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An effective website is not the same as a nice looking website which, in turn, is not the same as a fanciful website.
An effective website is one that successfully attracts visitor traffic and – if intended – generates income for the person or company that owns it.
An effective website could generate income directly for a business, such as by attracting more customers to buy goods and services. It could also generate income indirectly such as through web advertising, affiliate programs, and so on.
When I designed this website in 2002, I did not know anything about how to build an effective website. So I did the next best thing – I designed a website that is simple, yet elegant. That was how one visitor described this website. This is how I think websites ought to be – simple, yet elegant.
More importantly, I made this website user friendly. At least I did my best.
I believe these web pages do not take too long to load onto your computer, even if you don't have broadband – unless your modem is really, really slow. And I believe it is not too difficult for you to navigate your way around to find whatever information you need or want.
Recently, however, I learnt a whole new way of building websites – to make them effective. I learnt this through a program offered by a company called Site Build It or SBI (please click here to learn more about SBI, or read on as I will explain below.)
I am really excited about it and would like to share it with you because I learnt a lot. But it means I have to start from scratch and build a new website from ground up.
I just started on this about a month ago in April 2005. My new website is a photography site, www.art-photograph-gallery.com.
Right now is has just a few pages. Since I just started, I am not yet drawing a lot of visitors, but I know I will. Because one of my friends (who is not at all IT savvy) did it.
Within four months, her website reached the top 1 percent – in fact, it reached the top 0.3 percent – of websites in the world.
When I spoke with her in February 2005, she was earning about US$500 per month from her website. One year later, in February 2006, she was earning several thousand dollars per month – she asked me not to reveal the exact figure.
And all along, she did not sell anything. Hers was a purely informative website on how to make greeting cards, www.making-greeting-cards.com.
As you can see, hers is a very plain and simple site. But it is effective and it earns her income.
In sharp contrast, this website never earned me a single cent in three years. This site is ranked (in Sep 06), by www.alexa.com, at about 1.5 million – which puts it around the top 3 percent of websites. My friend's greeting cards site is ranked around 130,000!
So how to build an effective website?
The short, blunt answer is this. Join SBI or Site Build It. Click here to find out more.
Or read on…
SBI recommends a four-step program that makes a lot of sense:
- CONTENT – provide excellent content with plenty of good information that is relevant to the subject matter.
- TRAFFIC – learn techniques to draw visitors to your website, such as by making your website easily found by search engines, and by establishing links with other appropriate websites.
- PRE-SELL – make your website so good that visitors look up to you as an expert on the subject, endear to you as a trust-worthy person and a friend, and recommend you to their friends (just as I am recommending SBI to you now.)
- MONETIZE your site – learn how to earn income through pay-per-click ads, Google AdSense, affiliate programs, etc, as well as by directly selling goods and services.
The first three steps, according to SBI, are the most important and require the most work. Once you have provided excellent content, attracted a good number of visitors and “pre-sold” to them, the money part is easy.
Don't worry about not knowing how to do all these things. Don't even worry that you “cannot write”, let alone design a website. SBI provides everything so that even people who don't know anything about web design can get started.
Of course you will need to learn some things along the way. But all you need is basic intelligence – plus patience and a willingness to learn – not a lot of computer programing or web design skills.
The SBI program costs US$299 per year. Having signed up, I can say it is excellent value. For that money, you get, among other things:
- a domain name plus one year's web hosting. This would not cost a lot of money (less than US$100 per year) if your needs are simple. But in any case, you get enough disk storage space (to store your web pages, images, emails, etc) and bandwidth (for data transfer when people visit your website) even for huge and complex websites.
- web building software. For those who don't know web design, there is a template where you simply fill in the page name, keywords, headline, body text, images, links, etc. Building a website thus becomes a simple matter of “filling in the blanks”. The website may not look fanciful, but it will be effective if you follow the guidelines faithfully.
- plenty of reading material on how to do things correctly. The basic “Action Guide” alone is a PDF file of more than 200 pages (in large print for easy reading). In addition, you get another few hundred pages of background and other information.
- computer software for keyword research. This is vital for making sure that your website is easily found by search engines. The idea is to find keywords / key phrases that have high demand (which many people look for) but low supply (which few web pages provide). Then build web pages around these “profitable” keywords.
For my new photography website, for example, I have pictures of hands. However, I initially found that phrases like “hands photography” or “hands photographs” have almost zero demand. I felt very discouraged since I already have the pictures. Eventually, I found that the phrase “photographs of hands” has relatively high demand, but low supply. The exact choice of keywords is important!
- web page analysis. Before you upload your web pages, the computer will analyze if you have done it well, eg whether you have the key words in the title, file name, page description and main body of your text – or even if you used the key words too often. You will then be prompted to make the appropriate changes, then you have the page analyzed again until everything is “good” before you submit.
- search engine submission. Everytime a new page is uploaded, it is automatically submitted to all the major search engines and directories.
- internet support – to help you find links, advertisers, affiliates, business partners, etc that will increase visitor traffic and generate income.
- technical support.. If you run into problems, just email them and they will get back to you within 4 to 6 hours, sometimes within a few minutes!
- forum support where SBI users discuss ways to solve problems as well as to make their websites more effective.
As you can see, you really get a lot from joining SBI. There is actually more, some of which I have not even discovered yet!
Around the time I joined SBI, I also attended some free public talks and a one-day training workshop on internet marketing (which cost me about US$60 for two persons, lunch included).
The company whose workshop I attended was marketing a program that costs between US$4000 and US$6000 just to get started, and close to US$400 per year after that.
Another charged US$1000 for a 2-day workshop on how to draw web traffic and, again, how to sell almost anything.
Not having joined or attended these other programs, except for that one-day workshop (which doubled as a sales presentation), I cannot comment on them. All I can say is that they cost a lot more money and appear to teach similar things as SBI.
Having joined SBI, I am more convinced than ever that a fanciful website, with plenty of animation and other bells and whistles, is a waste of money.
If you are a web designer and can do it yourself, fine. Even then, I would caution against going overboard. From the user's point of view, I find it annoying having to watch a 30-second or up to 2 minute animation – I call it cartoon show – before even reaching the introductory page.
I also find it annoying when some sites are so fanciful or smart-alecky that I don't know where to click to find what I want!
If you are paying good money for someone else to do such things for you, think carefully. The website is not like a physical shopfront where fanciful design might attract passers-by. On the Internet, how many visitors you get depends on how high up you rank on the search engine's list of results. Fanciful stuffs DO NOT help at all.
Provided you learn and apply the techniques for drawing traffic and monetizing your website, however, it does not hurt to have it look nice at the same time. This is why I seek to do through my new photography website, www.art-photograph-gallery.com.
Now that I have joined SBI and learnt quite a lot of things from it, I think the following are the most important in website building and design:
- Effectiveness
- Content
- Appearance
- Ease of navigation
EFFECTIVENESS
This has already been discussed above. It means building a site in such a way that it is easily found by search engines, and thus able to attract visitors.
CONTENT
Quite often, I have come across websites that start off with a very impressive, animated introduction. Then the contents are a let down. Hardly anything useful is said about the company or its products and services.
This is where my experience as a writer and journalist comes in. To me, developing the content is vital. And his message is emphasised by SBI.
Good content would include the following:
- If you run a Japanese restaurant, you could provide talk about about Japanese food ingredients or Japanese culture.
- If you run a business consultancy, you could comment on issues such as the Enron and Worldcom scandals, your view of the economy, etc.
- If you sell maternity wear or children's clothing, you could have articles that discuss issues related to pregnancy and childcare.
Description: of your company and your products and services. The description should be adequate but not too detailed as to make your visitor bored. Also, it should not be so technical that the average visitor cannot understand.
Your philosophy: Tell your potential customers what you believe in – just as I am telling you now how I believe websites should be done.
Personal touch: Whether you run a one-person business or a large corporation, it is always good to let your customers know who you are.
Additional Information: Apart from information directly related to your products and services, it would be good to provide additional information that makes your website worthwhile to visit.
For example:
You could also provide links to other websites that contain such information. But it is always good to have your own material.
APPEARANCE
Once you managed to attract people to your site, a nice appearance will be helpful.
This is important because it is the first thing that strikes the visitor. If your pages look cluttered and messy, you have a good chance of losing your visitor right away.
The overall look and feel of the site has to be friendly. It has to be simple and elegant.
Other details of appearance that you need to consider include:
Loading time: Your pages need to appear quickly!
If you have complicated graphics / animation and your pages take a long time to load, again, you have good chance of losing your visitors. Not everyone has boardband (When I first built this sie, I didn't. Now I do, but only at 512 kbps whereas broadband has already gone to 1.5mbps, 3.5 mbps and beyond).
Not everyone has the patience to wait even 10 seconds for your pages to appear. So don't even consider making them wait 30 seconds or 2 minutes!
"Cartoons": Some web designers might convince you that it is impressive to have a 30-second animated introduction, complete with sound effects and other bells and whistles. This is more an excuse for them to charge high design fees!
Chances are, more people will be more annoyed than impressed - especially repeat visitors who have to keep seeing the same introduction everytime.
Animation can also be very distracting. Once, I visited a site that has cars running across the screen. I found it very distracting. And the site was not even about cars! I left immediatelty!
And talking of sound effects... remember that some people surf the web in the quiet of the night when the rest of the family is asleep.
So keep your web pages elegantly simple. And quiet. If you wish to have music or talking, keep it soft and gentle.
- Size and type of font – I generally use 12 to 14 point size for text, seldom below 10 pt.
- Colour of text - and its contrast to the background
- Space between lines
- Size of paragraphs
- Width of the text - don't have lines running right across the screen, and keep the screen width at about 760 pixels maximum, since not everyone has wide screens or high-resolution screens.
- Use of bold, italics, bold italics as well as colours to highlight certain words.
- Use of lines to separate sections, text indents, etc.
Readability: As it is, most people find it difficult to read text on a computer screen. You can make it easier for them by paying careful attention to factors such as:
Background: The page background is a very important area that is often overlooked. It sets the overall tone of the page. It also adds interest to pages like this, which consist of mostly text.
Even in pages with large pictures and few words, the background plays an important part. You will see this when you visit my photography section. If I had used this same background, the pictures will not appear quite as nice.
I put a lot of effort into creating suitable backgrounds for my web pages.
EASE OF NAVIGATION
How many clicks does it take to go from one section of your website to another section? How many clicks from one page to another page?
Ideally, it should be just one. If it is a big site with many different sections and pages (such as this one), it should be no more than 2 clicks from one section to another, no more than 3 clicks from one page to another.
A more important test is this: If you have found a page and you wish to find it again on your next visit, can you find it right away? Or do you need to click here and there to figure out where that page is?
MY DESIGN FEES
My fees depend on the complexity of the site and the amount of editorial input that is required to develop the site content.
Web design fee:
- S$900 / US$550 for a 10-page website
- S$70 / US$45 per additional page.
- free: 1-year web hosting
- free: 1-year domain name.
The above, however, is just for an ordinary website with text and pictures provided by the client and my job is only design.
If you want an effective website – that draws visitors and earns income – then my recommendation is that you sign up for SBI and do the site yourself. Click here to learn more about SBI and to sign up.
If you join SBI and still wold like me to build a site for you, then my fees will have to be much higher because I will need to:
- do the keyword research for you – it took me more than a week to decide on the keywords for my new photography site, and I am still researching as I go along.
- write the content for you according to SBI guidelines. This, in turn, means that I have to know and understand your business and products thoroughly.
For such assignments, my fee shall be
- S$4000 / US$2500 for the first 10 pages
- S$350 / US$220 per subsequent page
- free: pages with only basic information such as names, addresses and contact telephone numbers
- free: pages with only a few words such as a Thank You message.
I know my fees are not the lowest. There are even web hosting companies that will give you five or more web pages “worth thousands of dollars” for free.
But I also know that the quality of my work is high. If you appreciate my quality, then let's discuss how we can help each other.
Contact me at richard@richardseah.com