A professional website is always more popular than one that looks unprofessional.
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Don’t Advertise on Your Main Site
If your main-site has ads on it, it only shows people your intention is to make money of them. Your forum can have ads, your articles; every other page can have ads, but not the main site. Look at Triond, look at Google, look at any site that looks professional, you will see no advertisements. If you display ads on the main-site it is like asking people money to have a first impression. A shop also doesn’t charge you to come in, right. Even if the person doesn’t really pay for the ads, he or she will feel it like he or she is doing you a favor. If you need to resort to advertising on your main site, it doesn’t show any professionalism.
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Have Your Own Domain Name
You need to register your own domain name. It will cost you money, but let’s face it if you don’t want to invest money in your website, it doesn’t show much confidence. Own domain names in general are easier to remember. Compare Triond to my blog, Jotter Scalems. I confess, it doesn’t have to look professional and I don’t want to earn or spend money on it. That’s why it looks like it does now. You have to spend money to make money they say. That doesn’t mean you have to register an expensive name on the Internet. A cheap one will cost you around 10 dollars a year. That is less than one dollar a month.
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Be Straightforward and Easy to Use
Don’t waste your time on gadgets. Most people have one purpose when they come to your site and they don’t have a lot of patience. If I had to scroll down to use google, I’d swap to yahoo in no time. Triond is another good example. All you need is a couple of basic things that people can rely on. The contact button shouldn’t be big, by now we know that we can scroll down and find the contact button somewhere on the bottom of the page. If you sell dictionaries, the people who want to visit the site will want to buy dictionaries. They don’t want to hear about how your company has sold dictionaries for six generations. If you decide to add a search option on your site, be sure it works well. You’re better of with good categories than with a search option that doesn’t make any sense. If someone searches for Japanese-English dictionary, he needs a Japanese-English dictionary. If that search shows him two Japanese-Japanese dictionaries, two English-Japanese dictionaries, one Japanese-English and English-Japanese in one, one pocket English and so on, he won’t be happy. In this case you could use click buttons to select the languages and it would work much better.
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Do Not Brag About How Great Your Site is
Good websites don’t need to tell you how many people they have helped. They don’t display stories of happy users. Your website should have fame, not claim fame.
June 18th, 2008 at 12:28 am
Good observations on your part and thanks for pointing those out.