Your website is your business. It is like the headquarter of an offline company. This is why it is important to practice good website design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Plan a clear direction for the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and highly visible as to not have confused visitors roaming your site. Have a purpose and direction planned for every visitor.

Use a limited number images on your website. These tend make your site load slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think an image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size. Crop and resize to make the most efficient.

Keep your paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph gets too long, you should split it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will be easier to read. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content at all. Don’t forget to search engine optimize your site.

Make sure your website conforms to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure you test for cross-browser compatibility. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors. Cater to what your visitors are using.

Avoid using complex scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website like java or flash headers. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers (this can be fixed with the help of an automatic web caching system). Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that. Make sure to test, test, test.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

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Many successful Fargo websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more likely to return to a site and the more trust they have in that site. When you establish a relationship with visitors they will continue to come back to your site. Here are some methods to help:

Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are enabling your visitors to have a place to voice their opinions and interact with others including yourself. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day because they have a steak in its success.

Use a blog

Attach a blog to your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself or your business. People are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently, especially the latest news about your products. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website with a personality.

Polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely be added to your site from time to time. These provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved. Be sure to publish the results to the polls or surveys after you get the findings.

Hold contests, puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day (estimated 25% working time spent online aimlessly), and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

Fresh updated content

Update your site frequently! With fresh content your visitors will come back if they will know there is something new to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

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1. Update your pages frequently. Sites that are stagnant gets are dropped by some search engines.

2. Make additional offers of value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you (note: some search engines like Google frown upon cross linking). You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products are related to your industry and are not in competition with your own product, go for it.

3. Allow your customers to ‘opt in’ a newsletter or mailing like to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ and receiver valuable coupons or other offers.

4. Add a links to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’ plugins for these can be downloaded across the Internet depending on the platform of your site.

5. Enable people to ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ by adding a link for them to do so. This will help spread the word about your site by allowing the visitor to email your website link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.

6. Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans as well as providing a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.

7. Use a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers, an ‘About Page‘. Post your privacy policy as well so that visitors know they are secure when they visit your site.

8. Use a FAQ page to addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product, service or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site and help secure the first purchase.

9. Appropriately title and keyword each page of your site so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark. Tags are also very welcome here.

10. Never spam your clients, who have opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. Services like Aweber allow for this all to take place automatically. People may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you flood their inbox with emails they don‘t want.

Bonus: Take every opportunity to talk and engage with your customer, via phone, email, contact form, Twitter, you name it.

SEO Fargo is here to help in any way possible. Please scour our site for more free and useful information. If you are interested in our consulting services please visit our contact page.