An online business is a great way to make money at home with little start up. The first thing you must do when starting an Internet business is to learn to build a great website.

It’s true that the majority of Internet marketers have no knowledge of code. This is mostly because there are so many great softwares available that make building websites very easy. Many marketers turn to Wordpress blog software, which is free, and super easy for anyone to use.The main requirement for success online is commitment and hard work.

There are many facets to building a great website. While it’s true that experience is your best teacher in Internet marketing, learning how to avoid mistakes in website design is important. Most mistakes are fundamental and can be avoided with webmaster help.

3 Basic Mistakes Webmasters Make When Building Websites

1. The Design

Keeping visitors on your site to perform the requisite action is crucial to its success. The failure of most websites can be tracked to poor website structure that makes visitors go elsewhere. One of the most important aspects of good website design is good navigation.

Traffic has to be able to go from one page to another without much effort, which takes a proper sidebar navigation plus a good linking structure on the sub pages themselves.

The best navigation appears on every page in either a left sidebar, or a top bar. Colors are also important for the navigation areas, they should match the rest of the website’s colors, but they should also stand out.

The text of the link in the navigation menu needs to the opposite of the background color. The best case scenario is white text on a dark background.

It is a good idea to stay away from overly complicated drop down menus. Most visitors are novices and have a very short attention span. Taking care with navigation is the best way to keep users on your website longer and the best way to ensure that you close the deal.

Keywords
One mistake that some make is to not do proper keyword research prior to launching their sites. Finding keywords that have the most amount of searches is essential as those keywords are what will bring the organic search traffic. Also it is important to gage competition so that raking is not impossible. Keyword research can be tricky and you can learn more at: Step-by-Step Keyword Research.

3. Too Many Ads and Banners
One of the biggest mistakes that webmasters can make is to flood the site with too many banner ads. For the most part Internet surfers have become somewhat immune to banners. Useful content should be the main focus of the site. Banners and Adsense in over abundance can make visitors not trust the site. The best practice is for the ads to be peppered around the content and not hit visitors in the face.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 6:29 am and is filed under Online Business, Promotion and Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.