Melbourne Website Design Services

Anchors are an effective aid to internal page navigation on long pages.

Typically they take the form of a bulleted list at the top of the page with hyperlinks to sections further down the page.  In this way clicking on a link at the top of the page will take the visitor directly down to the section of interest, without them having to scroll down to find it.

These instructions apply to CMS made Simple, or any other application that uses the TinyMCE editor. If you are a little unsure of the TinyMCE editor icons refer to this downloadable quick reference chart.

Here are the steps to insert anchors into a page:

• Decide what points you want your visitors to be able to go to when they click on a link at the top of the page. Usually these will be sub-headings at the start of each section.
• Click to the left of each of these sub-headings, click the anchor icon in the editor’s menu and insert a name for the anchor. Make this either the same as the sub-heading or an abbreviation of it. When you click insert you will see a little anchor symbol appear next to the sub-heading. This is only a marker in the editor and will not be visible to the public.
• After you have created the anchors go back to the top of the page and create the bulleted list of hyperlinks. The list items should contain the same text as the sub-headings that you are linking to.
• Working with each list item in turn:
  1. Highlight the text that will form the link.
  2. Click the plain link icon in the editor menu
  3. Click the drop down arrow on the ‘anchor’ field and select the anchor you wish to link to.
  4. Add a title - once again the same as the sub-heading text
  5. Insert.

That’s It!

I often hear people say that they would like to earn a passive income on the Internet. Well yes, I think we all would!

But I can’t help but feel that there is a little bit of blind optimism at work here. In fact it rather reminds me of another catch-cry for “the paperless office” about a decade back. Great aspirations but short on substance.

Passive after all means “not participating readily or actively; inactive”.

Making money on the Internet usually involves selling products or services (either your own or others, as in affiliate arrangements). To do this it is necessary to attract a large number of visitors to your website. There are many ways to do this but they generally come down to:

• paid search engine traffic e.g Google Adwords
• or natural search engine traffic brought about by optimising web pages.

Both require very careful product and/or service research, precise keyword analysis, constant testing,  ongoing monitoring, feedback and continuous adjustment of all processes from marketing through to final product or service delivery.

It is not starting to sound too ‘passive’ is it?

So, is there to be money to be made on the Internet? Absolutely!

Is it likely that the money could be described as passive income? Well, no.

I am sorry if I have burst a bubble. No doubt many hopeful souls have already branded me as a heretic. It is just that I have a rather more down to earth appreciation what the Internet has to offer. In the end, from a business perspective, it is a fantastic marketing and sales channel. But like every other form of business it is highly competitive and success comes through intelligent application and hard work.

Sorry

What a desolate landscape a website would be without images. The importance of images, and in fact all the graphical elements that make up a theme, should not be overlooked. They add visual interest, set the overall mood, and in the case of online shops, are a vital part of the overall information required to convey a message to a market.

But for all that they are still just images. Of themselves they do not attract potential customers to a website, they add little to a customer’s understanding of what is being offered, and they do not constitute a call to action. No. .

Just consider for a moment what words add to the marketing equation of a website:

• They are primarily responsible for attracting potential customers to a website via search engine traffic.
• They engage the visitor’s interest by clearly explaining the purpose of the website in a way that will encourage them to take a closer look.
• They detail products and services, and most importantly the customer benefits that flow them.
• They are the main element in that all important “call-to-action” - the thing that causes the transition from visitor to prospect or even customer.

But here’s the thing: words may rule, but what words?

As a website designer I put all my efforts into creating websites that are functionally sound and visually pleasing. How disappointing it is then when I see clients add poorly written content. The result in business terms is quite predictable: poorly written content results in lost sales. It is just that simple.

Fortunately help is at hand from Word Nerds a company in whom I have great confidence.

If visitors are not choosing to become customers, perhaps you are just not asking them correctly: it’s all in the words!

Browser based editors such as those supplied with eCommerce or CMS applications are a wonderful innovation that enable non-technical site owners to easily create and edit content for their web site. Having said that however, there are still some issues that can lead to confusion. Most of these relate to the underlying format of information that is copied from office ducuments. Here are some simple guidelines to ensure you gain the maximum benefit with the minimum frustration:

• Never copy and paste directly from an office document (such as Word), or in fact from another web site, into a browser based editor. Some osCommerce and CMS installations are fitted with editors that provide a popup facility that strips all formatting from content that is pasted into it, leaving only raw text. If your editor does not have such a facility take the intermediate step of pasting the content into Notepad (or similar editor) that will strip off all formatting, and then copy and paste from Notepad into your browser based editor.
• The appearance of content in CMS and eCommerce systems is driven by an overall stylesheet. The purpose of this stylesheet is to ensure that content is presented consistently across all pages. For this reason best results are obtained by:
  • Leaving all body fonts as default wherever possible. Selecting particular fonts, sizes and styles will only lead to inconsistencies.
  • Use the headings (H1 - H6) wherever appropriate, once again without “embellishing” them. As with the body font these are controlled by the stylesheet.
• Create (or paste from Notepad) all text first. Only when the basic paragraphs are established should you go back and assign the Headings and insert images and hyperlinks.

In summary keep it simple - don’t import pre-formatted text, and allow your system’s stylesheet to do its job. And I should add that if you are not happy with such things as the body font or heading styles contact TOSD. These things can be easily altered in the stylesheet and the changes will be automatically rendered site-wide without you having to make changes on a page by page basis.

You run a business, you sell products and you have a “web site“. Maybe that’s the problem!

Without a doubt I think the single most important thing associated with managing a small business web site that sells products or services is the mindset that is adopted by those responsible for its growth and development. If it is perceived as a “web site” then that is exactly what it will be. A poorly defined thing with little or no focus.

A “shop” on the other hand has far more focus. We all intuitively understand that a shop:

• is accessed by visiting a published address
• entry will not be a problem
• the stock on display will be labelled, priced and available
• and there will be a range of payment options.

How does this help us manage an online shop? Now that we are thinking “online shop” not “web site” it is easy to extrapolate basic customer expectations.

For example: customers visiting your online shop will expect many of the things they have been conditioned to expect in “bricks and mortar” shops. They will expect to be able to move around easily to find what they are looking for, and when they do, they will expect it to be displayed to its best advantage with pricing and any option details clearly marked. In other words, they will expect sufficient information to be able to make a purchasing decision.

But as any “bricks and mortar” retailer will tell you, it goes a little deeper that that. Customers will also expect the online shop to have an ambience that supports the product range, help when they need it and excellent after sales service … and that is just for starters!

Do you begin to see how much easier it is to anticipate what customers will expect when you think of an online shop rather than a web site? It is simply a matter of extrapolating what we all expect when visiting a “bricks and mortar” shop. What follows of course is that that the online shop manager must ensure that all those things are where they are wanted, when they are wanted and are fully functional. It is quite unacceptable for instance for a customer to visit an online shop only to find that access is denied, information is missing, navigation and signage is inconsistent, prices are incorrect or the checkout system is faulty (or worse) insecure.

One parting comment: when was the last time you visited a shop, at intervals over a period of several months, without a single thing ever changing? And yet we have all seen it in an online shop haven’t we. Perhaps the owner thinks he is managing a web site …