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internet marketing newsletter issue #10, June 2004Affiliate Marketing Strategy, Basic Web Design Tips & more
Dear Friend,
Some tips for designing a good looking and well working web site. 1. the basic layout and size Your visitors shouldnīt have to scroll from left to right, so you must know how wide your pages can be. Letīs take a quick look at my web logs for the resolutions of my visitorsī computer screens: 1. 1024 x 768 48.61 % 2. 800 x 600 34.20 % 3. 1280 x 1024 10.23 % 4. 1152 x 864 2.50 % 5. 640 x 480 1.16 % 6. 1600 x 1200 0.75 % 7. 1400 x 1050 0.59 % 8. 1280 x 960 0.32 % 9. 1440 x 900 0.32 % 10. 1280 x 800 0.23 % What interests most is the first number (screen width). As you can see, most (over 96 %) screens have a resolution of between 800 and 1280 pixels in width. Only about 3.5 % use a resolution of over 1280 in width and less than 0.5 % are below 800 pixels. This means that you must design your website in a way that it looks good at least for everybody using a computer screen with a resolution between 800 and 1280 pixels in width. TheJungleMarketer.com has a fixed width of 790 pixels. Many other webmasters also choose from 750 to 800 in order to make sure all columns and subdivisions within this main table have the exact same size on all screens to always show the content in the same format. Obviously your web pages will completely fill out an 800 screen, while leaving a lot of space blank on a 1280+ screen. A different solution would be to define your main tableīs width to 95 - 100 %, so itīll always be within the screen width and filling it entirely from left to right. Take http://www.cheap-posters-and-prints.com as an example. I wanted the left column, which contains the menu, to have always the same size so Iīve set it to 200 pixels. The right column fills the rest of the space, which varies from 600 pixels (on a 800 px resolution) to 1080 (on 1280 pixel wide screens). You can see how it affects the text when you change your screen resolution from high to low. Compare it with TheJungleMarketer.com to see the difference. 2. Colors and Graphics I often see the recommendation not to use flashing and colorful graphics. Honestly - it really depends on your siteīs theme. For gambling, casino and games sites itīs absolutely o.k. as entertainment plays a very important role in these niches. On the other hand, informational websites (like TheJungleMarketer.com) and those designed to sell products should have a clean look and be free of distractions. Black text on white background and few graphics only. Good colors are soft blue - grey tones. A simple top logo is fine, but a professionally designed flash logo is great, too. A culinary / recipes web site should have psychologically "tasty" warm colors like red, orange, yellow and of course should also have more colorful graphics. 3. Fonts and text style I like Arial and Times New Roman, others use Helvetica and Verdana. Arial is one of the most used fonts and easy to read. You should use only those font types people are used to see every day in books and newspapers, unless you have a web site for kids where you can also implement special funny fonts in headlines, for example. You can format your text using CSS (cascading styles sheets), which allows you to define exactly how big your letters in headlines, paragraphs and other text elements appear. But donīt put all your text-style definitions into the "head" section of your pages (like many WYSIWYG web site editors do) as this will push your main web site content downwards and hurt your pagesī rankings. Save them in a separate file (called styles.css) like this one and add the following line of code within the "header" section of your web pages: <link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css" type="text/css"> 4. Check the look in different browsers Not all browsers interpret certain html tags and other web site codes the same way, so if you donīt want your web pages looking good in one browser and like a mess in another, you need to know what browser types your visitors are using. Letīs take a quick look again at the statistic for my web logs, regarding the browser types used by my visitors: 1. Internet Explorer 6.0 83.45 % ! 2. Internet Explorer 5.5 4.73 % 3. Internet Explorer 5.x 4.29 % 4. Netscape 5.0 3.57 % 5. AOL IE 9.0 and 8.0 2.84 % 6. Interent Explorer 4.x 1.60 % 7. Older Netscape versions, Opera 7.5 and older AOL IE versions (7.0 and lower) <0.5 % Over 90 % of visitors are using IE 5.0 or higher ! So in order to check if your web siteīs look is o.k. for 95% of internet users, you could simply load it in I.E. 5.0 and Netscape 5.0 after youīve created it. If youīve built your site only with basic html language, then it should also look good in any older browser and you wonīt need to perform this check. How to get your site noticed by the search engines and give it a jump start on its way to top rankings. Now that you have your brand new site created and online, you want the search engines to see, index and list your web pages. Beware of search engine submission services that promise to submit your site to thousands of engines. This will only result in getting you lots of junk mail from all the smaller search engine owners in return. Some of the submission services even offer you to submit your site every month. Never pay for that kind of service as it could be seen as search engine spamming and your site could actually get banned. Do it yourself instead: create a sitemap (one web page which contains links to each of your siteīs pages) and manually submit only this URL to the major engines. The better strategy would be to let the search engines find your web site by themselves, they are regularily spidering the world wide web to update existing sites and find new ones. Some SEOs say that when Google finds your site by its own, itīll give it a higher value. Although I have no proof of this, it does make sense to me. The search enginesī spiders follow links on other web sites, so in order to have them find your site, you just have to place a link to your site on a web page which is already listed. Some web directories are ideal for that purpose and itīs definitely worth to pay the fees of between 10 and 30 Dollars to get your site usually included within 2 business days. http://www.linkopedia.com http://www.webworldindex.com You can also list your site for free in the following link exchange directories, where other webmasters can contact you for a link exchange proposal. Just from these listings alone I get about 5 link exchange requests per week. http://www.linkalizer.com http://www.linkpartners.com In the next issue weīre going to talk about how to get more links to your website in order to improve its rankings. Whishing You all the best and lots of success ! Sincerely Yours, Guido W. Stiehle TheJungleMarketer P.S.: check out this great free e-book ! The Science of Getting Rich Disclaimer I accept no responsibility whatsoever for the content, profitability or legality of any published articles or advertisements contained within articles published on my web pages. And, although all of the guest articles have been selected for
their content, the publishing of such articles on this website
does NOT constitute a recommendation of the products or services
mentioned or advertised within those articles. If you found some information to be out-of-date, please contact
me and let me know it. Sincerely Yours, |
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