Many people have websites (for their businesses as well as for personal use) and many people have blogs. The issue is whether people truly understand the difference between a website and a blog. They certainly are not the same thing.

The following explains the basic differences between a blog and a website:

Blog

• Content is regularly updated.
• Not formal.
• Interactive.
• Informative and educational.
• Interactivity about industry/customer issues.
• Some people have a blog.

Website

• Content is static.
• Formal/professional.
• Interactivity does not exist. There is only one-way communication.
• Transactional.
• Communication about products and/or services.
• Almost everyone has a website. In fact, it is almost a requirement in business today.

A good way to think about a website is in terms of it being a virtual store that sells products and/or services. A website is the perfect forum to self-promote and advertise. Promotion and buying and selling are exactly what people expect when they visit a website. When they are at the point of making a purchase of some kind, they go to a website that will satisfy their needs.

They can either purchase something online directly from your website or they can use your website to find out exactly where your bricks and mortar store is located so that they can come and purchase products and/or services from you in person. Once a customer has bought something from you, there is a very high likelihood that they will not return to your store again.

It is also basically impossible to build relationships with your potential customers and existing customers on your website because the website is static. Once a person has purchased something from you, there is no potential for interactivity so the relationship will never have a chance to develop and grow.

Blog

A blog; however, is constantly supplying potential customers and existing customers with interesting and useful content and the blog enables them to interact with the blogger and the discussions that they have together can be potentially unending. Not only can you and your customers have discussions but they can also ask questions that you can answer.

Also, a blog provides a dimension to the content that you can’t get from your website content. Through your consistent and regular blog content, you will eventually be regarded as a subject matter expert in your niche and people will turn to you for answers. This will promote more and more discussions.

What is really being done in this case is that relationships are being developed and strengthened. Some of the people with whom you interact on your blog will never become your customers. That is perfectly acceptable. They can interact with you as much as they like and do not have to worry about any pressure to buy anything. A very important fact is that the people with whom you interact are getting to know you as a person, which includes your level of integrity, your passion for what you are doing and offering and your knowledge, knowledge that you impart to them.

Blogs have a lot of useful features that are very helpful in promoting interactivity. Blogs enable visitors to subscribe to them so they can receive updates on a very regular basis. They will always be informed when new content is added or there has been some update to the social media profiles of the people with whom they interact.

In order to really be effective, blogs should have new postings at least once or twice a week. Fresh, original content is very important. The content is exactly what attracts and retains people and many of those people will eventually become customers.

The true purpose of a blog is to provide helpful, valuable, informative and interesting content that helps other people and that they find interesting. A blog’s purpose is definitely not to advertise or to do a hard sell on anyone. If you try to use your blog in that way, you will be very disappointed with the results. You will not be able to build relationships with anyone and you most likely won’t sell very much. People don’t buy from people whom they don’t trust. The only way that they will trust you is if they get to know you.

All in one

One approach that has proven very effective is building your website with blog software, such as WordPress. Blog software has the capability of providing you with both static web pages (pages) and blog pages (posts). Since both are necessary for the success of your online exposure, this allows you to design a web presence that contains a traditional website and a blog using one tool. Among the other benefits are:

• One homogenous look and feel.
• Ease of optimization for SEO.
• Sharing of add-on plugins between the pages and posts.
• Ease and speed of designing and developing the web presence.
• Ease of maintenance and updating of content since the entire web infrastructure is based on a content management system (CMS).

Conclusion

Blogs and websites work in very different ways, serve very different purposes and produce different short-term results. However, they are both necessary to increase your online exposure and to strengthen your online business reputation. It is important to have both as part of your online presence. They function well together and undeniably, you will see positive results over the long term if they are a part of your business online.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

You have heard the term “bounce rate.” It is the percentage that represents how many visitors leave your website directly from the page on which they entered the website. A high bounce rate usually means a low conversion rate.

There are several reasons why you might be experiencing a high bounce rate, such as

• It takes too much time to load your web page
• Your landing page is too complicated to navigate. It is not user friendly
• The wrong sorts of visitors are being drawn to your website

With that said, there are several ways in which you can lower your bounce rate significantly, which will be good for your business.

Website and layout design

Your website design is one of the most important factors when it comes to bounce rate. Your website should have colors that are pleasing to the eye and you should try to avoid graphics that “pop out” in the middle of the page because those are very distracting. Your website content should be arranged in a manner that is logical and there should not be an over-abundance of words. You absolutely should have your website designed by a professional. Also, you need to make sure that the HTML of your website is valid so that similar results show up in all of the search engines.

Strong headline

Of course, the headline is the first thing that people are going to read when they land on your website. If the headline doesn’t entice the visitors, it will be all over. Your headline must communicate what the visitor will gain from visiting your website (What’s In It For Me [WIIFM]). In other words, the visitor needs to know that you have the solution to his or her problem.

Well-written text

You need to make sure that your title, headers and meta-tags of each of your web pages are relevant to the rest of the content. You might want to have an abstract in the first paragraph of your text or try to answer questions in your opening paragraph that your readers have asked. Optimizing your content is, of course, extremely important so that the search engines will give you high rankings.

Friendly language

The language in which your content is written should be friendly and human. You should never have content that sounds like you are a corporation instead of a person, no matter which business you are in. Short sentences are definitely recommended. You must speak to your target audience in their language.

The size of your web pages

It is very important to make sure that the sizes of your graphics are appropriate. You also need to make sure that the text/HTML code ratio is as low as possible. Try to keep the loading time of the pages as short as possible. This is important because the users will be more inclined to visit your website again and again if it is easy and quick for them.

Easy navigation

Your website must have a menu that is easy for users to navigate. When people visit a website, everything has to be simple for them. If possible, your website menu should not be on the bottom of the screen. You should have the content arranged in categories and keep important pages a click away and no more, if you can. Another sensible thing to do is to suggest relevant products and/or services on your web pages and to put links in logical and strategic places so that they can benefit your visitors.

Optimize your website for the best keywords and key phrases

When considering search engine optimization (SEO), always remember to optimize your web pages for the most relevant keywords. You should have 1 to 2 terms on each page. Your keywords should appear in important parts of your website, such as your titles, headers and opening paragraphs.

High-quality links

We all know that links are extremely important when it comes to increasing your exposure online. You need to make sure that the links that are pointing to your website contain anchor text. The links should always be relevant to your offerings and they should lead to content that is interesting and informative.

Conclusion

When it comes to your website, you need to successfully lead people to what you have to say and what you have to offer. You must consider many different things. Not only are traffic generation and website views important but bounce rate, the average amount that a visitor spends on your site and conversion rates are also extremely important and are strong contributors to the success of your online marketing campaign.

Remember that when the visitor comes to your site, they must always find what they are looking for. If they don’t find what they are looking for within 8 seconds, they will move on. That is all the time that you have to make a really strong first impression. Your content must always be clear and concise, you should never have distractions on your web pages and you should always allow your visitors to have the option to search and you should make suggestions for other pages that they might find interesting and helpful.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

Link building is the process of building links back to your website. Back links are links that go from other websites back to your website. More back links mean higher search engine rankings.

There are several ways in which to build links and some methods are more effective than others. The following are tips for effective link-building.

• Anchor text that is targeted: Once you start focusing on links on other sites, you must have anchor text that is targeted. Bear in mind that you should not have the same text everywhere. The search engines will take notice of that (not in a good way). You should have a few phrases that you use interchangeably and you should also use the proper name of your website. If it is only possible for you to get an image link, be sure that the website owner places your anchor text or the proper name of your website in the ALT tag of the image.
• Keep your eye on links in and out: The search engines pay attention to where your links appear and they decide how much benefit is returned to your site. If your site has a great deal of inbound links, it will add to your credibility. At the same time, if you are linked to a website that has poor-quality, outbound links, your credibility will not be enhanced.
• The relevance of the website: It is extremely important for your links to have great relevance to what your website is all about. You need to be sure to pursue links in places that are relevant and it is important to focus on how those websites are optimized. The relevance of the links will add more and more to your credibility and to the credibility of your business. Valuable links are links that come from pages with relevant and useful content.
• The importance of page rankings: Page rankings are extremely important; however, they are not the only important thing to consider. It is very possible for a website that has high page rankings to have low value. This situation applies to websites that sell links. It is a good idea to avoid websites that use phrases such as “sponsored by” and “paid for by.” It is possible that those types of websites may not be ranked at all by the search engines.
• Don’t be generous when it comes to link building: As is the case with volume of content, it is the same when it comes to volume of links. More is not necessarily better. It is not a large number of links that will earn you higher rankings on the search engines. It is the quality of your links. It is not always a simple thing to figure out which links are higher quality. If you pay attention to online marketing consultants and take their advice when it comes to link suggestions, you will probably end up with better-quality links. The more valuable your links, the higher your website will rise in the search engines.
• The value of social networking: Getting links into places where there are opportunities to do social networking is of the utmost importance and an extremely effective approach. The search engines pay attention to websites that are very active with continually adding fresh content and you will have higher search engine rankings because of it. Social networking is also very valuable because you are establishing and building valuable relationships with people who will eventually want to do business with you.
• Clean links: You need to make sure that the links that you have on your website are clean. If your links have any extra codes that shouldn’t be there, they are of no use to your website.

The reason that you have links on your website is to increase your search engine rankings. Even though it is sometimes difficult to determine good quality from bad, over time, it will get easier and you will see that it will become second nature to you.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

You have a beautiful-looking website. You originally invested a great deal of money to have a reputable firm design and build it yet you see almost no return on investment (ROI).

When you start to look into why your website is ineffective, you start to discover that not only are you not increasing website traffic but you are actually losing traffic, losing potential customers, and losing the opportunities of establishing new relationships. In fact, your website may be failing to attract visitors at all.

How to get your website to become effective and remain effective

You should have a balance between graphics and text on your website. The website should definitely be aesthetically pleasing but should have valuable content that is easy to download at the same time.

You should always test your website on more than one browser. What looks fantastic on one browser make look terrible on another browser. Many people still use text-only browsers at this point in time.

You should always remember to be meticulous with your website; keep it clean and up to date. You should look for ways to update your site at least once a month. If you let your visitors know that you are doing this on a regular basis, it will be an incentive for them to return to your website often. Even if they visit your website only because they are curious, they are still visiting.

You also need to make sure that you are reviewing your website analysis on a regular basis. Otherwise, you have no way of knowing for sure if your website is totally doing what it is supposed to do.

Issues with your positioning and branding

Website conversion rates: Differentiating and clearly articulated value propositions have a profound effect on website conversion rates. The conversion rate is a measurement of visitors who fulfill your intended outcomes. Those outcomes could include contacting you directly, buying a product from your site, signing up for a blog feed or newsletter, etc.

Your value proposition, which should be the centerpiece of your homepage, should answer the question “Why should I choose to do business with you instead of your competition?”

That is the most important question in business. People struggle with it all of the time. If you are missing an opening message that really grabs your visitors, it can seriously have a negative effect on the ultimate success of your business.

If your website visitors go to your home page and leave quickly, something isn’t right. Your content is not enticing them enough and it is not answering the fundamental questions “Can this company fulfill my needs” and “Should I explore this website further?”

An area of your website that can prove to be problematic is your landing page. The landing page is the first page that a visitor sees. The reason for this is that you generally have some well-indexed content that your visitors have found in a search engine.

It is key to understand how the visitor thinks here. Visitors come to your website to find something specific. It is irrelevant how they may have found you (on purpose or by accident). Initially, they may have absolutely no interest in you and possibly no idea of who you are at all.

It is critical that the first page that they come upon on your website engages your visitors instantly and communicates a solution to their unfulfilled needs. Additionally, your content must be compelling enough to attract them to other areas of your website. You need to make them want to learn more about you. It is not sufficient to merely give them a lot of good information. Otherwise, they will take all of that in and then they will leave.

Hopefully, your traffic reports are detailed enough to communicate to you which keywords are effective at bringing visitors to each page of your website. This helps you to understand where your visitors are coming from, mentally.

If your website visitors are reading the page and leaving, you have succeeded at giving them what they want but you have failed at drawing them to the rest of your website. This can be fixed. You need to improve your navigation and make it more compelling and you need to have calls to action on your website pages.

There are many websites that offer great information and compelling content and that’s the end of it. It is so important to guide visitors to the next step that you wish them to take. If you count on your website visitors to do this by themselves, there is a great chance that they will either make a different choice than the one that you want them to make or they will just leave your website altogether, which can impact how much business you do.

Issues with building your credibility

Testimonials that are authoritative, powerful and specific can have a serious impact on your website’s conversion rates. You must ask yourself the question “Am I potentially losing business because my website does not adequately establish my credibility and value?”

A great way to get in touch with this is to review your website for credibility by building content, for example, testimonials, case studies and client lists. You should distribute your testimonials throughout your website, using one- or two-line excerpts that are appropriate for the content on each page. The testimonials can be about a product, a service or the value of subscribing to your blog or newsletter.

Be sure that all of the content is linked to and from other pages so that your visitors can find it very easily. If, after that, you start getting more phone calls or Emails, you will know that you have done something positive to make your website more effective.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

Many websites are designed and built with no purpose in mind. They appear to have badly fitting parts that are haphazardly put together. Those websites don’t provide a reason or inclination for visitors to stay.

When you are designing and building your website (or having someone else design and build it), you need to have a definite purpose in mind. Depending on the type of business that you have, the purpose of your website will vary. The following are some really good reasons to build a website:

• Selling your products and services
• Publishing news items
• Blogging or having social interaction
• Displaying an online catalogue or brochure
• Having a gateway or portal to other sites
• Offering public service or special interest
• Having a virtual gallery or imagery

A great deal of businesses that are in the service industry start out with a basic catalogue or brochure that demonstrates what they have to offer. This type of website is generally the easiest to build.

If you are trying to sell one of your products, you will need a sales letter on your homepage. If your true intent is to sell your products online, you will need Ecommerce features on your website as well.

Online catalogue sites that have Ecommerce are not usually as simple to build. The best example of this is Amazon, which is known as the world’s largest bookstore.

Gateway or portal sites used to be very popular. However, if you want to have a gateway or portal site, you will have some stiff competition from established sites. However, on a positive note, you may be able to do well with a niche portal that focuses on a topic on which you are an expert.

A blog site is a wonderful way to promote your expertise and knowledge, have discussions with similar-thinking people, or provide a discussion forum and customer support. Blogs are great personal publishing sites and are highly regarded as part of the evolution toward social networking and Web 2.0.

If you are a photographer or graphic artist, you can have a site with powerful images, slide shows, and videos. In this day and age, most people have broadband connections so the extra bandwidth that is needed is not really a problem anymore. Numerous businesses work much more effectively if the website presentation is artistic.

Whichever type of website you design and build, make sure that your purpose is clearly defined. Think about what you specifically want your website to accomplish and what your visitors will want to do on your website. Also consider the type of content that you are trying to present and the best way to do that.

Once you are clear on this, you need to write a couple of paragraphs that can serve as your mission statement. Your mission statement should clearly define what the purpose and goals of your business are. This will set the tone for your entire website.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

• Your font should be easy to read and the correct size for your audience
• The background and text colors should complement each other
• You should use a limited number of font sizes and colors throughout your landing page
  • Font styles: Arial, Geneva, or Helvetica are the best fonts to use. The reason for this is that they are simple and easy to read.
  • Font sizes: 10- to 12-point fonts are the best sizes to use for body text. Other sizes will slow down the pace of the reader. If you have an older audience, you may want to increase your font size by a couple of points. Also, you should allow enough spacing between lines.
  • All caps: Don’t use text in all capital letters. It is more difficult to read.
  • Line length: Blocks of text over 50 characters wide are more to read. You might want to consider using hard returns in your paragraphs so that your lines don't become too long when shown on wider computer screens.
  • Contrast: It is a good idea to have a high contrast between background and text because it increases legibility. The best combination of colors is black text on white background.
  • Text background colors and images: White backgrounds for body text are very effective also. Navigation and header background colors should be relatively light to enhance legibility. High-contrast graphic images are not a good idea as background for text.

 Availability: When visitors look at your landing page, they should be able to understand which options you offer. Your navigation needs to stand out and be consistent and in a predictable location.

One of the biggest issues in search engine optimization (SEO) is the lack of credit that it receives in enticing traffic to your website. Many times, the root of this issue is at the senior management level. They aren’t familiar with SEO and how it works. Because of the lack of understanding, they can easily make decisions that are disastrous from an SEO perspective.

SEO is the improvement of the volume and quality of traffic to web pages or websites from search engines through natural search results for targeted keywords. Most often, a website that gets a higher ranking in the search results is the one that the searchers will visit more frequently. Therefore, it is critical that a site is optimized to get traffic the correct way to make it more search-engine friendly and get a higher ranking in the search results.

The concept behind the SEO technique is to get the topmost ranking without paying since your site is relevant to the search query entered by the user. The time spent on optimizing a website to draw traffic can range from a few minutes to a long-term activity.

If your product or service has unusual keywords, some general SEO would be sufficient to get a top rating. However, if your product or service industry is competitive or is in a saturated market, then it is important to dedicate a considerable amount of time and effort to SEO. Even if simple SEO solutions are used, it is necessary to understand how search engine algorithms work and which items are crucial in SEO to get traffic.

The tactics of SEO can vary to achieve top ranking in search results. These fall into two categories (White-Hat SEO and Black-Hat SEO), depending on legitimacy and ethics. White-Hat SEO uses strategies that are considered ethically correct and legitimate by SEOs and search engines while spidering a site. Black-Hat SEO uses illegitimate and ethically incorrect techniques, such as keyword stuffing, page stuffing, and invisible text, which will cause your website to be banned by search engines. It is best to avoid Black-Hat SEO altogether.

The following are some SEO pitfalls to avoid.

• Not Starting Early Enough
  Even companies that understand the importance of SEOs tend to begin the process too late. People in these companies may believe that SEO is about copywriting and keyword selection; however, they don’t realize that SEO also plays an essential part in technical implementation decisions. The main thing to remember here that it is easier to do it right the first time than to do it incorrectly and have to do it all over again.

 

• Choosing an Inappropriate Content Management System (CMS)
  Many CMSs are missing the basic SEO features, such as being able to select title tags, headings, and anchor text. Other CMSs might have these basics but aren’t crawler-friendly or create massive content duplication.

 

• Use Crawler Unfriendly Design
  Sometimes, a senior marketing manager insists on using Flash for the whole site. Search engines now have a better understanding of the content within Flash files, but their understanding is still not as good as with plain HTML text. Nowadays, there are also ways to totally block search engine spiders, such as implementing links in JavaScript that can’t be parsed by the crawler.

 

• Content Duplication
  There are several ways in which duplicate content can occur, such as creating print pages or referring to pages on the site with more than one URL (example: www.example.com and www.example.com/index.html. Many websites allow http://example.com and http://www.example.com to exist side by side without redirecting one version of the URL to the other. A somewhat rarer cousin to this is where http://www.example.com and https://www.example.com are allowed to co-exist.

 

• Thin Content Pages
  Many sites implement pages that don’t have enough content per page. These might even be pages that the user sees as content rich, such as a page with images showing a product and basic product information such as price. However, if the only text on the page that differs from other product pages is the title and heading tags and the price, the page will either be seen as a low-quality page or as duplicate content.

 

• Poor Use of Internal Anchor Text
  A large number of sites still use "click here" or "more" as the anchor text on many links. This is a shame because it is a loss of a golden opportunity to help search engines understand what the page being linked to is about.

 

• Over-Optimized Pages
  Sometimes, people go crazy after learning about SEO. They start creating overly keyword-rich pages in an effort to increase their rankings. This can easily create a poor experience for the user, resulting in a decrease in conversion rates and/or the site being less attractive and compelling for others to link to.

  One warning sign of this is when you hear people talk about "SEO copywriting." This is a red flag that the author of the content is thinking about search engines and not users, and that will get you into trouble. You’re almost always better off having the writer focus on creating quality content, with you controlling the title of the article so that you can make sure that the keyword(s) is in it.

 

• Not Investing in Site Promotion
  Many organizations feel that the process is complete once a site is launched. They don’t realize that the website needs to be promoted as much as any other product or service. Inbound links (and in the future, other references to your website, company, or products on the Web) are the main voting mechanism that search engines use to tell them which are the most important sites related to a particular search query.

Summary

Education is the best way to prevent these issues from occurring. Help your senior managers to understand what SEO is about in a way that is meaningful and relative to them.

If you need help with putting that together, hire a senior SEO professional to come in and do the job for you. Once they understand the business implications of their decisions, most senior managers will make far better decisions about the website(s) and SEO.

To learn more about how Internet marketing is essential to the success of your business, please visit us at CompuKol Communications.

Your website has a much greater impact on your business than you may realize. It is therefore necessary to make sure your website has a professional appearance, is user friendly, and is regularly updated to reflect changes in your products/services as well as those of your customers.

Possible things to consider include the following:

Does your website show that your company is unique and successful?
Visitors to your site will typically stay for only a few seconds if they are not engaged by what they see. This first impression should convey a clear and concise message about who you are and what makes you different from your competitors. Visitors are enticed by such things as an attractive, professional layout, well-defined and understandable listings of products/services, and easy access to more detailed information. To make certain your website has superior quality, compare it to those of other business sites of a similar nature.

Is your website content persuasive?
The website content should be clearly presented. The information must never leave visitors in doubt about meaning; confusing people will drive them away. It is best to be as brief as possible, and to avoid complex wording or sentence construction. Bullets and subheadings may be useful in conveying a lot of information quickly.

Can visitors to your website quickly find the information they need?
When visitors come to your home page, it is essential that they easily identify areas of interest and get to relevant information fast. This is facilitated by an intuitive user-interface, a sitemap, and well-organized content. Your site can be creative and exciting, but it must be easily navigable by all potential customers. If you have a lot of content and numerous web pages, you may want to consider drop down, pop-up, or fly-out menus making your site easier to navigate.

Is your website generating sales leads?
It is in your best interest to provide ways on every page of the website for visitors to volunteer contact information, which you can follow-up on. One way to stimulate more customer contact information is to furnish further information to interested parties in regular newsletters or website update announcements.

Can target customers find your website using search engines?
The best website has little value if no one comes to visit it. The movement of traffic to your website is of vital importance.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves various internet marketing and advertising techniques to make sure that people are directed to your site. Two of the techniques involved are Search Engine Marketing (SEM)- the practice of getting your website found; and Search Engine Advertising (SEA)- setting up paid advertisements on search engines – typically cost per click.

Is it easy to update and maintain your website?
The content management and posting tools now available are of great assistance even to non-programmers so that in a quick and easy way they can update the more dynamic sections such as news, events, and other frequently updated features. Updating the website on a regular basis is a must for any business.

CONCLUSION:
Implementing the ideas discussed above should get you well on your way to constructing a website that does the job. Since the ultimate aim of your business website is to generate business, a website that does not contribute to this effort needs to be changed so that this can and does happen.

To learn more, please visit our CompuKol Communications Professional Website Assessment services page.

Most small-business web sites are works in progress with continual revisions, improvements, and updates. This process frequently results in failure to include important information- information that could have a negative impact on your bottom line.

The inclusion of these pages on your web site will assure you that the potential customers visiting the site get everything they need. These pages are listed and described below.

It is hard enough bringing in new customers, so don’t get caught in the situation where the interested visitors to your site have to ask you for one or more of these pages. You need to make the selling process as smooth as possible.

• Contact Us. Every small-business site should have a Contact Us page that offers visitors a complete list of ways they can contact you – from e-mail addresses to toll-free numbers to a physical address. So, even though your company does have the online presence, customers still want as many contact options as possible; and this includes a physical address. This information should be in the navigation bar and the bottom of every page.
• Testimonials. Some companies mistakenly leave out the Testimonials, considering it too self-serving, People are, however, interested in this kind of information; and it is a natural for them to ask how others think of you. And when they don’t find it, they might begin to ask why it has been omitted, or why you cannot find enough people to say nice things about your company. The link to the Testimonials page should appear in the navigation bar.
• Privacy policy. These days safety and privacy concerns are a top priority for web users. A privacy policy page is therefore an absolute necessity on your site. Anytime you collect personal information, you must give visitors the utmost assurance of confidentiality. This will build trust and decrease the amount of form abandonment. The privacy policy link should appear at the bottom of every page.
• FAQ. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) are important because they save you time and money by creating a self-service format for the clients, so that you don’t have to answer the same questions over and over. In addition, if you find repeat questions on a solicited feedback form, you can always convert them into more FAQs. The FAQ page should be linked from the bottom of every page.
• About Us. The About Us page is more important than you may suppose. People are always interested in the nature of the business they are dealing with. But they don’t want to be overwhelmed with information. It is most effective to keep your company information short and to the point, and also limiting the technical jargon. The link to the About Us page should be in the navigation bar or at the bottom of the home page.
• Confirmation. The confirmation page acknowledges an order and thanks the visitor for his or her business, along with a statement that you will contact the customer shortly to confirm an order. This page will save you time and unnecessary headaches in dealing with customers trying to contact you by phone to check on their orders. This page should be linked to any kind of form on your site, such as e-mail us, subscribe to our newsletter, or buy a product.

Remember: Though these pages are essential, you cannot forget to update them on a regular basis to keep them fresh and in tune with customer interests and preferences.