10 Simple Ways to Make Life Easier for Your Website’s Users

admin    Website Tips     Easier, Life, Simple, Users, Ways, Website’s

Web designers and developers are continually gaining new tools to facilitate effective website creation. Compatibility, usability, interaction, visual appeal, and support for a website’s users are all important aspects for a designer or developer to consider when looking to present the most interesting and user-friendly site possible. By implementing the simple suggestions below, you can dramatically improve your users’ experience and the overall performance of your site.

1. Optimize the search function on your website or blog to make it easy for your users to find the information or media that they are looking for. Tag everything from articles to pictures and videos so that all of the content on your website is searchable. You want your users to spend a lot of time on your website, but you don’t want that time to be spent digging around for information that should be readily available.

2. Include links to all of your social network profiles on your homepage. Visitors who are genuinely interested in you or your business should be able to easily connect with you via social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. By including these links, your users can get more involved in learning about your company and will get the feeling that there are real, compassionate people behind your website.

3. Create landing pages that direct users to the content that is most relevant to them. Landing pages are convenient for your users because they can cut down on the time it takes for them to navigate through your website. Landing pages can dramatically improve conversions from website visitors to leads by providing users with a direct path to the page or form you are hoping they will use.

4. Optimize your website for the iPhone and other mobile devices by creating a version of your site that is readable and usable on the popular mobile browsers. Make sure that all text and media is formatted correctly for the smaller screen size and that your website’s style stays intact. Media Contour has an informative iPhone tutorial to get you started with making your website mobile-friendly.

5. Incorporate a text-to-speech application like Odiogo that allows your users to listen to an audio version of your website’s content. This is especially useful for users who are blind, illiterate, too busy to read, or simply lazy. Many people do not want to devote their time to reading a long blog article—by listening to it, they can browse through other sites or multi-task in other ways while they are enjoying your words of wisdom. Media Contour has implemented this application so that you can try it out for yourself—just click the “listen now” button above this or any other KaBlog! article.

6. Create text alternatives or captions to describe the content for all of your website’s media (images, music, video, etc.). This text alternative ensures that blind individuals can understand what a picture or photograph is portraying. Similarly, it also allows your hearing-impaired visitors to understand what is being played within an audio file.

7. Allow your users to navigate your site using keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts can save time and prevent early onset of carpal tunnel syndrome. Many users prefer not to use a mouse and some are unable to do so. By installing keyboard shortcut compatibility, you will ensure that your website is usable for the widest range of visitors.

8. Provide your website’s users with helpful tools like an automatic spell checker, help or FAQ section, and bookmarking buttons. The Help and FAQ pages can save time for your users when they encounter a problem or an error on your site or when they have a specific question. The bookmarking buttons help users to easily remember and share your website within their network of friends, family, and professionals.

Tips specifically for e-commerce websites:

9. Provide an option for one-click checkout on every page so that users to do not have to spend time going back and forth between pages, potentially losing interest in purchasing your product or service as they waste more time navigating.

10. Include testimonials on your homepage, products page, or portfolio section that give your business a good reputation and help prospective customers gain trust and respect for your company’s products or services. You want to be able to choose which reviews your users see—without testimonials on your site, you will force your customers to look elsewhere for reviews of your business. These reviews, unlike the testimonials on your site, cannot be moderated by you.

While these suggestions are not appropriate for every website, they can be very valuable for a designer or developer looking to improve usability on multiple levels. By optimizing your site for many diverse types of users with their own preferences, tendencies, and handicaps, you can increase traffic to your site and raise the standards by which designers and developers create their own works. The Internet is for all to enjoy—you should make your visitors’ experience as pleasant and pain-free as possible.

Influencing Powerful Social Media Users to Generate Massive Traffic to Your Website

admin    Social Media     Generate, Influencing, Massive, Media, Powerful, Social, Traffic, Users, Website

Generating a buzz to get massive amounts of traffic to your website is best done using social media websites?

The easiest way to accomplish this is to leverage the clout of influencers within the social media community.

Influencers are people within a social network that are respected and liked by others in that community and are able to popularize discussions on topics of interst in that community. 

Influencers stimulate the conversations, connect people to ideas and can capture the mindshare or opinion of an audience within a social sphere. All social media websites have a few select individuals who stand out for their activity within the community and their expertise has gained the trust and support of the social media users.

These are the people you are are looking for and the ones you want to influence.

There are so many social media sites and the points we make in this article can be applied to any of them. We’ll be studying how to develope your own strategy for targeting the influencers of these sites to engage  their social network with your content.

Let’s look at a social news site like Digg for example. Digg and other sites like it allow the audience to vote on the value of content with a simple thumbs up and thumbs down vote. By actively participating in the community you can develope a following and become and authority and with that comes influence.

Over time supporters will share your content with friends or add it to their websites and blogs. Social media users can be pitched just like a blogger or writer can be pitched with a simple introduction at first gradually building a relationship that’s mutually benefitial. The goal is to leverage their brand of influence by influencing them to promote your website content within their community.

The main steps are Targeting, Networking and then Pitching the influencer in question.

1.Targeting
Finding a social media influencer that shares your point of view about your content and is relevent to their website or sphere of influence is most important. Making your content in-line or coherent with the influencers interests makes it much easier to get them to promote or agree with your content.

Go to the public user ranking list of the social media site in question, in this case Digg, and visit each profile on the listed looking for who has influence and also who resonates with what you’re promoting. Get a feel for what interests them. You can also do a keyword search on the social media site looking for content based on your keywords and find the users that rank high within the site on those keywords. If they have consistently submitted content around those keywords they are likely to be open to suggestions of simular content. You can also do a URL search of your keywords to find people that may be open to more content of that type.

Using the site yourself will help you discover little details about the user you’re targeting that can help you reach them and develope rapport. For example, while top Digg user MrBabyMan submits a great amount of stories, most active Diggers are familiar with his avid interest in Cracked.com, a popular pop culture/men’s portal/magazine.

2. Networking
After you’re done targeting a specific social media website you need to contact them and develpoe a relationship. You can get in touch with them from their contact info in their user profile and join the site as a registered user. If contact info is not available Google them by their name and user name to see if you can find it elsewhere. Look for their blog or other profiles they may have listed on other sites.

Once you have their contact details initiate a conversation by just send them a note and thank them for their contributions. Trying to pitch to promote your content right away is very bad etiquette and annoying. You can stand out from the crowd of self-interested crowd by genuinely showing your appreciation for their contributions.

Take a genuine interest in them and engage them in a dialog of common interests and do so continuously until you have a good idea what material they would support and do favors for the user by giving them publicity or links to free resources and interesting content (not your own).

Real social media users are always interested in buzz-worthy news or opinions that can boost their own authority within the social media community. Your content or anything else you offer should not only meet the integrity of their personal brand, but it should improve it and the reputation of the user within the community.

Offer them free invites to unrelated websites, give away exclusive information on certain topics. Share some links to excellent websites. Do little favors without asking for anything in return at all. Give them a reason to be interested in you.

Networking is really just about making friends. It’s that simple. This will gradually lead you into the third and final stage: Pitching the influencer.

3.Pitching
So now that you’ve built a rapport with this person what next?

A. Ask Casually. Do your pitching in a light hearted and casual manner and do not
aggressively push the user to promote your content. This is a huge turnoff and
you should understand that the user has a perfect right to refuse you.

B. Disclose Your affiliation. I would recommend letting the user know that you
are affiliated with the specific website, particularly if you plan to have a long
working relationship with the user. He or she will appreciate your honesty and it
will also make it easier for you to ask the second time round.

C. Space out your pitches. The biggest mistake you can make is to ask the influencer
to promote every single piece of content that comes out on your site. This is a major
irritant so only offer the user your best work, while pitching your material only once
per week or every two weeks.

Continue to keep aclose contact after they are promoting your site. Building a long-term relationship will have longterm results and targeted in-bound links to your website for years to come.

Good Luck!

Talk soon, 

Frank Tocco–Marketing Mentor

What Website Allows Users To Make Graphic Design Images For Businesses?

admin    Website Design     Allows, Businesses, Design, Graphic, Images, Users, Website

I found it one time but I can’t remember the name. You can create your own profile and either submit designs like logos, business cards, and website designs or create criteria for your own company. The person making an offer decides which design they like best and pays the designer for it.