One of the most critical parts of building a highly successful website is making sure that the site is user friendly. It sounds like it should be easy but if you don’t do it correctly it can be really terrible. If you do get it wrong you will know it because your bounce rate won’t just be sky high, the traffic you do get won’t stick around that long. Get some analytics on your site and start figuring out where the trouble spots are. You can even hire a person to run an audit and make sure that your site is meeting all of the criteria for user friendliness. Whatever may be going on, if you’d like to have a good business, you are going to take this seriously.
Fonts that are hard to read generally don’t get read for very long, so this means you have some control over this. These are Arial, Verdana, and others and many sites skip the serif varieties, you’ve seen serifs which have the solid curly cues on them. It’s not necessary to load up your site with so many kinds of fonts for each little section, etc. If you use too many fonts, then it can look very distracting unless you choose very well. Large sites that are nationally recognized with millions of visitors will have more font types, but for a simple niche site by an IM marketer will usually have two – one for the headline and one for the text and links.
With your business blog design, or the theme, you can do well with the minimum just as long as it’s clean. The point here is to find something that works without spending weeks stressing about it. Take a look at the top sites in your niche and see how they get it done. What you want to achieve is successfully selling your message, and yes, everything comes down to selling even when you’re not doing a hard sell. Remember that speed is important, so find a good theme you think will be accepted and get your blog live.
Making mistakes is really easy, particularly in terms of content creation and in other areas. Some of the examples of this are your side bars. You’ll have special offers, opt-in list boxes, etc and each of those things are going to need to be promoted. It is important to make sure you’ve got effective copy here. Try to avoid doing the same things that almost every other webmaster does–just putting up opt-in boxes and eBook graphics. This is something that most people are so used to seeing that they tune them out. You can place a smaller box in the side column with smaller font copy and an email field. The smaller font shouldn’t be too small and the copy needs to be compelling. Even if your current website is a total failure, if you know what to do you can turn things around pretty reasonably. Of course knowledge is only good if you know how to use it and how to use it confidently. It’s really all up to you and how badly you want to have a successful business on the web.