Comments on: Website design tips from the pros

By: sabrina

sabrina — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:36:53 +0000

r.b. chandler,
i read your mention of a drop down menu that interfaces w/ homestead. i am spread thin trying to run a business; and i’d be grateful if you could explain the tool you mentioned. thanks.

By: michael abii

michael abii — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:34:17 +0000

How can I resize or rather increase the width of my site? Should I change my template which I quite like?

By: Clairice

Clairice — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:27:08 +0000

Give visitors a reason to come back — Update your content often so that people see your site as a useful resource. One of the worst things you can do is leave outdated information on your site, like listing an event as upcoming when it has already passed. Offer your visitors fresh content and you’ll keep your site on their radar.

WE NEED THIS COMMENT FUNCTION ADDED TO SITEBUILDER!!!

By: Judy Jones

Judy Jones — Fri, 08 May 2009 00:33:33 +0000

I agree with Gus. It is a extreme challenge to find balance with the very small selection of fonts that you have. I want to do things that are directly a part of the site instead of having to create it in Adobe CS, save as jpg, then bring it in. This gets to be painsaking. If I could have an assortment of fonts to create with that would be hot! Do you plan on giving us more in this area anytime soon?

By: Air Monitoring

Air Monitoring — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 19:14:54 +0000

I am just developing my site now. Good clear advice. Thanks.

By: Pamela, Design Services Program Manager

Pamela, Design Services Program Manager — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:29:05 +0000

Hi Elaine,

We took a look at your site to see if we could help. Your basic layout looks ok, but by reviewing your site statistics we can see that the people who find your site on the search engines often don’t continue browsing beyond your home page. That’s a common problem, and in your case I think you may be able to remedy it with a few changes to improve the usability of your site:

* Make sure everything on your home page is working properly; we noticed broken images in your header that can really detract from the image of your site.

* Make sure your content stays within your design and doesn’t drift outside the borders of your pages. Images or text that just “float” along the side of the page look like they don’t belong there, again detracting from the professional image of your site.

* To maintain a consistent design, try to use the same images in the header on each of your pages, or at least place images in the same position in each header.

* Consider using a section of your home page to feature one of your products and talk about its benefits. After all, you want people to buy your products, right? You can change this section often to keep your home page fresh.

* Remove the banner ads on your home page. Since these ads can conflict with your own products, you should consider using them sparingly on specific, targeted pages instead of your home page. For example, if you want to place an ad for a magazine, you might want to write an article about outside resources and include a mention of that magazine as a good resource. That magazine ad would then be a good addition to that specific page. If you keep that ad on your home page, there is no context for it, so there isn’t any particular reason for someone to click on the ad and buy a subscription.

I hope these suggestions help you keep your visitors browsing once they get to your site. I’m working on a new post right now that will put together other suggestions for how to get more traffic, so stay tuned!

By: R. B. Chandler

R. B. Chandler — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 00:01:46 +0000

I found an easy to use menu maker called DHTML Menu Studio (http://www.xtreeme.com/dhtml/) that makes great drop down menu that works quite well with Homestead. It is great when you want something a little more flashy than the Homestead Navigation Tool. It is not quite so intimidating as a lot of other menu making tools I tried out many of which did not work well with Homestead.

Elaine Sigmon, I took a look at your web site. Overall it is a good site but just a little too focused toward one group of people which is why you are not going to get a lot of hits. My brother is a lawyer with the same problem. Your site could use a little work as some elements are not alined properly and you have some grammer issues “you need to sale your bird” should be “you need to sell your bird”. Get out and get listed on all the bird forums and blogs that you can find. This will help a little bit and is a form of free advertising. Being online is better than not having a web site at all. It all takes time, nothing happens over night, and the more you can do to get notice the better. If they have bulletin boards in your local pet stores you can put up ads with your .com name. Try link exchanges with other web sites. The more stuff you have out there the better. Also, add that you have birds for sale on your home page, helps with keyword searches. Also the kind of birds for sale will also help.

By: Jordy

Jordy — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:20:48 +0000

Pamela, thanks for these great tips. I particularly am drawn to the last one, checking your site statistics.

I study my Real Tracker results, provide with my Homestead account, everyday. By doing this I am able to see which pages are getting traffic and where the visitors are coming from.

Once I know what is working then I begin to focus my attention on those pages and certain keyword phrases that are yielding results.

Over time the traffic increases because I am building upon a foundation of things that the statistics revealed were already working.

This is how we increase traffic to our websites.

By: Elaine Sigmon

Elaine Sigmon — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:34:51 +0000

I had Homestead to build my site, advertize in the directory and every where else I could, followed all advices given to me by the Homestead, and I still do not get very many hits. I don’t know what else to do. If anyone can give me more advices that work, I am open to hear from you.

By: Gus Campuzano

Gus Campuzano — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:01:15 +0000

As usual, your suggestions and help is valuable, but I sure would like to see one big improvement to your site design tools and that is the ability to work with WordArt or a similar font tool that would allow us flexibility with font designs, shading, fills and outlines, etc.
Look at Microsoft Office Word 2007 or better and you can see what I mean. There’s so much you can do with that program but nothing can be transfered directly to the website.
Now, if you do have some tool that can do all that, I have not found it yet and i would definetly like to know about it.
In sumation, lettering (font design) is poor within the tools provided and that is sooo important in designing a good looking site.
Thank you.