ARTICLE:

Sales and signups need a quick pick-me-up? Before you go tinkering with your ad copy, make sure it's not your site's DESIGN that's killing off your profit.

A surefire way to tell whether your site is "effective" is to ask yourself,

"Are a good percentage of my visitors doing what I've designed the site to GET them to do (order, subscribe, etc.)?"

Here are the top five components every e-business site MUST HAVE in order to be effective:

1) An easy-to-understand navigational system.

Can your visitors get around easily, or are they easily lost? Do you have a link to get back to your home page and/or site map on EVERY page or only a few?

Ten times out of eight (nope, not a typo), people don't tell you when they link to you. If they link to a page that's not connected to your home page, a good amount of your visitors WON'T FIND IT.

HINT: Why? It just doesn't occur to a lot of people to go to the base domain of the URL they've visited.

2) Your name and e-mail address listed on your website.

Having an e-mail address is just not enough. Who are your visitors supposed to address their e-mail to?

I really can't figure out people who do this.

WHAT are they hiding from? Why NOT put your name on your site? Do they forget, does it not occur to them, or are they afraid people will be able to discover where they live and come stalk them with just their first and last names as a guide?!

Whatever the reasoning, it's absolutely ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as the reps who work for Cardservice International telling customers that they "don't give out their last names."

EXCUSE them?! All this, when these merchant account providers have access to our bank account info, social security numbers, and everything else they need to steal our identities and clean us out?!

<...sigh...> I apologize. I digress.

Not having your full name plainly listed on your site is ruining your credibility and the credibility of your business. So, JUST DO IT! If you don't plan to list the BARE MINIMUM of your full name and e-mail address on your website, you may as well pack it up now and call it quits.

3) A compatible screen size for most (if not all) browsers.

1028 x 768 seems to be the standard screen resolution for now. At least on my own sites. Check your website's stats to see what resolution most of your visitors are browsing at. (If you don't have a site yet, start out with 800 x 600 pixels as a standard.)

You can control the width of your site using tables, by setting the width of the outermost table to the maximum size. (So in this case, you'd set the table width to 600.)

4) A reasonable background image and color scheme.

Orange and green backgrounds with bright red text, dancing babies, and flying bunnies are just NOT cool for business sites, no matter what your friends might say.

If you have to squint to read your site, or your eyes get tired after 2-5 minutes of reading, your site needs a major color scheme makeover. Use BLACK text, or very dark colored text on a WHITE or very light colored background.

But, if you absolutely can't live without your stars, triangles, or dinosaurs cluttering up your background, just be sure to set the image as the background for the page, and put a plain white table on every page that contains text.

If done right, this could be a nice looking addition to a web page.

5) Use mood colors.

This one can really be helpful when setting the tone of your site and increase your response. For example, green is considered a "concentration" color. So on pages that have a lot of text, you might do well to use green (i.e. as a solid background color behind your white table, or accented throughout the page).

TIP: *Dark* green is a MONEY color, while the regular, standard green is the concentration color.

Learn to use color to your advantage in designing your sites, to make your visitors feel energized, relaxed, focused, more ready to make a purchase, or almost anything else. You're only limited by your imagination (and, of course, color blindness).