The Spider Knows
Big Website Mistakes Cost You Money, Time, and Aggravation!By Jeanette Joy Fisher
Here are some of the mistakes I made when I first started making websites.
- I should have changed my name to one that people can spell so I would only need ONE website. Because Jeanette Fisher is also the name of a movie star and a character in a kid's game, I added "Joy" to my name. Does that make me sound like a serial killer? Decide whether you want to brand your name or your company before you get a domain and website. If you brand your company, you can sell it. If YOU want to be famous, brand yourself.
- I went to the first hosting company recommended to me to set up my accounts. I paid three times as much money for the domain registrations as other companies charge.
- I used the templates provided by the host company. Their templates could not even be spidered! The only reason Google could find me was by my articles pointing to the sites. But, my keywords "flipping houses" only pointed to my articles on other people's websites. One week after converting the website to a Dreamweaver website, Flipping Houses moved up to number 5 on Google.
- I didn't research website search engine optimization (SEO). I should have named my first books with titles that people search, too. Who searches for Doghouse to Dollhouse for Dollars? Notice the book has a new keyword subtitle: Flipping Houses... (My husband hates that term!)
- I didn't like long sales letters so I didn't write long sales copy to sell my books. After paying thousands of dollars for copy writing help, some of my sites still did not sell well. Turns out I hired the wrong copywriters. Always get recommendations before you hire someone. Learn how to write a sales letter.
- I redid some of my sites using FrontPage. It's so easy to use. But, it adds a lot of useless codes to your website and doesn't pass website validation. I heard that FrontPage has been discarded and they're making a new program due in 2007. Too bad I had to learn how to use Dreamweaver--sort of. If you can wait and see if the new program is easy to use, great. If you want to get started and don't want to pay the high price for Dreamweaver or spend hours trying to learn it, here's a great easy, low cost website builder that I have used and like. It doesn't have spell check, so you need to check your text. Otherwise, it builds web pages easily and you get a great online presentation showing you how. Check out 123 WysiWyg Free 15-day Trial Offer.
- Even thought I wrote hundreds of articles, I didn't optimize my "about the author" signature to motivate people to click through to my site. People don't care if you were a teacher or best-selling author, they want the FREE ebook or FREE teleseminar. Learn how to drive traffic to your site with your author bio.
- I never checked my traffic statistics. Turns out, the one site I never paid any attention to has the highest page rank and traffic! Why? I submitted a press release and paid PRWeb $500 to upgrade it. Plus, my articles on credit got posted on a zillion sites. You can bet that now I know that site gets so much traffic I'm going to rewrite it next. Monitor your traffic so you know what works and what to tweak.
- I named my images wrong and didn't size them correctly. Don't use capital letters and put the underscore between the words. Wrong "Jeanette Fisher.jpg" Right: "jeanette_fisher.jgp." Resize your photos in a good program to keep them clear. Don't make your images large and slow down page loading. This is hard for me to do because I like BIG interior home shots! Remember, the entire world doesn't have fast Internet connection.
Other mistakes to avoid: Top heavy graphics, flash, strange fonts, too many fonts, too many colors, unclear navigation, horizontal scrolling, opening pages in new windows, the list goes on...
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The Spider Knows