Building a successful website is important for your business

Online business success depends on thousands of factors. Price and quality of your product are two important factors. Factors related to your website also play a major role in the success, for example, site popularity, page rank, ordering process, etc. When you develop your website, you should ensure your websites readability. These can help to keep your visitors stay longer in your website.

Format your text using style sheet:
Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) allow to adjust the look and feel of your website with a style sheet. It controls how text looks on your entire web site. Make use of CSS to maintain your whole site.

Use appropriate font in your website:
Choose font size that is large enough so that your visitor can read the text easily. Webpage is not the place to show off your fonts collection. The most important is to let your visitor read what is written on your site.

Good contrast with background:
Black-on-white always gives you the highest contrast and it can improve the readability. You can make use of color background but do gives enough contrast with your texts. The more contrast, the better.

Gather text into block with headlines:
Break the text into different paragraph and associated with a headlines. Headlines can gives a good highlight to visitor what the paragraph related to. visitor can scan and read your text easily with the headlines.

Proofread your website:
Don't let your visitor think you're an amateur or not serious with your business. Proofread all the pages in your website. Remember, mistakes or typos can greatly affect your credibility.

At the same time, you should also avoid unnecessary stuff on your website which may makes your visitor confused.

1. Avoid those "little funny stuff", like page counters, java text scrolling, flashing images, and animation.

2. Avoid using large files. Try to reduce the size of thos multimedia files, like image, sound, and video.

3. Avoid incorporating download plugins. Flash is funny, but you will loose visitors if you don't provide an HTML alternative.

4. Avoid "Horizontal Scrolling". Ensure that the visitor does not have to scroll horizontally.

5. Avoid using frames.

6. Avoid using too much fonts. Use standard font can ensure your webpage looks the same in different browsers.

7. Avoid "auto-run" background music.

8. Avoid "Wall of Text". Use paragraphs, heading, bulleted lists.

9. Avoid resize the visitor's browser windows. Let the visitor has the control.

10. Avoid registration. Your visitor is looking for information and not vice versa.

Building the web site is just a starting point, you need to take different means to get your website success. You not only need to attract new web traffic, you also need to attract the recurring traffic. You should have the following three items in your website and they can help to generate the new and recurring traffic.

- "Bookmark This Site"
It is important to ask your visitors to bookmark your web site. This can increase the chance the visitor re-visits your website. It is difficult for visitor to remember your website address. But if they bookmark your website, the name and address of your website will be listed in the visitor's bookmark. They can easily locate your website and revisit again. This is your main source of "re-visit" traffic.

It is also important to let visitor knows your website will be updated regularly.

- "Tell Your Friend"
"Word-of-Mouth" is important. Customer referrals is one of the main sales and marketing tools and sources of new business. Ask your visitors to refer your web site to a friend. They may know someone that find interest in visiting your web site. This is one of the important source of "targeted" traffic.

Create a web form for visitors to fillin the email address of their friends. You can also allow them to fillin the comment in the form too.

- "Subscribe To E-Newsletter"
Ask your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter.

You can send the subscribers newsletter regularly and this can remind the visitors to re-visit your website. The newsletter not only keep contacts with your visitors, but also promote your products/services.

Isaac Chu is Project Director of Evinco Solutions Limited. Evinco provides innovative business software, include emarketing web solutions, email marketing software, e-catalog publishing software, invoicing software, and electronic cheque writer. Visit: http://www.evinco.com.hk