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Graphics can add a real nice touch to a website . . . or they can slow it down so much that no one will wait for the page to load! Webmasters designing new pages are forced to examine the pros and cons of web page graphics. As you plan your latest website project, will you use graphics or not, and if so, should you? Here we will look at both sides of the equation.

It all boils down to functionality. If you are selling paintings on your website, you will obviously need graphics, no two ways about it. The same goes for nearly any kind of product that could be featured graphically, such as books, stereos, etc. People like to see what they are buying, so you pretty much need to have pictures for these items.

However, if you are going to put photos of your products up, you should consider making them thumbnails for faster loading and make them clickable. Clients can then choose which one they want to see in more detail and click to see the full version. Since they know what they are doing, they won’t mind waiting a little extra time to see the product graphics.

Apart from purely practical use, should you use graphics on your website? That depends on what kind of graphics you want to use. You need to make the page easy to read and relatively fast to load. This rules out most giant graphics, such as photographic backgrounds, unless they are absolutely necessary.

If you do decide to use some reasonably sized graphics, you should try to limit the number per page. While a cute logo is fine, having little animals all over your sidebars and buttons can be not only distracting, but it also looks pretty unprofessional. Cluttering up your site with too many graphics is not generally a good idea, it gives a bad impression and if you are trying to sell something, an amateur look is not the way to go, no matter how fun it is.

When deciding whether or not to add graphics to your website, you should consider whether or not it adds quality to the page. Do you feel that your website will be represented through the graphic you are considering? Will it help sell your products? Is it going to convince the customer to stay when they might have thought about clicking away? If you find yourself saying yes to any one of the above questions, you have a good reason to be putting graphics on your site. Otherwise, you should probably forget about it and stick to a more simplistic look.

The decision of whether or not to display graphics on your website really is a personal one, but it can make all the difference in terms of sales and how many visitors actually stay on the page! If it takes too long to load graphics that you simply must have, try lowering the resolution a bit for faster loading times. Remember that people are impatient and will simply click away to another site if yours is too slow or too cluttered.

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It can be very confusing trying to figure out exactly what you need to do and buy in order to get going in ecommerce. There are a myriad of products out there that are quite different in prices, ranging from free to thousands of dollars and all of them claim to be the only way to really earn any money in ecommerce! While these products and information packages might be very useful, the reality is that you don’t have to buy a huge pile of things just to get started. That can come later, once you are established. So let’s take a look at just what you do need.

For any ecommerce venture, you will need a web presence. That generally means a website or possibly a blog where you can promote and sell your product. Ecommerce is all about selling, so you will need to design your website specifically for selling. That might mean hiring a good copywriter, especially if you aren’t a great writer yourself. This is no time to skimp on quality.

Obviously, in order to sell, you also need a product! The best products for ecommerce are information products like reports and e-books that can be easily and rapidly accessed online once the buyer has paid for them. You don’t even need to write or create your own product, you can get one that has resell rights and simply turn around and sell it to your own customers.

The disadvantage to selling someone else’s product in your ecommerce business is that you are not the only vendor, so if you are able to write your own e-book or develop your own product, you will have a leg up on the competition. If need be, you can hire a freelancer through a bidding site to do the work for you. This may cost a bit more, but you will end up with a higher quality product.

Once you have your product and your ecommerce website designed to sell that product, all you are missing is customers. You will need to build your traffic in order to sell your product. This can be done in a variety of ways, including free promotion such as article marketing and banner exchanges and paid methods like Adwords and the like. In general, the free methods work, but tend to bring in a trickle of visitors. If you have the budget, paid marketing is the only way to go! Take out a couple of Adwords ads and pay for a banner campaign or two and you will soon be swamped with visitors.

The last step in building your ecommerce business is to develop repeat sales. You will need to set up a mailing list, which is relatively easy. Sign up with an auto responder and have it collect people’s email addresses when they purchase your product. They will have to enter their email address in order to download the e-book or whatever it is that you are selling. Later, when you expand your product line, you can send them a notice letting them know that you have new products that they might be interested in.

These are the only things you really actually need in order to start in ecommerce. Anything else can be considered extra and a luxury. Ecommerce can be developed slowly as you have the time and money to do so.

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When you are first starting up your e-business, it can be difficult to decide which webhost to go with. While free looks appealing, it does have it’s setbacks and you might prefer to go with paid, but it is good to get all the options before making a major decision! For e-businesses with a very low budget, starting off on a free webhost can be the best choice, but you need to know what you are looking for.

Free webhosting for e-business has obvious appeal because you don’t have to pay, of course! However, while free hosting can be nice, you do usually get what you pay for. They aren’t just giving away space for nothing, the webhosts still need to earn money and most do that by placing ads on your website.

Having banner ads or a notice that says “Get Your Free Website Here” on your e-business site is not very professional, so you might want to look for other options in this case. There are free webhosts for e-business that allow for ad-free websites, but they are usually extremely limited in the way of space and bandwidth. As long as you stay small and don’t need to upload videos or major files, you can use these providers for your e-business.

Most e-businesses prefer to have their own domain name as it appears far more professional than a website hosted under a subdomain such as www.freehost.yourbusiness.com. If you decide to go with a free webhost, you need to make sure that you select one that allows for outside domain names. There are free hosts out there that allow for this and it really is your best option. If you are doing marketing and promotion for your e-business, you don’t want to lose all that traffic simply by moving to a new webhost later on. A domain name allows you to switch hosts without losing your traffic, you can simply redirect your domain.

Another thing to watch for when you are searching for a free webhost for your e-business site is upgradeable hosts. This means that if you like the webhost and everything is going well, when you need to expand, you can easily do so by simply starting to pay a low monthly fee. This gives you more space, bandwidth and other options for your e-business.

If you plan to monetize your e-business website with Adsense or another type of ad, you will probably be banned from doing this on any webhost that already runs Adsense themselves. An ad-free site is more likely to allow your ads to be placed, but make sure you check this out before signing up. It’s no fun having to redesign your entire e-business website just because you missed a “no ad posting” clause!

If you find a host that offers free webhosting without ads, with paid upgrades, allows for domain names and your own ads, plus the space that you need to get started, you have the perfect webhost for your e-business. It really does pay to shop around.

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Article marketing basically consists of submitting your promo pieces to article directories and hoping that they will be approved. However, there is a better way of doing things than simply submitting and waiting with crossed fingers. The trick is to guarantee that article directories accept your work.

It takes time and effort in order to write an article, submit it by hand to the article directories (the recommended method), and if you get rejected, you have wasted all of that time. Simply completing the submission process can take a minute or two and if you are submitting to several article directories or are trying to send multiple submissions to one, that could easily add up to half an hour, time for you to write a whole other article!

The best way to guarantee that article directories accept your work is to be familiar with their guidelines. Each directory is different, but by following general rules, you can ensure that everyone will accept your article. The editors are not usually that picky, as long as you follow formatting guidelines and stick to non-offensive information, you have a pretty good chance of adding your work to the roster.

Formatting guidelines for article directories are pretty standard. If you write an article that is between 400-800 words, you will be fine for length. Article directories tend to like their articles formatted for the web, which means writing in the same manner as this article that you are reading right now, single spaced lines, with a double space between paragraphs. This is easy to read and easy to write, as well. Avoid using TABS or indentation and stay away from automated numbers and bulleted lists. While using number is encouraged for steps, just make sure that your word processor isn’t adding them and indenting them automatically.

Your paragraphs should be fairly short as well. Three to four sentences is usually good. This means there is plenty of white space on the page and gets your article noticed faster. While the editors might accept your article even with long paragraphs, webmasters and ezine editors will be more likely looking for something that is easy on the eyes.

Spellchecking is a must for any article that will see the light of day. There is no excuse for submitting misspelled words to article directories. They will not accept this. All basic grammar rules should be followed, as well. Capitalization at the beginning of sentences and all other such rules need to be applied or your article will probably be rejected. The idea is to look professional, even if that means getting someone else to critique your work.

Links are also a no-no in many article directories and it is best to simply avoid them. If you want to add a link, you can do so in your bio at the end of the article. Otherwise, you can mention company names (like Chapters), but not the site (chapters.com). This will boost your chances of getting accepted into article directories drastically.

By following the guidelines above and making sure to read the submission rules on all article directories that you submit to, you will be sure to have success.

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Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web’s population is still running on good old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you’re designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website.

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.

You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.

If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the “quality” of the JPEG image — normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image’s file size.

On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format — the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!

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There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.

Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

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You can’t just put your website on the net with right keywords and all the right touches and expect your traffic and ranking will remain constant. As the web is an ever changing landscape, you have to keep track of your own web results like what is happening with the competition and also the best and highest ranked sites. There are many useful tools to help you find out what exactly is happening.

1. A tool which you can use to test your own website links or other websites for broken links:

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

2. With this tool you can check search engines for the number of back links to your URL i.e. other web pages linking to your site:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/backlinks/

3. It sometimes becomes important to know where the servers of your hosting company are physically located. Because, some search engines like Google have the ability to filter search results based on their physical location called geotargeting. This could be used to determine why your site is showing in only a certain country. This link can also be used to research the country location of a particular competitor’s website:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/website-country/

4. In order to track the location of the visitor or a customer to your website:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/geovisitors/

5. In order to check the Yahoo! web ranking of your’s or your competitor’s website use :

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/webrank/

6. Here is a link to check the web ranking of a website using a Mac or Apple computer:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/pagerank-mac/

7. You need a Google AdSense account for using this. This link provides you with charts and reports which will help you analyze traffic, clicks, and results from your AdSense advertising

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-charts/

8. If you have an AdSense account, you can analyze your website address or another website address to see what Google ads will be displayed when the customer selects certain website names or keywords:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-sandbox/

9. This link will take you to a cooperative advertising network where you can join to display and

share your ads with other website owners:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/

10. You can add the Search Functionality on your website which uses Google. This works only if your site is listed in the Google Index.

 http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/search/

11. Here are some links to free website counters which you can use on your website to track your traffic and hits:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/counter/

http://www.amazingcounters.com/?ref=gad033

http://www.cyber-counter.com/signup.php

http://www.statcounter.com/free_hit_counter.html

http://www.free-counters.net/

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It is worth cataloguing the basic principles to be enforced to increase website traffic and search engine rankings. 

• Create a site with valuable content, products or services.
• Place primary and secondary keywords within the first 25 words in your page content and spread them evenly throughout the document.
• Research and use the right keywords/phrases to attract your target customers.
• Use your keywords in the right fields and references within your web page. Like Title, META tags, Headers, etc.
• Keep your site design simple so that your customers can navigate easily between web pages, find what they want and buy products and services.
• Submit your web pages i.e. every web page and not just the home page, to the most popular search engines and directory services. Hire someone to do so, if required. Be sure this is a manual submission. Do not engage an automated submission service.
• Keep track of changes in search engine algorithms and processes and accordingly modify your web pages so your search engine ranking remains high. Use online tools and utilities to keep track of how your website is doing.
• Monitor your competitors and the top ranked websites to see what they are doing right in the way of design, navigation, content, keywords, etc.
• Use reports and logs from your web hosting company to see where your traffic is coming from. Analyze your visitor location and their incoming sources whether search engines or links from other sites and the keywords they used to find you.
• Make your customer visit easy and give them plenty of ways to remember you in the form of newsletters, free reports, reduction coupons etc.
• Demonstrate your industry and product or service expertise by writing and submitting articles for your website or for article banks so you are perceived as an expert in your field.
• When selling products online, use simple payment and shipment methods to make your customer’s experience fast and easy.
• When not sure, hire professionals. Though it may seem costly, but it is a lot less expensive than spending your money on a website which no one visits.
• Don’t look at your website as a static brochure. Treat it as a dynamic, ever-changing sales tool and location, just like your real store to which your customers with the same seriousness.

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