Affiliate Web Site Design

There are many variables available in the design of a web site which means that it can take many forms, styles and routes, and it is very easy end up with a design that is totally unsuitable for it's intended purpose.

Most people involved in either affiliate or internet marketing are small companies or a work from home business, so branding is usually not either important or a requirement. This means that fancy graphics, a flash presentation or a splash page are not usually going to gain you anything and in fact will just distract your customers.

However having said that, one of the latest trends in internet marketing is to add an audio message to your web site. This has been shown to increase sales or your opt-in subscriber rate for your newsletter. It's fairly easy to add audio, learn how here.

Some of the top key factors that should be carefully considered in the design of an affiliate or internet marketing web site are:

• Simplicity and clean look

• High search engine ranking capability

• Fast page loading speed

• Good navigation system

Lets cover these in more detail.

Simplicity and Clean Look

Keep your layout and design simple, after all people are not visiting your site because they think they may find great graphics or a stunning flash presentation. They are looking for easy to read information that either: solves a problem, makes them money or makes them happy!

Poor grammar or spelling is the end-all, be-all of presenting yourself unprofessionally online. After all, if you can't spell correctly, you don't pay attention to details or those "small things" that make a product or service great, right? Well, that's what your visitors think. So run your pages through a spell check once or twice, and have someone else proof read them.

You ever visit a site that changes designs, backgrounds, and navigation systems completely whenever you click a link? Kind of makes you feel lost, doesn't it? You feel as though you're at another site, and you don't know where you are. So, keep your web site's design consistent, and make it clear to the visitor where they are on the Internet and on your site. (Note: Consistent does NOT have to mean boring!) Use two to three colors and stick to it.

Choose an easy to read font and font size, for example this is Veranda 10 pt, and stick to it, use bold here and there for emphasis, but don't over do it. But remember to use the H1 to H3 HTML tags for headings and sub-headings etc as this will help the search engine optimization rank of your pages.

If you are having problems creating and writing good content for your web site try this content creation course for web masters.

Search Engine Compatibility

If you want to achieve good search engine rankings you need to have this in mind right from the start of the design of your site, otherwise it can be time consuming to correct later. There are a few golden rules to follow which are really essential if you want to be successful in this area:

1. Don't use frames, search engine spiders cannot follow the links so your site has no chance to get fully indexed.

2. Use lots of text links, ensure that there is text link route from the home page to every page on your site. One way of doing this is to use a site map. Try to use your keywords in the text links.

3. Make use of meta-tags. Even though some search engines don't use them all, some of the major ones do, and this may change at any time in the future. Make sure that every page has a different title, description and set of keywords.

4. Avoid having too many external links on anyone page (external link means a link to another website, internal link means a link to another page on your site). probably 10-15 is the maximum you should have.

5. Make sure that every page has a text link back to the home page.

6. Make sure that each page contains your desired keywords.

7. Avoid the use of a large amount of graphics, in the search engine world these don't count for much.

8. Keep the size of each page to a reasonable size. Search engines put more value on the content nearer the top of the page. If the page is too long the content on the lower part of the page could be ignored or given a low ranking. The most import or key information should always be in the top half of the page.

9. Make sure that you don't violate any of the Do Not's, see S earch Engines for more details.

Fast Loading Speed

It is important to be aware of how long your pages take to load

Have you been on a site that takes really long to load? It's quite irritating. Well that is due to heavy graphics. I don't mean that you should use visually small images. You should use images that are small in terms of file size. The best way to go about doing this is to compress your images to a more reasonable size.

Try something like Ulead's SmartSaver Pro - http://www.ulead.com or Adobe Photoshop itself which has an optimizer in it. Instead of using "Save As", use "Save For Web".

Good Navigation System

It is important that the user can easily find their way around your site, this increases the opportunity that they will find something of interest and spend more time on the site.

A recommended system is to have a vertical topic list on the left hand side of the page and have the same links repeated at the bottom of the page, this is our this site has been designed. I call these page the primary pages.

I addition you should make sure that there is a link to the home page on every page. This not only helps the user get back to the main index but it is also important from the internal link structure of the site. The link back to the home page helps ensure that it builds a strong page rank.

At the end of each page it is also useful to include a couple of "see also" links, if appropriate. These should be closely related to the topic of the current page, or they could be a continuation of the same article if the page was getting too long. These "see also" links are useful if you have too many pages to list in the vertical left hand menu, I call these secondary pages.

However you should be aware that these secondary pages may not achieve the same page rank as the primary pages because they are more links away from the home page.

See also [ Page Rank ] [ Web Site Hosting ]

[ Web Site Templates ]

Web Site Design

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