Increase Profits: Spruce Up Your Site for the Busy Season	Visited: 1080 Not rated Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Eva Browne-Paterson October 13, 2003

It's coming up to that time of the year again when business booms. August, September and October can be the busiest times of the year so it makes sense to prepare for more sales by sprucing up your web site and refreshing the content. This article will give you some tips on ways to attract more sales during this busy period.

Look over your main web page and think about the pros and cons of the page. Ask yourself these questions:

Does your site appear attractive? Does it make you feel good?
Does your page stand out or does it look like many other sites?
Have you stuck to only one or two fonts and font colours on your page?
How does the copy read? Are you speaking to your visitors personally?
Could you use a new header graphic or background?
Have you included a method to capture visitor's info., eg. opt-in box?
Have you made it easy for your visitors to navigate your site?
Have you included any links to products that you can profit from?
Have you included disclaimers and privacy notices on your site?

If you answered "No" to any of these questions, you need to spruce it up and get those things done. Let's look a little closer at these points to give you some ideas.

Your web site needs to look good and make you feel good when you look at it. If it makes you feel good, there's a good chance your site visitors and prospective customers will feel good too.

How do you feel when you visit a site with say a dark background and a tiny font in dark coloured text? 'Hard to focus' colour schemes can be a real strain on the eyes. You would probably click away as soon as you can. You don't want your prospective customers doing that...

The text needs to be either 10 or 12pt in an easy to read font like verdana or arial. Plain old black is a good text colour to use, using other colours for headings and to accentuate particular sentences. Bolding text and simple underlining also creates emphasis. Text needs to be easy to read and should flow on your web page.

Colour in your web page should really come from graphics, headings and backgrounds etc. Get the graphics to match the colour scheme if you can. with 'busy' backgrounds, use a white or light coloured table centred on the page at around 80% width for the text. Always spell check the text and use a thesaurus to replace descriptive words that are continually repeated.

Ask an associate to read over your page and give you their opinion. Don't be thin-skinned though... There's no use asking for an opinion if you can't take constructive criticism. Just think of it as a way to improve.

Go to the effort of making your page memorable to your visitors and give them an easy way to bookmark it so they come back again. Attract attention by including a 'special' on your front page and throughout your site. Using words like Discount, Special Offer & Time-Limited work.

There are several ways to capture visitor's details. Include an opt-in box to your list on your site. Place it near the top of the page in the 'first fold' and make it stand out with colour. Consider placing it in an exit popup box with a free gift for visiting. If you need the code to use on your web page for a popup box, go here and conduct a search: http://javascript.internet.com/master-list/

Ever come across a web site that has a popup alert box asking if you'd like to subscribe to the site's newsletter? You click ok and it sends an email to subscribe you, or you can click cancel. Effective. Here's the software to do just that: http://www.evieb.com/magicsubscriber.zip (5.6 MB download).

Consider attracting visitor participation and capture their details with these methods; conduct a Poll, a Contest, Mini-interview, Demographic questionnaire etc. Just ask a question and see what type of response you get. Give the participant something in return for their time and capturing their details.

Make sure you have good domain traffic analysis tools so you can view your site statistics of the visitors you've received. Keep an eye on the counts and capitalise on it. If you think you're not getting enough site visitors, do something about getting more visitors... Advertise.

Just ensure that once you've captured your visitor's information, you make it worth their while. Contact them periodically, don't spam, and give them something that will make them come back to your site again like details of your current special discounts etc.

Take a closer look at your navigation and see if it needs sprucing up. Is it easy to follow? Do all the links work? Have you included links to all your main pages? Do the words need changing on the links? Are they easy to see on your page? Take all these things into consideration.

There are many kinds of menus that you can utilise; graphics, text, javascript, flash, animated. They all work well and need to be prominently placed on your page.

It's less than 20 weeks away... Make the most of it and start adding festive giveaways to your web site. Whatever you want to offer, you can usually get it for free. www.zdnet.com is a good place to search for freebies. A little touch here and there can make the world of difference. Make new links to Christmas specials. Update your product range to suit the season and your market.

You can make extra profits this year. Just take the time out and spruce up your site. It's well worth your time and effort. Once your site is all spruced up, don't forget to promote it. :~)