Creating a successful web site

Building a successful web site comes down to your ability to know what your customers are looking for and finding ways to serve their needs. A web site must be clear, concise, and easy to navigate. If your web site is hard to browse, people will go to another site for their information or services. To get started with your web site, follow these simple tips:

• Take a look at your competitors web sites. What information is on their site, is it an educational site or is it used to sell products or services? How can you make your site better from theirs?
• You must be able to create a unique domain name. This is sometimes hard to do if you are trying to be original, but you want to keep the domain name short enough for your contacts to find. It also needs to be easy to remember. Does your company have a short name, how about a nickname that you could use?

  It is important to register your domain name as quickly as possible since a lot of companies are getting online and looking for other domain names they can register and link into their site. It doesn't cost a lot to register your domain name. You also need to get a host for your server, which does tend to cost a little bit more. Overall, you should expect to pay $25-$50 for the domain name and about $500 extra if you need to have it hosted online or through another company.

• When you make the decision to move forward with the creating of your own web site, understand the audience you are serving. Try to create a web site that is focused on serving their needs. This may be simple things like adding your products to your site, or starting up a question and answer section to serve all of their needs. Give your users a reason to come back and visit the site frequently.
• Write engaging content to add to your web site. It is important to have good content to increase your web sites visibility and to increase your web site rankings. The content must include some of the keywords and search terms that people will use to find your web site. Use some keywords in the titles of the web pages to create higher listings in the search engine rankings.
• Your home page is one of the most important parts of your web site. The home page is in charge of producing the first impression to your web site visitors. Make this page exciting and entertaining for them if you want them to keep coming back to the site and returning to purchase more products.
• Link your web site to other companies that you work with. This will help to boost your web site rankings and it's a great way to offer information about some of your affiliates. Having your affiliates on your web site also helps to increase your web site's visibility.
• If you add pictures, PDF files and other thing to your web site, you need to upload the smallest file sizes as possible since everyone may not have the same memory on their computers that you do.
• Once you get your web site up and running make sure you continually update it. Check for broken links and other things that may cause your web site to be frustrating for your users. Be sure to proofread your web site to check for misspelled words. If you have any grammatical errors, your readers will notice this and it will cause them to have a lower opinion of your company.