Your Website Hurts My Eyes: 7 Reasons to Tone Down Your Advertising
 by: Dina Giolitto

So you’re on the computer, as usual. Your eyes are smarting. Your back hurts. You want to jump in the car and sail down the highway with all the windows down and your hair flapping in the wind. But before you call it quits for the day, you have to look up just one more thing. Maybe it’s web marketing, maybe you want to buy some artwork to hang in your office. Off to Google you go.

You type in the magic words, whatever they are, and watch as a list of websites flows down the page. You click on the first one, and it’s an instant assault on your eyeballs. Ten glaring banners, flashing like Vegas at midnight. One of those annoying hover ads that follows you as you scroll and won’t let you read anything until you click the corner. Some sparkly things “snowing” down the page. Frantic messages screaming things like BUY NOW! LAST CHANCE! INSTANT SUCCESS CAN BE YOURS. A picture of a grinning guy who reminds you of your creepy Uncle Lester.

You click away. Not today, not any day. You don’t care what that guy is selling or even if he’s giving something away, because his presentation is god-awful. Just when you thought you’d escaped the mayhem, a sneaky little window pops up: “WHY DID YOU LEAVE THIS SITE? Please fill out this quick survey!” Are they kidding? You consider typing something offensive in the “Leave Your Comment” box, but figure it will only encourage someone to spam you with unwanted offers.

We’re all familiar with this web-surfing experience. It’s downright unpleasant. What’s your opinion of someone who pitches their company in such a loud and desperate manner? Do you believe all of their pie-in-the-sky promises? Do they strike you as company run by people who are intelligent, honest and reliable? Are you going to whip out your credit card because they tell you to?

Of course you’re not. Being the loudest, the brightest, the busiest and the boldest may attract attention, but it does not bring sales. That’s something to remember when you’re creating your own company website. What DOES attract and keep new customers coming back? A simple, tasteful web design. An easily navigable site. Copy that’s crisp, clean, and interesting.

Here are 7 reasons to tone down your advertising:

1. Flash is just too flashy. A flash presentation can be creative and unique, but is it really needed for what you offer? Will that kooky winking clown-head in the corner really make the sale for you? Even if you find a really excellent designer who can put together an incredible high-tech Flash feature, consider the harried web surfer. She’s been clicking all day; do you really think she has the patience to stand for one more mini-movie?
2. Too many messages cancel each other out. Ever try to read one of those pharmacy circulars when you’re tired? All of those big red words emblazoned across the page. Headlines crammed in beside blown-out price points and cheap photography. It isn’t easy! If you try to cram a whole bunch of words on your website, guess what? Not one of those messages is going to be read, let alone remembered. The eye doesn’t know where to look! Try a visual whisper instead of a scream. Make your point as best you can, but take care to leave whitespace so the eyes have a resting place where they can digest what you’ve said.
3. Movement is distracting. Think about the last time you visited a website with “magical stars” sprinkling down over the words. Were you able to read and understand it? Mind the weary web surfer; be kind to his eyes! You stand a much better chance of holding a customer’s interest with words that aren’t flying off the page, but rather standing still in one spot, waiting quietly for someone to read them!
4. The mighty click is all-powerful. You know what it is to be that web hunter. The mouse is in your hand; you’re in total control! Now think of that other person palming the mouse, surfing YOUR site. If your website is a frenzy of color and confusion, all it takes is one CLICK and you’re forgotten! Don’t want them to click away? Here’s how to make them stay. Keep it clean and simple!
5. Your empty promises are lost on the skeptical consumer. Think about your own web-surfing experiences. Did you believe that guy who told you he’d make you a millionaire if you just SIGN UP TODAY? You’re better off being honest and optimistic, than crazed and fanatical about what you can offer your customer.
6. Pop-ups are really annoying. Have you ever been so intrigued by a pop-up ad that you bought whatever they were raving about? My guess is no. Do you appreciate it when you’re trying to get some work done on the computer and fifteen pop-up ads crowd your screen and overload your hard drive? I certainly don’t! If you don’t like such rude interruptions, then don’t impose them on somebody else. I don’t care how many times that marketing guru tells you it will improve your search engine ranking. Search engine stats might give you exposure, but click rates mean nothing if the customer’s not buying.
7. No one reads really long sales letters. Ah, how brilliant of those copywriting experts to convince you that a six-page letter is going to bring in big bucks for your company. Especially if you’re paying them by the hour or word! A two-page letter will do the same thing as a six-pager, and more. The ‘more’ being that it will hold your reader’s interest the whole way through. Brevity is the key to great writing. If you can make a great argument in five words or less, you’ve got it all over the next guy. Keep that in mind before you put the Magna Carta on your web portal.

Want to design and write website content that attracts and captivates? Want to bring your visitors back for seconds, thirds, fourths, and the ultimate purchase? Then keep the above “distractors” to a minimum. Really try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes… the one who is searching the internet for what you have. Think about all of those things that prevent you from enjoying your web surfing experience, and then take care to remove them from your own company website! Offer tasteful, subtle design, eloquent headlines, and clear, informative copy. Be honest about what you sell and how it can make a difference for your potential customer. Speak softly, and watch the sales roll in.

Copyright 2005 Dina Giolitto. All rights reserved.

seniorcopywriter@yahoo.com

This is a very perfunctory look at the website code HTML, for those who never did any kind of Computer Studies at school and have never had the need or opportunity to look ‘under the skirt’ of your average website. There’s nothing that an experienced webmaster will find here that’s not very basic, but for those who have just begun to discover the ‘website’ and especially those venturing into… maybe starting one of their own, here’s a basic understanding to pique the interest and possibly kick-start the learning process.

If you don’t even know what I’m talking about when I say HTML, as a means to follow what we’re talking about as we go, then just go to this page - Home Based Business & Affiliate Center and click on the ‘View’ option at the top of your browser and select ‘Source’ or ‘Page Source’ (depending on your browser type) from the drop-down menu. You will be confronted by a Notepad document with silly looking symbols, letters and numbers on it. Well, that is HTML code. It’s the coded ‘blueprint’ for the web PAGE (not the whole website) that you’re looking at. Keep the Notepad document open to refer to as we discuss each part.

P.S. I have had to add some spaces into the example codes that wouldn’t normally be there, otherwise the example codes would actually ‘work’ and influence the way the article looked in those article websites that accept their article submissions with html code ability. But you’ll get the idea…

HTML is nothing more than a set of instructions for your browser program (or any program used to read web pages) to interpret and present the web page in a visual form for you to see. It’s made up of individual symbols, with each either have a meaning in itself or sometimes a set of them (often many characters long) representing a simple instruction to place any part of the web page, say… an image in a certain spot or to perform a function.

Firstly, at the top, you’ll see the < html> tag, which is identifying the language being used. Then you see a tag. That’s comparable to the ‘header’ on a letter, where your company name, address and phone number would go. It’s there for the Search Engines, like Google and Yahoo etc, so they can, at a glance, see what the web page is and what it’s about. Under the < head> tag there are < meta> tags, each of which contains information about different aspects of the web page like, the title, a short description, the program used to create it, copyright information, keywords that relate to the subject matter on the web page and other instructions that are meant solely for the Search Engine robots (spiders, crawlers - they have different names) when they visit.

The < head> section is then closed off with a < /head>. That’s an important part of the html code. Every tag that contains an instruction needs to be ‘finished’ by using the same tag with a ‘/’ in front. This is telling the program that this particular instruction type is finished. It’s like saying ‘over’ at the end of a radio transmission.

There are too many different types of instructional tags to cover in a simple article, but covering a few of the most common ones will give you the basic idea. Next is the < body> tag. This is the start of the part of the web page that will be visible in the browser. In the case of my webpage example, the tag is long because it contains some specific instructions, which apply to the entire web page. They concern the background of the page (in this case an image is being used for a background that forms the vertical stripes), the colour of the page text and the different colours of any ‘hyperlinks’ on the page (before during and after they are being clicked by someone).

Obviously, it would be a huge task to systematically explain each entry as I have done up to now, but suffice to say, there are various kinds of tags containing coded instructions that tell the browser (or whatever program is used to produce the visual representation of the HTML code) what to put in the web page, where to put it, what colour to make it etc. Just with regard to colours, all colours of the rainbow are represented by a six digit system called the ‘hexadecimal’ system, which we don’t need to get into except to say that each code that looks like ‘#A1B2C3′ represents a particular colour.

The more oft used coded instructions found on a web page are:

< font> - A font tag is the instruction to the browser concerning what type, size and colour the text in between these tags is to be. When anything about the font changes, you will see the new tag containing the new instruction, which may simply be a colour change. For example:

< font face ="Arial" color="#FFFFFF size=" 4">.

This represents text written in Arial font, coloured white (#FFFFFF), size 4 (which is 14pt text).

< b>, < i>, < u> - Text can also have other tags within the < font> tag, which denote, as these do respectively, bold type, italic type and underlined type. When the bold, italic or underlined type is discontinued, there needs to be a corresponding < /b> or < /i> etc, to instruct the program to go back to the standard type.

< p> - is a paragraph break. It can also contain extra information like where to align the entry (left, right, center or justify). For example: < p align=" left">

< br> - is a single line break. It doesn’t carry any extra instructions.

< table> - A table is simply a box. It can be any size, in any position and have borders or not, which are coloured or plain, dotted or solid etc. It can have a specific background colour, which is different from the main page background. It can contain different numbers of rows or columns or just be a single open box. If the table is divided into rows or columns, the different sections within the table are called ‘cells’ which can all have the border, size and background options as the table.

< tr> - Defines a row within a table. It is always contained between a < table> and < /table> tag.

< td> - Defines the attributes of any given cell within a table. Again, it can only be between a < table> and < /table> tag. For instance: a ‘cell’ or < td> tag might look like this:

< td width="100%" height="64" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" style="border: 1 solid #BF0000; padding: 2" >

In this particular code the width indicates 100% (of the table in which it is contained), the height is represented as 64 pixels - both percentages or exact pixel measurements can be chosen. The background colour is, as you can see, #FFFFFF, which is white and it has a solid border, 1 pixel thick and the border colour is #BF0000, which is a red/brown colour. You also see another attribute - padding, which in this case is ‘2′ pixels. This is the ‘buffer’ zone around the inside edge of the cell so that the contents of the cell (text, image or whatever) don’t sit right up against the edge of the cell border.

< a> - is an ‘anchor’ TAG. It is more often used to create a hyperlink to another webpage (in the same site) or another website altogether. The ‘hyperlink’ anchor will have the tag < a href>. Hyperlink tags will contain the location the user is to be taken. For instance, a link to my example website would look like this:

< a href="http://www.online-plus.biz" target="_new">Whatever text is to contain the link

You will also notice a ‘target’ attribute, which determines whether the destination of the link opens in a ‘new’ browser window (in this case) or it can be designated to open in the same window.

The < a> tag can also be used to ‘link’ to another point on the SAME web page. In this case the tag used will still be the < a href> tag but the point to which you wish it to go to will have a < a name> tag. For example:

< a href="whatever">The text to be the link< /a> and the point in the page to which it links will have a tag < a name="whatever" >Word or image at that point linked to< /a>

< img> - Is the instruction to insert an image. Of course, the program needs to know which image to insert so, this tag will contain the location of the image (using ’src’, meaning source), which will generally be within a folder on the server, which hosts the website. However, essentially, the address (URL) of ANY image on any public server can be inserted and that image will appear on the web page. It is represented like this:

< img border="0" src="images/logo1.png" width="195" height="66" >

This instruction says the image (with the file name ‘logo1.png’) has no border (”0″), it’s source (where it’s located is the ‘images’ folder within this website). It also has the measurements of the image in pixels. If an image from another website needed to be inserted, the full URL of the image would appear. For instance, if this image was located on another website server, instead of the ’src’ being just ‘images/logo1.png’ (which is a local website address), it would need to be ‘http://www.other-website .com/images/logo1.png’, so the program would know exactly where to go to retrieve the image.

That’s about all that can be covered in a short (or not so short article) however, I hope that to those who have either never seen HTML code or those who have considered it some mysterious secret technical jargon, will now see it as more friendly and understandable.

In my earlier days I found such websites as W3Schools as an invaluable source in the process of understanding what all the ‘gobbledygook’ meant. There is also a full list of all the different HTML tags and their meanings. I’m sure my over 35’s peers (and possibly even younger ones) will too.

The 2005 Edition of Steve Brennan’s popular ebook title ‘The Affiliate Guide Book’ is available now. He also operates a number of Affiliate wesbites which include The Diet & Weight Loss Place

How You Pay More for Unused Web Space and Traffic
 by: Subhendu Sen

“2GB web space with 50GB traffic for $5.95 per month!”

A luring ad—definitely. In fact this ad makes many small business owners feel cheated by their present web hosts.

This is how the small business owners, who have taken small amount of space (say, 5, 10 or 25mb) calculate and feel that they are paying more :

“If 2000MB (2GB) costs $5.95 per month, then 5MB should cost (5.95 x 5 / 2000) = $0.15 only! But my web host charges me $1! A 700% profit!! Oh…I am losing so much money!!”

So, if a small business site shifts to the advertised web host, he should get better value for his money. Right?

Wrong.

Let me explain how :

As a small business owner, how many HTML pages do you have in your web site? 5, 10, 15, 25?

Experts say that you should not have a page of more than 100K including images. Normally the file size of a starndard HTML page is around 10-15K.

Remember that, many of the images linked to your pages are common. If you have a 400×300 pixel image, the file size of that image should not be more than 30K. Buttons are normally between 3-5K.

So, let’s take an example of 25 page web site, which has (a) 25 HTML pages, (b) each page has one big image of 400×300 pixel and (c) have 25 buttons.

So, the total space usage is :

25 HTMLs x 15K = 375K

25 400×300 pixel images x 30K = 750K

25 buttons x 5K = 125K

Total : 1250K = 1.25MB

You need space for mail. How many email accounts do you need? 5, 10, 25? How much space you want to allocate for each mail box? Do you get large attachments? Your can set your email software to delete mails from the server (immediately or after few days) after you download them to your computer. So, if you check your mails every hour and keep your mail space clean for receiving further mails, you may safely allocate 1mb for each email accounts. If you are using only one email account, you can use the entire free space for your email.

So, with the above example, if you go for a 5MB space, it’s enough for you in the given circumstances.

But, if you go for a 2GB space and use only 5MB of it, you are actually paying $5.99 for using 5MB space. A loss of $4.99 every month—$59.88 every year!

You got it now, right?

You may ask, ‘What about Traffic? 50GB!! It’s huge man!’

Yes, it’s huge. But, do you need it?

With the above example, if one person visits all the pages, your site generates 1.25MB traffic. If you get say 100 such visitors every day, you generate only 3750MB or 3.5GB (approx) traffic for the entire month!

So, here again you pay more for the unused traffic.

Check from your control panel, how much space and traffic you are you consuming currently. Are you paying for unused space / traffic? If yes, then browse the web for reliable hosts and find out a plan which fits with your requiremnts. Compare the prices and features. Check the reliability of the host and go for the one you find the best.

And, Save Money!

Creating Personal Web Sites
 by: Ashish Jain

This is a two-part article about creating a web site on the web and the tools that you need to do that.

During the last decade we have truly entered the information age. More and more people are becoming a part of the ever growing and wondrous community called the Internet. It was just over a decade ago that ‘Internet’ was just another new concept that a lot of people were skeptical about. Today however, it would be difficult to imagine living in the world without this amazing phenomenon. It really has enabled humans to reach new heights.

Some basic terminology that you should take a look at before proceeding further:

Web Page: A document that contains information created with the help of HTML.

Web Site: A collection of web pages on a particular subject.

HTML: Also known as Hyper Text Markup Language, this is used for the creation of web pages. Information is written in between HTML tags ( ) to instruct the web page as to how information will be displayed. You can also put images into the web page by using this language. Some other languages like JavaScript, VB script, ASP, ASP.NET etc. are also used to display dynamic content on web pages and for performing user driver events.

There are basically two main categories of web sites:

Personal web site: These include websites that are about individual human beings/people.

Business web site: Includes web sites that advertise and inform users about the products and services that a company is selling.

This article will deal with creating personal web sites and putting them on the web.

You too can make your presence felt on the web (if you have not already done so) by creating a web site.

The demand and popularity of personal web sites have increased at a great rate since the start of the web. People have found web sites a great way to express themselves.

A personal web site is your message center where you can upload information about friends and family and share them with the rest of the world. They can even act as a personal Blog (on-line journal).

Having a personal web site on the Internet has a lot of advantages:

• Gives you the freedom of self-expression. You can tell the world about your favorite hobbies, special interests, post your resume etc. for the whole world to see.
• Ability to keep in touch share your life) with friend and family who are far away.
• Great opportunity for making new friends and forming online communities.

Now comes the question of actually creating a web site. Surprisingly it is not a difficult task at all. In fact there are a lot of web sites that will provide you with all the tools you need to create your own web site and put it on the web, and you do not even have to know HTML to make them!

You do not even have to worry about buying up web space; almost all these sites will provide you with free hosting services. The only disadvantage is that they will probably put in banners (advertisements) of their sponsors on the site.

For example:

http://geocities.yahoo.com/

members.lycos.com

These are two of the most popular web sites where you can create your own web pages. Yahoo gives you multiple options for creating web pages. It has yahoo page wizard and yahoo page builder, which are two very powerful yet simple editors for creating pages and have a point and click interface.

http://www.webspawner.com/

http://maxpages.com/

www.expage.com/

These are some other sites where you can create your own web pages. You can also search on the Internet for more sites like these as well. All you need to do is register and then you can create your own web pages.

However, there is one little drawback when creating a site on these sites: you do not get your own personal domain name, so the address of your web site will be something like http://www.site_where_you_registered.com/yourname

Where ‘yourname’ is the name under which you registered.

However, taking everything into consideration, this is the simplest way to get on the web and start expressing yourself.

Creating an appealing, functional, and effective Web site is much harder than it looks. It’s not simply a matter of taking a company brochure or catalog, converting the text to HTML, and throwing in a few pictures (although many sites seem to have been created using this technique!).

A Web site is a 24-hour a day advertisement for your company and should be treated as such. You wouldn’t turn over the design of your next direct mail piece, newspaper ad, or TV commercial to an amateur, and the same should hold true for your Web site. Actually, more care should be given to your Web site considering the potential number of online viewers is much greater than the audience for any other communication medium.

We’ve redesigned Web sites for large companies that initially thought they’d save time and money by hiring a college student to design their site. They wound up with a site that looked like it had been designed by a college student, did not incorporate effective online marketing tools to draw traffic to the site, and the college student graduated and moved on, leaving them without ongoing support.

A Web site should not be static; it should be dynamic, offering the possibility of interacting with others in a way that traditional media can’t. As Web sites become more sophisticated, so does the need for experienced developers. Web designers also need to be familiar with the peculiarities of this new medium. Your Web site will be viewed by different people from all over the world using vastly different equipment. How do you design a page that needs to fit onto several different size monitor screens, set at a number of different resolutions, using a variety of different browser software?

The answer is? hiring a professional Web development firm like WebSolutions. We develop Web sites for a living. Our clients are pleased with the results because we strategically plan the elements of their sites depending on each individual customer’s needs. We expertly handle everything from securing the site’s domain name to creating graphics and programming the Web site. The possibilities are vast and ever changing. You need a professional firm to discuss the options and work with you to find the best solution for your site.

Designing an effective Web site is part art, part science and a little luck. You need an experienced professional to get the best results. And, to some extent, the old adage applies, "you get what you pay for."

WebSolutions is a professional Web site design, development, and hosting company based near Chicago. Their expertise in Web design has been highlighted in print and television and their custom developed solutions have been highly successful for businesses nationwide. Jon Kee handles all sales and marketing related activities for WebSolutions and can be reached by phone @ 630.375.6833 or email @ sales@wsol.com.