The 25 Deadly Sins For Your Internet Marketing Website

By Detlev Reimer
Posted Thursday, June 24, 2004

Content Is KING!

If you create a website, be sure to have valuable content you
can offer. Try to find facts which cannot be found anywhere
else on the Internet. It can be a lot of hard work, but if you can
deliver unique content, you will certainly have visitors which will
appreciate this.

Especially, having dozens of banners at your homepage should
be avoided. This is like to say to someone on the street : "Give
me all your money". Your visitor has not intended to come to
your website to make you money but to find valuable content
he can profit from.

Be Decent With Your Ads

Of course, this should not refrain you from making money with
your website, but it has to be more decent than blinking banners
everywhere on your page. One banner, a sponsor, should be
enough for one page.

Once you have finished your pages and uploaded them to your
webspace, be sure to check everything online as well. Often,
the links work on your local computer but if you want to access
it on the net, pages cannot be found, graphics are not loaded,
links lead to nowhere-land, forms do not work correctly etc. ...
etc.

Check Every Link Online

Most of the times this is due to the fact that links are automati-
cally set to your local directories and not to your URL. So make
sure, you test every link online as well, especially the spelling of
your linknames. This is a very common source for faults and
testing is something I would really recommend.

Test The Functionality Of Your Forms

If you have forms on your web site, test the functionality with
your own contact information and e-mail address first. Nothing
is more annoying to your visitors than if they want to contact
you through the form you deliver and then nothing happens or
they get an errror messsage. This doesn't have to be that way.

25 Deadly Sins For Your Internet Marketing Website

01. Your page has so many advertisements on it that your
content is hidden

02. Background sound is played in a loop and cannot be
switched off and takes ages to load...

03. Your visitors get confused by too many links on your home-
page

04. Incoming e-mails are answered after more than 3 days

05. Links cannot be recognized as being links

06. Letting the visitor guess what comes next if they click on
a link (Text like: ...more or ...next page)

07. Hiding your links within the text so that they only can be
found by placing the mouse over it ( it becomes a hand...)

08. Using more than 6 different colours for your basic design

09. Visitors have to guess which submenu they are in

10. Many spelling errors in your body copy

11. Nothing for FREE on your site

12. Forced registration on your first page or no content
available...

13. Your page takes 2 or 3 minutes to load ... most people will
interrupt it

14. Using wrong fonts (fonts which are installed on YOUR
computer only)

15. Showing the same picture but name them differently. By
doing this, it cannot be taken from your browser cache to
speed up the loading time of your page

16. No cross-browser test; your site looks excellent on the
Internet Explorer but...

17. Scaling your graphics only by width and height attributes
of your HTML-code instead of making your graphics
smaller/bigger

18. Headlines as gifs instead of text; search engines will ignore
them and your loading time will increase

19. Using dozens of blinking elements and marquee-fonts on
your pages

20. No unique content, just rehashed material from other web-
sites

21 "Ugly" pages; colours which don't fit together, backgrounds
which make your text very hard to read

22. Pages which have no "exit", no links which lead you back
to your starting page

23. Choosing a hard to remember name for your website, you
want to be found, don't you ?

24. Wrong prices for your articles

25. Choosing slow ISP's

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+ Forgetting to have fun! Don't take everything too serious ;-)

About the Author
Article by Detlev Reimer. Feel free to use the article with these
bylines included. Detlev has just finished creating his first product,
a database program for Internet marketers which will help you to save
and organize e.g. your advertising, customer and contact data. For
further details, please visit : (http://www.promobuddy.com/) . Sign up
for his newsletter at (http://www.internetmarketing-success.com/) .