What is "Integrity" in a commercial website?
You must make your website an Integral Whole where every single page, every image and every link serves one goal: to sell. Here are two questions you must ask yourself when your website is ready:
- What is missing and what else should I add to it?
- What is unnecessary here and therefore must be removed?
Remember the following before you start:
- Every page of your website must promote only ONE of your products or services.
and...
- All of the links on the page must be related to THIS product or service.
Note that the pages with too many links on them don't work or work very poorly. The pages with more than one banner on them don't work or work poorly. Two or three images on the page are usually enough to make your page look cool. Textual links work 100 times better then any button or banner. Every page of your website must have its own theme and only one or it won't work.
When your website is "ready," look at it and ask yourself: "What is unnecessary here?" Remove anything relating to this category. All those "traffic generators," banner exchanges, "free content" buttons etc. - do they really bring you traffic? Several hits a month? Or do they only make your pages load 20 seconds slower? Remove them! Only things that are absolutely necessary must remain on your website.
Now double-check all the links leading your visitor away from your website. Do they lead your visitor to your "order page" or to something else like "Download Your Copy Of IE!" or "Get a free counter for your website now"? Do you really think it's your goal to promote somebody else's free counters or Microsoft browsers? Remove them!
What you really MUST have on your website:
- -Your Logo (the simplest way is using your URL for this, helping your site stay in the visitor's memory for a long time if well made!)
- -Your own Newsletter subscribe box.
- -Your name and E-mail address with "You may contact me at any time" on every page
- -Link to autoresponder with some Hot Report
- -Link to a free gift (Your own Marketing E-book is the best)
Why is it necessary to put your name on every page of your website? I know from my personal experience people feel a website is more credible and reliable when they see a real person's name instead of some impersonal "Staff Member," "Support Service," or anything else. I prefer to see something like this:
"Please contact me at any time if you have any questions,
Yours sincerely,
William B. Yeats
E-mail: william@wbyeats.com".
"Me" is a keyword here!
Some marketing experts suggest putting the most important info or link in the upper left corner of the website. I think it must be just everywhere, in the upper left corner, in the middle, at the top, at the bottom and everywhere else...but in many different forms! Image here, textual link there, Subscribe Box on the left and autoresponder link at the bottom etc. Our language is rich enough to express the same opportunity in a thousand different ways.
All of the above are just the basics and it's not time to discuss the advanced web design questions here. But if you follow the simple rules above then your website will sell!
Thank you and happy marketing!
Yours sincerely,
Igor Gir
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