are using Wix to make your own business website for free, don't forget to add an "About" section, which includes all the important details about your company - where are you located, how long have you been operating, what is your specialty, do you have casual fridays and so on. If you are using Wix to create a free website for personal promotion, then this section should describe who you are and what are you doing here. Once you've answered these questions, you are ready to start writing your funky content.
One of the most important things about creating content is keyword research. Continue reading and learn how to perform an efficient keyword research for your site.
8 Simple Steps to planning your site
From Wix.com
Jump to: navigation , search What makes a really good website? The answer is more simple than you think. This guide will teach
you how to create the mystical combination of content, design and functionality and bring to life your dream site.
Contents
[ hide ]
1 What's Important in a Website?
2 Road Map: Mapping Out Your Site
3 Flash Websites, HTML Websites & Wix Sites
4 Quick Tips for Choosing Your Domain Name - You'll Thank Us Later
5 Website Hosting
6 Benchmarking - How Do You Compare?
7 Keyword & Keyword Selection Tips & Tools
8 Design for Your Target Market
9 See Also
What's Important in a Website?
Everyone has their favorite websites to visit online. These are the websites that you happily go back to again and again. It’s not only because of the information that they provide you with, but also because they’re easy to use, designed in a way that appeals to you and give you an overall lovely web experience.
"WOW! How can I build a killer site like that?" Well, you've come to the right place! We’ve written down these tips to help you as you start pondering about your new free website :
A great design: Visit websites that you like and try to figure out what’s so good about their design. What websites do you think your users visit often? Study these sites to get inspiration and design ideas. After your research is complete, use Wix’ website design tools to create a professional- looking and visually stimulating website.
Easy navigation: Internet is supposed to be simple. No one wants to get lost and stuck (unless your website offers some crazy D&D labyrinth for people with impaired social skills). Think about the most important points that your users are looking for and let them guide your navigation decisions.
The most important information should be found with a minimum number of clicks. Use clear menus and buttons and provide your visitors with connective links on each page for a simple and natural flow.
Appealing content: A site’s content is often what attracted you to it in the first place. Whether your users are searching for homeopathic remedies, how to build a playground for bunnies or photos of Communist interior design, the content of the site is the primary attraction. Another thing about content is that search engines are crazy about it. If you provide premium content, your site can become more visible on google, Yahoo! and the rest of them.
Few ways to improve your web content:
Quality writing:Clear and clever writing will keep the readers smiling. Updated content:Sleepy content is boring, both for your readers and for the search engines.
Wix makes it easy to update your website as often as you wish with our user-friendly editing tools. Simply login, go to your website account, edit all you want and then hit save. The changes will automatically update on your published site.
Offer your visitor some added value: Focus on the benefits of using your product or visiting
your website. One way to do this is to offer them something extra - something beyond what they would expect to find on your website.
Keep these notions in mind and you’ll be on the right track to creating your dream free website .
Road Map: Mapping Out Your Site
To build a great website, you first need a blueprint. When architects create a blueprint, they first consider the function of what it is that they're building. An airport’s blueprint looks much different than a library’s blueprint, for instance.
Think of your website’s blueprint as the outline of your site, ultimately providing you with a plan for how to build the site that you’ve always envisioned on those sunny afternoons of daydreaming. Yes, building a website can become somewhat emotional.
One rule that should always guide you: When you’re building your free website with Wix technology, it is important not only to have a superior design, but also to have real quality content. After all, content is the main reason why someone would choose to pay your website a visit in the first place. On the World Wide Web, content is king. Content is what helps search engines rank you, which, in turn, helps your ideal users find you.
Things to consider for your super roadmap:
1. Function: What will be your site’s function? Will it be a personal blog, an online gallery or exhibition or a promotional website for your business?
2. Information: What sort of information would you like people to find on your website? What should they find on the homepage? Once you decide on the main topic of your website, you’re ready to start organizing your content. If you're truely interested in your topic, then selecting content should be one of the most thrilling phases of website building. Fun!
3. Navigation:
• How many pages should your site have? • What should be the order of the pages? • How will people navigate on the site? How should the menus, interactive buttons, displays
and all the functional tools work? Important questions that need to be answered.
4. Design: Your website’s design should, to a large extent, be derived from the function, information and navigation you decided on. It is important to keep the design clear, but not boring. Think about the visitors you wish to attract to your site. What kind of design will they appreciate? How can you please them and even surprise them?
Once you have your roadmap in hand, you can work quickly with Wix.com’s Free website builder to design a beautiful and efficient website.
Flash Websites, HTML Websites & Wix Sites
Stepping into the great Flash vs HTML debate
For years there has been a dispute in the website building world between the Flash mob and the HTML gang. These days, however, the dispute is coming to an end, with flash offering what it always had to offer AND what HTML has to offer as well. Ok, so we may be a tad biased here, but hear us out.
HTML has been the traditional form of website building since the 1980’s. Flash websites, on the other hand, use a new technology to create dynamic and smooth web experiences. As many of the biggest companies switch their websites to the Flash website mode, Flash is becoming a website building standard. For Flash advocates throughout the world, this is no big surprise.
Here’s why:
Dynamic Memorable Visual Experience:More sophisticated than HTML, Flash provides an incredible visual experience, allowing you to create a dynamic memorable website for your users.
Greater freedom:Flash provides you with a degree of freedom of development that’s not found elsewhere. For instance, you can place objects anywhere you want without having to deal with tables and all sorts of coding nightmares… yuck!
Greater Interactivity:Flash is the way to create an interactive website: rollovers, color and image changes, incorporating mp3 and wav files, movies, background music and tons more. Perhaps all these features together are too much for you. No problem – just don’t add them. But unlike HTML, at least its easy .
Videos and animation:It’s much easier to incorporate animation and videos in a Flash website, and they look way more awesome than with basic HTML elements.
Wix Free flash websites have even more to offer:
Search Engine Friendly: During the dark ages, one big challenge with Flash was that it was hard for search engines like google to index. Wix has taken care of that, so you can now build your Flash website with Wix and know that your site is being read by search engines & by your visitors.
Easy to Update Content: The ability to modify your website used to be hard with Flash . With Wix, those sad days are over. We’ve made it as easy as editing a document on your computer. All you need to do is login to “My Account”, find your published Wix websites, edit them the way you desire and hit save. Your changes will automatically be updated on your Wix website. Simple.
Overall, if you want to create a website, a Wix Flash website is the best way to go. With its highly professional but at the same time user-friendly features, you’ll be able to deliver a dynamic and rich free website that is also easy to update and search engine friendly. How lucky can one be?
Quick Tips for Choosing Your Domain Name - You'll Thank Us Later
Ok, so it’s not like we’re talking about your newborn child or your puppy, but choosing your domain name is super important! It’s the name of your website address. The thing people type in after the http://www .
For the majority of your website's visitors, the domain name will be their first impression of your website. And as you probably know, first impressions are quite hard to change. So in order to make
a good first impression, we recommend you spend some time coming up with the ideal domain name.
Here are some homemade tips for choosing the domain name that’s right for your free website : Keep it simple: Your domain name is your guests’ direct highway to your website. Try to keep the
name as simple and straightforward as possible, so they won't get confused. Avoid words with tricky spelling.
Think catchy: Creating a catchy name will make it easier for guests to tell their friends about how to find your website online.
Make sense: Make sure the name is related to your site. Short and sweet: Long domain names may be more explanatory, but they won’t be much fun for
your guests. BecomingABuddhistTheEasyWay.com can just be EasyBuddhist.com – much friendlier.
Keywords & buzzwords: Try to incorporate keywords and buzzwords related to your website's topic (it helps to create a list of your favorite related words and try different combinations of them).
Choose carefully: Avoid using a temporary name and changing it afterwards. This will only confuse and upset your regular guests.
Wix Tip: Ifyou’re using Wix free hosting (it’s free, safe & simple!), your domain name will look like this: www.wix.com/ username / your Wix doc name. To create a great name, we recommend you rename your Wix website document, using a keyword related to your topic.
These tips are meant to help people find and enjoy your Wix site without difficulty. Although choosing a domain name may be a long pain, it will be worth your while to keep focusing and not to settle on an average name. After all, a fantastic and original name will help define and distinguish your free website right from the start.
Website Hosting
One of the great benefits of creating a free website with Wix is that we offer you the option of free hosting as well.
That means that you can design and build your own website using Wix’s Flash website builder , AND you can also host your miraculous creation with us when you are ready to publish it online.
But what is important in a host?
1. Flexibility: We’re providing the hosting, but you’re still the boss.
2. Safe & Secure: If you don’t want your site to crash from time to time, you need a reliable hosting service. Your site is safe and sound on Wix’ servers, guarded by a firewall and a load balancer.
3. Free: Hosting can be pricy, but not with Wix. Ours is a free-of-charge policy.
Benchmarking - How Do You Compare?
How do you rate compared to your competitors?
Benchmarking is the process of evaluating your business practices, yourself or your website against the other players in your field.
In web design , benchmarking is an important part of creating and improving a site. Benchmarking helps you to set goals for yourself. It motivates you to create the best personal websiteor business websitethat you can.
Once you have the first draft of your website, you are already set to begin benchmarking (using a comparison survey to evaluate your progress, for instance). So this is how it's done:
1. Search & find competitors: Go to a search engine like Google or Yahoo and run searches on the most popular keywords related to your website.
The goal here is to find other websites that are the best of the best, the jewel in the crown, the cream of the crop in your genre (vintage fashion, authentic Japanese cooking, Vanilla Ice fanclub, etc.). Of course, you can also type in your competitors’ names and see what keywords they are using to attract visitors.
2. See what they offer: Examining the industry’s standards will allow you to know how high you should aim for and where can you improve.
3. Do it better! Don’t be the same as your rivals, be brutally better. Explore your competitors’ weaknesses, find inspiration in successful websites from different fields, adapt unique practices into your own website design process and always aspire to bring something fresh and captivating.
Remember that benchmarking is a valuable exercise in all stages of a website’s development. In order to maintain the quality that matches the highest industry standards, constant benchmarking and updating must be practiced.
As you build and update your website, continue to benchmark. In the online world, the bar is always being raised. Make it your goal to be a leader in your free website niche.
Keyword & Keyword Selection Tips & Tools
An overview and a reference to some cool keyword tools
Everyday, millions of people around the world perform searches on popular search engines like Google and Yahoo. What are they looking for?
What they search for is commonly known as “keywords”. Each search term can include one or more keywords that are related to a specific topic, for instance: “baby stroller”, “Mexican food recipes”, "how to remove blood stains from carpets" and so on. Wise keyword selection can substantially boost the traffic on your free website You probably heard it before, and you're likely to hear it again: on the web, content is king. It is your content that is being read by search engine robots, which then compare it to all other relevant websites and decide how to rank you.
That's where keywords kick in. It doesn’t matter if you’re creating a business site or a personal site. Using keywords that are related to your website in the site's content can elevate its position on search engines and increase your traffic. This does not mean you should turn your site into a keyword dumpster. Keywords should be used moderately and appropriately.
But how do you choose the right keywords?
Keyword Selection is the art of choosing the best keywords for your website. These keywords should include words and phrases that are both commonly searched for AND that are related to your website.
If you want guidance with your keyword selection, there are paid services and plenty of advisors you can hire, but unless you’re creating a massive business website, we don’t recommend it much.
Instead, we recommend you spend some time doing your own keyword research. You'll find a neat free Keyword Tools here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Wix Tips:
Check out your competition: If you’re having trouble getting started, try searching for your competitors and check out which keywords they are using.
Use Keyword Phrases: Keep in mind that most people perform multiple word searches, which means more than one word. So keyword phrases are generally better choices than one keyword. They also allow you to be more specific about all the wonders your website has to offer.
Spread 'em: Use keywords in your website title, description and domain names.
Design for Your Target Market
Your “target market” is marketing-talk for “who are you building your website for". Knowing who you’re writing and designing for will help you express yourself with certainty,
purpose and sex appeal. You can create the website of your life, but if you don't keep the target market in mind, it just
wouldn't work. So, who are the visitors that you hope to attract to your free website ?
If you’re designing a business website, you may want to consider your ideal business clientele and what they would expect to find on your site. Breathe, focus and ask yourself the following
questions:
1. What actions would you like them to do while visiting your site? Do you want them to buy, to provide their contact information, to subscribe to something?
2. What language are they used to – technical, formal or conversational?
3. What information and products/services are attractive to them?
If you want to make a personal website, you're aiming for quite a different target market, which is a little more difficult to define.
For instance, if you think of a webpage written by a single mother, her target audience may be other single mothers. On the other hand, the website could be designed to inspire children of single mothers, to generate awareness to issues of raising children as a single mom or to take revenge at that bastard of a father. Each target would lead her to choose a different design.
Once you’ve figured out who your target market is and what they wish to find on your site, you can begin to build a sweet website with a clear focus.
Some quick tips for how to design for your target market:
• Design your website as a clear roadmap for your target market. They should be able to
find exactly what they are looking for without having to dig through the whole site.
• Create a simple website menu (e.g. “About Us,” “Products,” “Contact Us”) on each webpage for easy navigation.
• Keep the text and pictures relevant. No kitties pictures, unless it's necessary. • Benchmark: Browse through websites that appeal to similar target markets as yours to get
inspired, expand your ideas and keep ahead of your competitors. • Learn which keywords your target market would search for and integrate them into your
content and design.
Design your Website like a pro
From Wix.com
Jump to: navigation , search So you’re ready to design your first Flash website but you have no idea where to start— What color
should your website be? Should you include animation? What fonts should you use? How should your site be laid out? Or perhaps you just want to learn more…The Wix team of Flash website designers has put together their tips to building great flash websites.PS Wix offers you a major benefit when designing a website – you don’t have to waste time or get stuck on technical problems and programming, even if you know how. With Wix you can bypass all that and focus on the fun part, your site’s design!
Contents
[ hide ]
1 Top 6 Benefits of Flash
2 Colors the World Wide Web
3 Adding Animation
4 Typography – fonts, headings and more…
5 Usability 101
6 How Many Pages?
7 See also
Top 6 Benefits of Flash
Flash has become a popular option for web design .
It’s versatile, entices visitors to come back for more and with Wix offers you the chance to customize your own free website without any prior experience or technical know-how.
Six benefits for creating a Flash website:
1. Dynamic Memorable Visual Experience: More sophisticated than HTML, with Flash you are enabled to make a website that is rich with interactive components. This means you can easily provide an incredible visual experience, allowing you to create a dynamic memorable website for your users.
2. Greater freedom: Flash provides you with a degree of freedom of development that’s not found elsewhere. For instance, you can place objects anywhere you want without having to deal with tables and all sorts of coding nightmares…
3. Greater Interactivity: Flash is the way to create an interactive website: rollovers, color and image changes…incorporating mp3 and wav files, movies…background music. Perhaps all these features together are too much for you. No problem – just don’t add them.
4.Videos and animation – It’s much easier to incorporate animation and videos in a Flash website – and they look much more impressive than basic HTML elements. Not only that, Flash enables video to play directly from your site, no plug-ins necessary. Visitors to your website will be able to view videos easily, even if they haven’t installed QuickTime or Media Player.
5.Search Engine Friendly: Traditionally, a challenge with Flash was that it was hard for search engine engines like google to index. Wix has taken care of that – so you can build your Flash website in Wix and know that your site is read by search engines & your visitors.
6.Easy to Update content: The ability to modify the look of your entire website used to be hard with Flash. With Wix those days are over. We’ve made it as easy as editing a document on your computer. All you need to do is login to “My Account” find your published Wix websites, edit the way you desire and save. And your changes will automatically be updated on your Wix website.
Simple.Overall, if you are looking to create a free website , a Wix Flash website is the right choice: with its highly professional but at the same time user-friendly features, you’ll be able to deliver a dynamic content rich website – that’s also easy to update and search engine friendly.
Don’t know a thing about Flash website creation? Don’t worry - even if you don’t know anything about Flash design you can create beautiful and
dynamic website easily with Wix Flash website builder . And because Wix is also search engine friendly, you get all the benefits of creating a Flash website without having to worry about search engine robots.
Colors the World Wide Web
After great text, color has the largest psychological impact on your site visitors. So whether this is your first site or you’re a seasoned web designer, it’s worth spending a bit of time on selecting the color scheme that works for your flash website .
Whether we notice it or not, research shows that colors have an emotional influence on us and impact the way that we judge the reliability, quality and value of websites, products and services.
Though there are no good or bad colors, each color does have negative and positive associations. White can be viewed as calming and clean, but in another context it can seem empty and sterile. It is also important to note that different colors are associated with different things. For instance, red can mean love, passion and romance; brown can suggest the earth, home and friendship; blue is Though there are no good or bad colors, each color does have negative and positive associations. White can be viewed as calming and clean, but in another context it can seem empty and sterile. It is also important to note that different colors are associated with different things. For instance, red can mean love, passion and romance; brown can suggest the earth, home and friendship; blue is
Kat also warns that having too many colors per page is likely to confuse your users. Instead she recommends that you opt for a set of colors. Of course, some combinations of colors work better than others and for this Kat shares a little secret “There’s no need to spend too much time discovering meaningful color schemes. You can save time by checking out sites like this one: http://kuler.adobe.com/#.” They offer suggestions on which color combinations work well together.
It is also important to keep in mind that too much color or too bold color can take away from the content of your site. If your site has a lot of text, consider placing the text on a white or grey background as this creates a calming effect. Then pick stronger font colors like black navy or dark grey for the text. This calming effect is also helpful as people get tired reading text off their computer screens. That doesn’t mean you need to loose color altogether. Add colors to the buttons, sidebars, navigation bars, headings and banners on your site instead. Or add some key images or photos. If you have a site that is showing off a lot of images try using black or dark grey as your background color. And the last tip from Kat, “it’s easy to add and change your sites’ color scheme with Wix, so have fun with color!”
Adding Animation
When you are building a Flash website you have the opportunity to make your website as dynamic as you want. It is up to you whether you want a clean, static site or whether you prefer website design with a lot of action, animation and effects. Check out the following tips for adding animation that will help you to maximize your site’s effectiveness, attractiveness and usability.
The most important thing to keep in mind when adding animation to your site is to use animation to contribute to your design without taking away from your site’s content. Any website designer will tell you that the design is there to support the content use animation as decoration rather than as the centerpiece of your site. Unless of course you are building a site to display your animation abilities…
A good rule of thumb is to have one major animation per page. You can then add smaller animation or behaviors like moving buttons to keep that page dynamic. Another good thing to think about is what you are trying to highlight on the page. Then all you need to do is make sure that the animation you select aids users in focusing their attention where you want it, rather than distracting them away from it.
Another important tip is to keep your animation files small so that they can load within a few seconds. Most users don’t have the time or patience to wait around for your animation to load, and they may well move away from your site… to the site of one of your competitors. You can cut down on the size of your animation by using the smallest images possible with under 16 million colors. Frame-based animations should have a maximum of 12 frames per second. Additionally, the resolution of your animations should never be larger than the smallest screen resolution out there (640x480).
You don’t need to be a flash website designer to add flash animations to your website! Wix Flash website builder offers you a large variety of free Flash animation options including animated backgrounds, graphics, buttons, drop down menus, effects, behaviors and more. And of course it’s easy to upload your own animations with Wix, too!
Typography – fonts, headings and more…
Typography is the art of arranging and designing “type” - letters. Typography encompasses a lot of factors including font and font size, formatting, spacing and line length. You don’t need to be an expert in typography to design your own website, but these tips will help you on the way to creating
a great readable site. At its best, typography is used to create readable and coherent content that allows the reader to
focus wholly on the content itself.
1. Choose fonts that are easy to read: Any web designer will tell you that if you choose a font that is hard to read people are unlikely to stick around to read what you’ve written. No matter how great it is. Make life easier for your readers and stick with a simple font group known as “Sans Serif” for the majority of your text. This group includes the popular font “Arial”. (All these fonts are available on Wix).
2. Size Does Matter - at least with font size it does. Once you choose a clear and legible font make sure that that is large enough that your readers won’t have to squint to read your content. Many of your readers are also dealing with low-contrast screens and slow refresh rates—if you want to keep them on your site it’s a good idea to draw them in with simple and clear typography.
3. Appropriate Font: Choose a font that fits your subject matter. For instance, it may make sense to use a font like Wix's “Bored Schoolboy” for your personal page, but it is unlikely to suit your business webpage.
4. Check to make sure the font you choose works in different browsers. These days people are using more than just Explorer to browse through sites. They also use Firefox, Mozilla…etc. So
make sure that the font you select works in all browsers. If you are working with Wix to create a
free website don’t worry, all our fonts are compatible across browsers.
5. Keep fonts to a minimum: If your intention is to have people read your content, too many fonts can be distracting or off putting to your site’s visitors. A good rule is to use one font for general text and another font for headings and titles. If this feels too boring consider adding color, animation or behaviors to make it more interesting.
6. Be Consistent. Once you’ve chosen your font/s it’s a good idea to be consistent throughout the whole website. Typography is also huge part branding. Look at Coca Cola, McDonald’s and Google. You’ll notice that they are consistent with their font everywhere including their websites, logos, advertisements and even their internal communication. There’s a reason for this – it means that every time people encounter you they recognize you, even if they haven’t read your content yet.
7. Punctuation: It is also important to make sure that your punctuation is correct and clear. Punctuation can make it much easier on your reader. If you have ever tried reading a huge block of text with small letters and no punctuation you know that this is virtually impossible. That said the writing for the web is a little different to print. It is perfectly reasonable to remove commas and a good idea to avoid apostrophes where possible - as these can be distracting.
8. Arrange your text with care: When you are working on your website design, keep in mind that the way you arrange your text should not be distracting. If you have a lot of content, consider writing it into shorter paragraphs and using bullets.
Now that you are ready to apply these typography lessons to your site let’s go ahead and see how designing the right usability can help you create a site that your visitors will enjoy and want to bookmark your site and come back!
Usability 101
These days everyone needs a website, but without usability – how user-friendly your site is – it’s unlikely they’ll stay! This article gives you a quick guide to usability…so you can get on with creating a site that entices your users to stick around!!
Whether you are building a Flash website or a non-Flash website, usability centers around how easy
a site is to navigate, and find information on. Without it, even the best site will fail. And of course, having a site with high usability will put you at a huge advantage over your competitors. This article is designed to give you a quick overview so you can design a usable site that people want to stay on – and visit again and again.
According to usability expert, Jacob Neilson www.useit.com “on the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival.” Why? Because if your website is difficult to use, people leave. If people get lost on your site, they leave. If the homepage doesn’t clearly show users what the site offers and what they can do on your site, they will leave. If the information on the site is difficult to read or they can’t find what they are looking for, they leave. And if they can’t find the product or service they are looking for, they leave – and they didn’t buy anything either….
It’s up to you to give them an interface that is easy to navigate and use…so they stay. And enjoy their experience on your site.
Navigation: What pages and sub-pages does it make sense for your site to have?
These days people are in a rush and they don’t want to spend ages on your site looking for simple information. Most people will expect to find “Home”, “Contact” and “About” pages on your site. Be sure to clearly label these and design a menu or easily findable buttons so that your users can find what you are looking for. Even if your site is still under construction it is worth creating a simple page with includes a short about message and contact information so that visitors can get in touch with you to ask questions and provide comments and feedback.
An easy way to think of your website as a department store. If you go into a department store looking for a new pair of shoes you shouldn’t have a difficult time finding the shoe department. Most department stores have signs directing customers to each department, making the shopping experience easy and pleasant. Within each department there are also often sub-departments like sneakers, sandals, pumps, men’s and women’s shoes. These are your “sub pages”, or pages that fall under the larger page group “Shoes”. Write out all the headings for your site and organize them into main pages and sub-pages. This will make all of the content on your site easy to find and navigate so that your users won’t leave and go to a different site.
Quick Tip: Make sure that you place a link to your “Home” page on every page of your site so your users never feel lost and can easily navigate through your site.
User-test to improve usability: Once you’ve designed your site, and arranged your pages with easy to use navigation send a few of your ideal users to the site. And after, ask them to answer these questions:
- Is it easy for users to do basic tasks the first time the come to your website? And can they do them quickly?
- Is it enjoyable and easy use your design? - Can they easily find the information they are looking for.
Don’t be afraid of their feedback. The good news is when you use platforms like Wix to create a
free website , you can easily make any changes you need to improve your site’s ease of use. These tips should help you on your way to an easy to understand and easy to navigate site. If your
site is user friendly and they can easily find what they need, and they will probably come back again.
How Many Pages?
Everyday people browse through countless sites. And they tend to only look at one to two pages. The number of pages on your website plays an important role in how easy your site is to use, so spend a little bit of time planning before you start creating your site.
There is no “right” number of pages for a website—this depends on your site’s goal. That said, whatever your goal, this article is aimed at helping you choose the amount of pages for your site (and eliminate unnecessary ones) .
Helpful Questions: Take a piece of paper and jot down the titles of pages you want on your website and what content you would place be on each page. The following questions can be helpful during this brainstorming process:
• Which parts of my site are the most important? • Which parts of my site do I want people to see first? • Is there unique and interesting content on each of my pages? • Which of my pages need sub-pages? What should the sub-categories be? • Do I have enough text on each of my pages?
These questions also help you remove pages that are not unique or interesting, combine similar pages and add content to pages that do not have enough information.
Important Pages – Home, About & Contact: It’s good to be different and distinguish yourself from other sites, but these days, with the speed at which people look at a site, it is a good idea to include a clearly labeled Home page, About page and Contact page. When thinking about your Home page, it’s a good idea to make it welcoming, with good and clear information but not too busy. This should entice your visitors to move around on your site. The Contact section should also give users an easy way to contact you.
Use Sub-pages: It is also a good idea to distinguish between main pages, and sub-pages. For examples, for a department store, shoes would be a main page, while categories like sneakers, pumps, men’s and women’s may be sub-pages.
Less is More: When you build a Flash free website with the Wix site builder you have the option of adding an unlimited number of pages. However, this doesn’t mean you should build your site with tons of pages just because you can. Remember, particularly online, less really is more!
Tips on promoting your new website
From Wix.com
Jump to: navigation , search Today, you can still find all sorts of middle-aged forms of PR. Using word of mouth, promoting
events and giving sponsorships, making press announcements, bla bla bla. That's great, but we're talking internet here. The first amazing thing you need to remember is that the internet never forgets. Links are here forever, search engines map out the entire web universe and if you spread yourself well enough, people will end up bumping into you. The question is, how can you take advantage of this? The internet offers many tools and services that are meant to make a user's life events and giving sponsorships, making press announcements, bla bla bla. That's great, but we're talking internet here. The first amazing thing you need to remember is that the internet never forgets. Links are here forever, search engines map out the entire web universe and if you spread yourself well enough, people will end up bumping into you. The question is, how can you take advantage of this? The internet offers many tools and services that are meant to make a user's life
Contents
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1 Optimize your free Website for Search Engines
2 Promote your free website with MySpace Comments
3 How to use eMarketing Materials
4 Promote Your Website Through Blogs
5 Promote Your Website through Viral Marketing
6 Drive Traffic to your website
7 Offline Promotion - Because the Real World Still Exists
8 See also
Optimize your free Website for Search Engines
Stick ‘SEO’ into google and you’ll get millions of links (206 million last time I checked). But often very little one knows what to actually do to optimize your website for search engines. Whether using a wix.com platform or not, here are some steps/tips we recommend:
• Keyword Research • Choose your platform with Care • Write clean relevant text • Submit your Website • Relevant inbound links
1. Find the right keyword If one of your goals is to drive tons of traffic to your website (which is usually the case), then Keyword & Keyword Selection Tips & Tools is incredibly important for you. “Keywords” are the words that people type in search engines like Google, Yahoo! and such. Combining popular keywords within your website infrastructure can raise the number of visitors to your site. One way to come up with keywords is simply to think about popular terms related to what that goes on in your site. For instance, if you are offering online salsa classes, you might choose the keywords salsa, dancing, dance classes, latino dancing, lame activities and so on. By including these words in your content, you can attract people that were searching for these terms on search engines.
Instead of coming up with a list of keywords off the top of your head, you can do a little bit of research and see which words are being searched for the most. There are plenty of online tools for keyword research, including the freebie Google keywords research tool. With these tools, you can find keywords that lots of people are already searching for and combine them into your content. This way, your site will appear in search results of these words. Free flash websites created with Wix are search engine friendly, so putting a little bit of effort into keyword research can really help you increase traffic and turn your site into one hot tamale
2. Choose Your Platform With Care: Before you even write a word, it’s important to ensure your Website is designed in Format that Robots can read. For most html-based sites this is a given. It is also a given with Wix. Traditionally, this is not a given with Flash. So if you are thinking of using flash - dynamic visuals being great for humans - Wix may be the solution for you. (Wix creates an html mirror of all your web content that can be read by search engine robots but is invisible to your website visitors).
3. Write Clean Relevant Text: You’ve probably heard that on the web, “content is king”. This is because although all search engines robots behave differently, the 3 largest engines (google, yahoo 3. Write Clean Relevant Text: You’ve probably heard that on the web, “content is king”. This is because although all search engines robots behave differently, the 3 largest engines (google, yahoo
• http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/ • http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal/
Of course you should also make sure to write for your current & potential customers…
4. Submit Your free Website: When you have finished your website, it can also help to let search engines know you exist. If you are publishing your website on your own domain, you can submit your website to the 3 major search engines by using the links below:
• http://www.google.com/addurl/ • http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html • http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx
(If you are publishing your website with Wix hosting service, this will happen automatically.)
5. Relevant Inbound Links: “Content is king” is not the only SEO mantra. “Relevant links” is also key. From an SEO perspective, the more relevant inbound links your site has, the higher the ranking your website will receive on Search Engines. Here are a few simple ways to increase your inbound links (and help your site get promoted):
• Add your site to Open source Web Directory Dmoz: (Note: it can take a long time for your
request to be processed) • Create links from web directories that are relevant for your free website subject area. • Ask friends and clients with relevant websites to link from their website to yours.
These are just some tips for optimizing your free website for search engine robots – without compromising on the language of your customer. We hope you’ve found them helpful! If you do end up using wix feel free to ask our help for any follow on questions.
Promote your free website with MySpace Comments
MySpace is one of the world's most powerful communities. It can be a brilliant sphere to connect with users - to talk to users in their own place and their own language. But it must be done with style, otherwise, the community will eat you alive. Try and become a living part of the community. Don’t just come and throw up comments at people's profiles. MySpace users are smarter than that. They'll just ignore you, block you or humiliate you. Learn your friends and communicate with them for real. Define which users are interesting for your goal (How many friends do they have? What are their fields of interest? How old are they? What's the look&feel of their profile page?), locate them and start communicating with them. Adding people as friends and sending them a sparkling “thx 4 approving” comment won't cut it here. It's like in the real world. Friends will be friends if you spend time with them and pay attention to them. Don’t use them. Most of the time, working in SN Marketing is just being human, and it’s not as easy as you think... When writing a comment on someone's profile, make the comment is worth staying. The person you wrote to should be glad to have a comment like yours on their page. That means your MySpace comments should be attractive, funny, wicked, sweet or whatever is good for your specific audience. You can add Music, animations or other funky features that will do the trick. Wix has several great options to offer:
• Countdown Campaign: Wix' countdown widgets allow you to post comments that will
update as frequently as you wish. You can also use this widget in banners, newsletters and such. Check out how the Anarchist Music Project, A.N.A, used it on MySpace. Discover more
• The “where i am” widget(this is my personal one):This widget tells your friends where else on the web they can find you. As you can see, I just chose specific icons (more Wix icons for more sites coming up soon) and linked them to the my personal profiles on those sites. This can enhance your relationship with your friends by bringing it to other web levels. The fun thing is that you can:
• Customize the look of your widget with colors, special effects, sounds and more pazazz stuff. • Fit the size of the widget to your blog/profile/whatever. • Add more and more icons to your widget the moment you join a new service (and you
will!). A simple click will update the widget wherever you placed it.