Stuff You Can Add To Enhance Your Plain Web Site

Its not enough that you have a single- or two-page web site telling people this is what your site is about, heres what youre offering them, heres how they can contact you.

People are naturally visual creatures. And they are more likely to go back to a site that not only gives them the information they need but also gives them visual satisfaction and a lot more.

So why would you make a plain web site if there are tons of stuff you can add to it? The good thing is, most of the stuff you can add to enhance your site you can get for free!

1. Add a little graphics to your pages. Dont overdo this though! You might get carried away and overload your pages with tons of graphics. The key idea here is to enhance your web pages, to add a little color to it. A page that is 100% text is boring. A page that is chock full of useless graphics is overkill! Try to balance the texts and the graphics - 75% text, 25% graphics. Besides, you wouldnt want to turn off your visitors when your page takes forever to load!

2. Put a guestbook on your page. This is a good way for your visitors to tell you what they think about your site, their suggestions, or comments on what they saw. If your site is hosted by free web site hosts such as Yahoo! Geocities http://geocities.yahoo.com, Freeservers http://www.freeservers.com or Homepage http://www.homepage.com, you might want to take advantage of their free guestbooks.

3. Conduct polls. To make your web page more dynamic, try conducting a mini-poll where visitors can vote. You might want to hold weekly polls and then compile the results at the end of the week. This would give your visitors a reason to visit your site periodically. There are several sites which offer poll services for free. All you have to do is sign up at their site and put a link of your poll from their site to your page. One such poll service is Freepoll http://www.freepoll.com.

4. Add a counter and track your visitors. You might be interested in knowing how many visitors go to your site at a given day, week or month. Beyond just the numbers, there are now several sites which offer free counters for you to put in your site not just to track the number of hits, but also to give you information such as platforms, browser used, country, domain and other statistical measures. The Counter http://www.thecounter.com and Webtracker http://www.webtracker.com are two sites which offer this service. You first have to sign up and then copy and paste the counter code to your web site. Each week you will receive generated statistics reports.

5. Link to other sites similar to yours. Give your visitors links to other sites like yours to visit. If you have a site devoted for dogs, then put up links that are dog-related. You can go as far as making a directory of links for your specific topic. With a little bit of advertising, your site could become a sort of a one-stop-site for people looking for information about your sites topic.

6. Offer free stuff. Anything that is free can pull people to visit your page. People love free stuff. Offer something free from your site that they can download. This serves as an incentive for visitors to check out your site. Offer free ebooks for download. Offer free advertisements. Offer free graphics and programs. Offer free services. In time, when you have built traffic to your site and people come to your site even with less offering of free stuff, you can also offer paid services and products.

7. Put a search engine on your site. You can do this by linking your site to major search engines such as Yahoo http://www.yahoo.com and Altavista http://www.altavista.com. All you need to do is go to their site and copy and paste the link codes to your site.

8. Put a subscription link for updates. Offer your visitors an option to sign up to your mailing list or newsletter so theyll know about updates on your site. This is a good way of keeping track on them. You need not make an elaborate newsletter. Just send them a simple email every week or two weeks telling everyone who signed up whats new on your site. Once you resolve to sending updates on a weekly basis, stick to it. Never send them more than one email update a week. They will look at it as an intrusion to their privacy. They signed up on your mailing list with the expectation of receiving an email from you once a week, not more. Doing so would make them unsubscribe.

So there it is! Eight things you can do to enhance your web site.

About the Author

Shery Ma Belle Arrieta is an Officer and the newsletter editor for the Internet Musketeers, Inc. To receive more great articles, join our merry band of Musketeers, marketing professionals one and all, as we work to return the values of truth, honesty, and integrity to the world of online marketing. Get straight-to-the-point practical articles that cover all marketing issues and all skills, from the novice to the expert, and great value freebies that will make your marketing life easier. Be educated and be challenged in each stimulating issue of The Internet Musketeers Newsletter. Send a blank e-mail to subscribe here: InternetMusketeers-subscribe@topica.com or visit us online at internetmusketeers.com
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