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Flash Deadly Sins (that can kill your web business)
Looks like every client wants a Flash site these days but the reality is...as flashy as these sites may look, there are many negatives you may want to consider before delving into Flash.Deadly Sin One - Long Load TimesThis is the most obvious problem with ...

How To Get Profits From Your ? Page Not Found' File
"'Page Not Found' on this Server. Check the URL and try again. Or Refresh the page..." This is the annoying error that we will come across every time we surf the web pages. Internet will be changing every minute and day. The web sites that were here are ...

Web Design Blunders That Can Cost You Lost Profits
It's hard enough to bring people to your little corner ofcyberspace, and once they're there, you have just a few brief seconds to catch their attention. A simple click-of-the-mouse and your site visitor is gone!Keep as many interested prospects on your ...




10 Web Design Tips For A Professional Looking Niche Web Site
 
Web site design is a critical element in niche marketing.
If you want to build your reputation as a Professional in your niche, you need to project a professional image from the moment your visitors reach your web site.
Like it or not, first impressions count and no more so than on the Internet. Your web site is the only way that visitors can judge you and your product. Give them the wrong impression, make it hard for them to find the information they're after and chances are they will click away into cyberspace and never come back.
To avoid this happening to you, here are ten web design tips to help ensure that your niche web site projects a professional image :
1 - Use the KISS approach - Keep your web design simple and straight forward with clean lines and a suitable colour scheme. Avoid distractions like Flash presentations, animated gifs and audio which loads as the page opens.
2 - Visibility - Design for a screen resolution of 800x600 pixels and a maximum page width of 760 pixels so that your web site visitors don't have to scroll from side to side to read your content.
3 - Graphics - Keep your graphics down to one or two smallish ones and optimise them to load quickly (You can optimise your graphics at www.netmechanic.com who offer a free facility to do this). Always add "alt" tags to each image, with a concise description, so that people who surf with graphics turned off and the sight impaired, who use text readers, know exactly what the image is.
4 - Load time - Aim to have your pages load in 8-10 seconds on a 56K modem. You can do this by keeping your page size down to about 10k or less.
5 - Use CSS - CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS enables you to define the look of your web site with various style elements like font type, size and colour, backgrounds, Hyperlinks and a lot more. By linking your HTML pages to a Cascading Style Sheet you can reduce the amount of code on your web pages and speed up load times.
6 - Navigation - Make sure your main navigation links appear in the same place on every page so that your visitors don't have to hunt around for them. Your visitors should also be able to see at a glance exactly where they are on your web site, so include "You are here" links at the top and bottom of each page showing the path from your Home page, for example :
"You are here >> Home > Widgets > Redwidgets"
In this case Home and Widgets would be linked back to the relevant pages.
7 - Site Map - Include a Site Map on your web site listing the title of each page with a short description and a link back to the relevant page. Not only will this enable your site visitors to find their way around, it will also help to encourage search engines to spider your entire site.
8 - Readability - Avoid dark backgrounds and fancy font styles, if you have a lot of stuff to read on your web pages it is better to stick to a white background with black print as that is less fatiguing to read. Arial, Verdana and Times Roman are the most common fonts to use and the easiest to read. Oh and one other thing - not everyone has 20/20 vision, make your font sizes big enough for those people to read comfortably.
9 - Test - Test your design in as many browsers as possible. Although Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser, don't ignore alternatives like FireFox, Mozilla, Opera, K-Meleon, Netscape, Safari, etc. they may only constitute 15%-20% of browsers, but that's still millions of potential customers you might otherwise miss out on.
10 - Relevance - Don't cover more than one major topic per page, this will help you get your message over more easily. Make sure that everything you are going to include on your web site is relevant to the niche market you are targeting. For example if your site is about golf, don't include links to a dog training site (unless it's about training dogs to find lost golf balls:-).
Copyright © 2005, André Anthony Niche Market Know-How
About the Author
André Anthony has been running his own businesses on and off the Internet since 1983. He owns and operates Niche Market Know-How a resource for beginning Niche Marketers. Visit http://www.nichemarketknowhow.com today to find strategies, tips, tools, products and resources for effective niche marketing. Get his free Niche Market Know-How Course here: http://www.nichemarketknowhow.com/course.htm


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Revealed: how Pietersen sounded out Warne to coach the Poms - Sydney Morning Herald
ENGLAND - or more accurately their departed cricket captain Kevin Pietersen - sounded out Shane Warne about their coaching job. In a turning of the tables, it is believed Warne was contacted in recent weeks by Pietersen, who resigned on Wednesday ...

SonicWALL Announces Timing of Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2008 ... - Yahoo Finance
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Obama Team Asks Congress To Delay Switch To Digital TV - Free Internet Press
President-elect Barack Obama's transition team Thursday asked key members of Congress to consider delaying the nation's switch to digital television scheduled for Feb. 17, saying there is "insufficient support" for the problems consumers will ...

Colombian drug baron shot dead in Madrid hospital - Forbes
Spanish police say a convicted Colombian drug baron has been shot dead in a Madrid hospital. A police spokesman says Leonidas Vargas, who was convicted of drug trafficking, was murdered in a hospital bed where he was being treated for lung disease ...

Obama picks lobbyist as Pentagon No. 2 - Forbes
President-elect Barack Obama, who deliberately distanced himself from lobbyists during his campaign and his transition, appointed a defense contractor's lobbyist Thursday to become his No. 2 official at the Defense Department. Obama acknowledged that ...

CES: Sony Builds Internet Video Into HDTVs - Broadcasting Cable
As expected, Sony Electronics has taken the integration of Internet video technology into its high-definition TV sets one step further at this year’s CES, unveiling high-end Bravia LCD sets that can hook up to a broadband connection and deliver ...

Magnet school can use dog insulin - Miami Herald
Q. I recently had to put my wonderful dog, Yogie, to sleep. He was diabetic the last three of his 15 years of life. I have three unopened bottles of dog insulin, ''Vetsulin,'' left over, worth about $100. Do you know of someone or somewhere I can ...

Court papers: Gotti neighbor was dissolved in acid - Philadelphia Daily News
NEW YORK - It is perhaps the most intriguing unsolved mystery from the gaudy gangland career of John Gotti: Whatever happened to the neighbor who accidentally ran over and killed the mobster's 12-year-old son , and then vanished? According to papers ...

Burglar Uses Metal Bar To Try To Open ATM - CBS 13/CW31 Sacramento
The Sacramento County Sheriff's department is looking for a suspect who attempted to break into an ATM with a metal bar but failed.  He was, however, caught on camera. The attempted theft happened early in the morning on December 30th at the Safe ...

Video: 'Mac Versus PC' in Paragon City - Wired
City of Heroes recently came to the Mac OS X operating system and to celebrate publisher NCsoft released the above parody of Apple's iconic "Mac versus PC" commercials. Instead of John Hodgman's lovably nebbish "PC" and Justin Long's smug hipster ...