How To Avoid the 7 most common mistakes on your website.

# 1. Most business owners design a website from their perspective and not from the viewpoint of prospective clients and or buyers. You must step back and look at your site as if you were a prospective buyer, customer or client. Is it easy to navigate? Does it make sense? Is it inviting and do you want to find out more or is it just too boring?

# 2. The most important key to your marketing campaign or product launch is - you must know your audience/prospects inside out. What would they be looking for and does your offer capture their attention, create interest and instill a desire for them to find out more? If your web pages don’t do this, then you have wasted your time effort and money.

# 3. The space you allot for information on your web pages has value, and this depends on where it appears in relation to other information. Does it appear above or below the fold? Above and below the fold as used in web designing - refers to the location of an item near the top of a web page, which can be viewed in a browser without scrolling.

# 4. Navigation of your pages must be consistent between pages. If you are using pull-down menus at the top of a page then make sure you have the same pull-down menus at the top of all your other pages. Many sites use a specific table of contents on the left side of each page and static links at the bottom of the page that can be used as alternates to the menu bar. A good website has menu bars that are easy to use and understand and again they must be consistent.

# 5. Don’t use plug-ins - java script or flash on your pages. These goodies just slow down the loading of your pages and expose you to losing your visitors because your site is too slow or too awkward.

There are several ways you can evaluate the usefulness of your website.

# 6. You can use “site overlay” that Google Analytics uses to track user activities on the website. Site Overlay is a very useful feature of Google Analytics because it displays your web pages superimposed with click and conversion data for each link.
You can now find out exactly where people are clicking on each page.
Obviously this is very useful to determine if your page layout and site navigation is all working properly.

# 7. Before you can decide where you want to go - you need to find out where you are at and then determine what steps you have to take. By reviewing and analyzing your website statistics you can readily determine the “key performance indicators.” You can use this information to determine and monitor your site’s popularity. By knowing how many visitors you’re getting, what pages they go to, and are they buying anything, is information you want to know.

The information comes in different categories: Hits, Page Views, Visits, and Visitors.

Hits are how many times a file on your website has been accessed.

Visits show how many individual visitors come to your site; one visit can create multiple hits (i.e. every time a visitor goes to a different page on your site).

Visitors are the unique users to your site; a visitor can have multiple visits.

Page Views – this tells you what individual pages have been viewed the most. A Page View can also create multiple hits because it must call the server for every image and file that it must load in order to build the page.

Google Analytics

This service is free and there is nothing to download or install. Simply put in a tracking code on all of your pages and you’re done. One minor problem. You will need an invitation from someone who’s already using it. You can sign up for an invitation but be prepared to wait several weeks before you get a response.

Relax Referrer Analyser

Relax is a free specialized web server log analysis tool for referrer information processing. It answers the question: "Which search engines, search keywords and referring URLs led visitors to your site?". Relax reports tell you the quantity of visitor you’re getting from the leading search engines and the most popular keywords being used.
There are other programs available but you will have to do some searching for them as they are programs to buy and we’re not promoting any such sites in this newsletter

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