Think of your website as a sales brochure. It will be the least expensive sales brochure you ever purchase if you do it yourself and do it correctly.

Think about it, for about $60 per year you can have a permanent brochure that is accessible 24/7 by anyone in the world. It will cost you at least twice that to have a professional write and print your print brochure that most people you give it to will throw away. If they don’t throw it away, they will forget about it and never truly lay their eyes or attention on it. However, your online brochure - your website - will stay live for as long as you pay your hosting bill.

For most people, one new customer from their website each year will result in a net profit. They will make their money back and more.

An effectively written website will result in your sales going up and up and up and your profits coinciding. There is no substitute for a well-written website. None. Period. Write it to sell. You are much better off hiring a professional to write your sales copy because a professional copywriter will get you results. There are various copywriters on the web that will charge you a reasonable amount for some worthwhile copy. This money invested will be worth it in the end.

You must invest in your copywriting in order for your website to really do well. It can have the best design, best graphics but when there is insufficient text and/or text that doesn’t make sense or is not well-written, your entire website as a whole fails. QUALITY IS KEY!

When it comes to website improvements a simple template can go a long way. Too many people try to build a website around some complex code that just gets in the way of the search engines. You want to keep it simple. Java is cool and Flash can give your website a snazzy image, but if you don’t get crawled it won’t make a dime’s bit of difference.

You can get a real simple template from Template Monster or one of the other template marketplaces online. I highly recommend Template Monster. You will have to pay for a template but their templates are better for SEO. If you get a free template from Joe’s website you are likely to get a template that is not designed well and won’t get crawled by the search engines. You need a template that will get crawled. You should not spend more than $500 on any given template (I would even go as far to maybe say half of that). You want to invest without overspending. For under $70 even, you can get a template similar to this:

After you find a suitable template you can build all of your web pages around that. The great thing about templates is they can be easily modified. Go ahead and tweak your template to suit your business needs and you’re good to go.

Broadband uptake is on the increase in the Asia-Pacific region. While this is not exactly breaking news, some figures paint a surprising picture of the scope of broadband penetration in Asia. The article has some interesting information for website marketers, especially as many people choose to make website improvements that require broadband speeds in order to be enjoyed.

Broadband access in the Asia-Pacific region has seen significant growth in the past decade, as operators have upgraded their networks in preparation of future demand for high bandwidth services according to a new study from ABI Research.
Broadband Adoption Rising In Asia

The study focuses on fiber to the home (FFTH) and finds that different markets within the region are currently in very different stages of broadband growth. ” While broadband adoption is increasing within APAC, growth is not homogeneous across all countries in the region,” says research analyst Serene Fong.

“For instance, Hong Kong is one of the early adopters of FTTH and has the largest FTTH household penetration, currently 21%. On the other hand, countries such as China and India are still struggling to encourage greater broadband usage.” For now, most FFTH is still in the more developed countries within the region including Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea.

How does this apply to website marketing? It establishes just how rich your websites can be and thus the website improvements that you can make without sucking up too much customer bandwidth. Video for instance requires a large amount of bandwidth and might cause a site to run too slowly on a dial up connection as too can sites that are swamped with flash. When making your website improvements, it is now possible to include some heavy media, but it would still be recommended that you provide a low bandwidth option. You do not need to necessarily hold off on bandwidth heavy website improvements. Broadband penetration is now great enough that you do not have to worry too much about the compression of your images. It may soon be the case that you don’t have to worry about running video directly from your site. 21% of Hong Kong is a massive market and penetration in Korea and Japan is huge.

Netscape, a web browser that most of us cut our teeth on has officially been dumped by AOL. I must say that their performance has been lackluster over the last few years. They managed to take, what was a great browser, and totally destroy it. Bugs took forever to iron out. The last time I used Netscape was two years ago, out of sentimentality. The memory leak crashed my system and I uninstalled it soon after. Two months later I tried it out again to find the same problem.

Compare that to Fire Fox which has updates available almost as soon as problems are discovered. There really is no competition. What does this mean for webmasters? It doesn’t really mean a great deal. There are now five web browsers to keep sites optimized for, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Did anyone ever really check their sites in Netscape anyway?

Source: Web Pro News

Polls are a great website improvements and are relatively simple to set up. A poll is a great way to get meaningful feedback regarding the content of your site. If you want an honest opinion on a new color scheme or logo, you will generally get one from a poll. Likewise, you can use them to feel out new products or services that you plan to offer. If you have a responsive visitor base, then they can be an invaluable source of information and a great way to build up some customer involvement in your business.

Here are a few tips to help you make better polls:

Polls are a really easy website improvement and for many content management systems, come standard. If you have the option on your site, make use of it. They are non-intrusive and can be a little bit of fun.

Everyone wants to improve their website, but did you know you can improve your website 100% by making just one simple change? No joke. This is it:

Seriously, this one one improvement to your website will bring you more traffic and keep people on your page longer than almost any other improvement. If you look at the top of your Internet browser, you’ll see the title of this page. Most small business put their company name in that page title area. The fact is, most of your prospective customers don’t know who you are yet and really don’t care. Plus, those first few letters of your page title will be viewed as the most important part by the search engines.

If you want your company name in the page title, put it at the end. Put your keyword phrase at the beginning and write it in such a way that it promises a benefit to your readers. Make it interesting and unique and they’ll visit your page. That is the best website improvement you can make today.

Web design projects can create time management issues. It takes a great deal of time to code a site if you are not doing it all the time. There once was a time that I would do all of my site designing myself in a bid to save a few extra bucks. It usually worked out well for me, but spending hundreds of hours in front of the computer screen designing websites is not my idea of fun. I prefer to be in the trenches making sales, promoting, producing content and that sort of thing. Time is money after all, and why not spend your time doing the things that you do best? Outsourcing website design can be a massive time saver and is not all that expensive with GetAFreelancer.com and Quote Catcher.

I use Quote Catcher for times that I want a site designed from the ground up. Quote Catcher will allow different designers to bid for your site. You will get up to five quotes, you choose the one that is the best offer from your point of view. The best offer does not have to be the cheapest one. It depends on your needs, if you want a slick looking website, then it is probably wise to go with whichever site designer has the most impressive portfolio. If it does not really matter, go with the cheapest.

When I have smaller or more technical jobs, I use GetAFreelancer.com. With GetAFreelancer.com you give a specific outline of the job that you require and freelance programmers will offer you bids. It is important to distinguish GetAFreelancer from Quote Catcher. The freelancers on GetAFreelancer.com are programmers, you use them for programming related jobs. If you need a shopping cart system, or would like to make some sort of site related improvement, this is the place to go.

If you are not using analytics to enhance your site then you need to take a long hard think about it. All the website improvements in the world will not help you if they are not being seen. Websites are increasingly bloated and it is entirely possible that there are places on your site that are completely overlooked on a month to month basis. HitsLink will tell you exactly what is going on within your site and allow you to tweak your website accordingly.

You can follow your visitors throughout your website and see which pages they visited. You will know the most visited parts of your site and can focus your efforts on improving those areas so that they can achieve even greater success.

If you find some parts of your site are being neglected, it might not be through lack of content, rather it could be through lack of connectivity. If you want to encourage your visitors to drop in on less visited pages in your site, you can always create links to them on your more popular pages.

HitsLink gives you the facts and figures that you need to apply sound business intelligence principals to your website. If you are looking for other great Website Improvements and website analysis tools, please contact us at Brick Marketing.

Flash might not make much sense from an SEO point of view but it is a great website improvement if properly applied. The trick is to blend Flash with enough plain text that you do not reduce the search engine optimization of the site.

If you are planning on using Flash for your website, make sure that its inclusion will be an actual website improvement. Avoid video introductions like the plague. There is nothing worse than watching the same video EVERY time you go to a site; it turns into a very easy way to drive away business.

Flash headers are great and worth investing your time and money in. Just make sure that your site is navigable, has a site map and does not rely solely on Flash for navigation. HTML or PHP are best for the guts of your site. Flash is just a little window dressing. Used correctly, it can give your site a great look and feel. If you would like some customized Flash work for your site, please contact us.