Navigation Tips For Your Website Design
Author Matt
www.x-vc.co.uk
It is essential that your website has a clear navigation to ensure that your presence on the net is a successful one. However if your prospective clients are having difficulty in finding basic information regarding your product or services the likelihood is that your website navigation is having a damaging effect on your business. It is extremely important to regularly review your website navigation and monitor its performance, because if your website frustrates your visitors they will go to a competitors. The following are 6 quick and easy tips to improve your website navigation.
1. Create relevant categories for your products and service with relevant information:
Unfortunately many websites fall victim for not having relevant categories for their products and services. The reason for this is because they do not see it from the point of view of their customers. Therefore you should approach this with a customer perspective. Remember although you are very familiar with your products and services your customers may not have a clue about them. So by using suitable categories for your products and services, your customers should be able to probe easily with any hassle. You can implement this tip by creating categories; these could be a "Feature & Benefits" category or a "Special Offers" category etc. If you are still unsure what categories will work for you, then ask your customers or get a website critique to discover the most appropriate solution.
2. Your navigation should be clearly seen:
I am sure that you have experienced at least one website that you have got lost on when you have scrolled through it. Some websites may have a navigation bar on the side but when you scroll down you can not tell, where you are on the page or on what section you are on. This problem can be obverted by placing the navigation in areas of your website with fixed locations, the most important factor is to remain consistent, by having this navigation on all relevant pages. Hence when your customers visit your website they will be able to move throughout your navigation without getting lost or annoyed.
3. Breadcrumbs anyone?
Breadcrumbs are trails that visitors can easily follow; these are popular on websites that have several levels of navigation. Breadcrumb trails act on every web page and display every page on that website illustrating the different levels of navigation. The levels displayed in the trail of breadcrumbs act as a link that will allow your visitors to navigate back to a specific section for example Home / Products / CD's / Rock CD's etc.
4. Internal links with relevant areas:
By aligning internal links with other sections that are similar or in some way relevant. This can be achieved by including "Maybe you will like" sections in your side navigation bar, this will allow you to expose your customer to additional services and products, this is especially useful with e-commerce websites as this greatly increases sales and orders.
5. Search boxes:
If you have a larger quantity of web pages or a large amount of content, based within your website, you can add value by reducing the time your customers waste searching through irrelevant information. This can be eliminated through offering a times saving solution in the form of search boxes. Your customer will appreciate this ability to quickly and effectively finds the content that they are looking for, this can also help you by offering recommendations like "Similar services and products" etc.
6. Have you got a sitemap:
If you have not got a sitemap not only are you potentially loosing prospective clients but also you are also not increasing your positioning in the search engines. The reason that your website is potentially loosing customers is because the expectation amongst modern web surfers is that they expect and demand a central source they can go to, to select the relevant page that they require i.e. the sitemap page. If they cannot find this central resource they may become frustrated by the experience and leave the website. The reason that a sitemap increases websites rankings is because it offers visitors a clear overview of the website and what you can offer them see Xpoosures sitemap at http://www.x-vc.co.uk/sitemap.html.
Feel free to visit www.x-vc.co.uk for more hints and tips


Where Are The Internet Police?
Do we need internet police? You bet! The internet is still the wild west, and the sheriff hasn't yet come to town. Scams are everywhere, and there is little to stop the criminals. For example, I estimate that my online articles have been used in violation of my copyright at least 2000 times. Two thousand times - this is not an exaggeration.
Is there anything I can do about it? Yes, when someone in another country steals my article and puts their own name on it, I can find it online using search engines. At that point, the most I can really do is send a threatening email mentioning a lawyer that I can't actually afford to hire for each of these many violations.
In these cases the thieves usually remove the article, but they will almost always keep stealing other articles. They know that it is too much trouble and expense for anyone to pursue a legal case against them.
Of course there are larger crimes. I get "scam" emails almost daily, looking like they came from my PayPal account or my bank. You have probably seen the same. They try to get the information necessary to empty our accounts.
The Internet Police To The Rescue
There are few police qualified to fight crime online, and no political will to allocate money for training. My solution is to encourage someone or some company start their own for-profit internet police department. It would be a company that charges for protecting our rights.
They would know all the tricks necessary to go after the criminals. They would have technical knowledge needed to shut down web sites of criminals, for example. They could go after web hosts or others that repeatedly did business with known criminals. They could punish the wrong-doers.
To finance these operations, they could charge for each enforcement action, or sell a basic security package that might even include virus protection and such. Many, including myself, would pay for this protection, particularly if they could truly punish and deter criminals.
This would essentially be a "vigilante" operation. I am okay with this, because it is clear that the legal authorities are so far defaulting on their responsibilities in this area. Of course the company would have to develop a reputation for true integrity.
How would this work in action? Suppose I found an article of mine that was stolen. I would contact the Internet Police.com (or whatever their name was). They would then verify that I have used their service without problems before (to be sure I am not making bogus claims against others). Then they would look at documentation I sent them. I might have a service contract with them, or I would pay a set fee.
They would contact the owner of the website where my stolen article is, telling them to cease and desist in their copyright violation. If this site or person had a record of such violations, punitive action would be taken, which could include notification of all who do business with them that they are stealing articles. It might also mean being listed on the internet police "most wanted" list, a site the public could visit.
If this didn't convince the offenders to change their ways, other actions could be taken. Web hosts might be convinced to close their accounts. Volunteers might be used to overload their server with non-stop visits.
Criminals who engage in scams like trying to access people's bank accounts, could be "tricked" into divulging information. Criminals are always susceptible to being fooled, because they are always hoping for unearned power and money. Information thus obtained would be used to punish them, or could be forwarded to the appropriate authorities near them.
There are many ways internet criminals could be legally punished by the internet police, especially in conjunction with internet users who want to help clean up the web. Eventually, after a few good stories of this "vigilante justice" get into the press, fewer people would choose to engage in internet crime.
Copyright Steve Gillman. For inventions, new product ideas, business ideas, story ideas, political and economic theories, deep thoughts, and a free course on How To Have New Ideas, visit : http://www.999ideas.com


NoSugarCoating, No BS Internet Marketing
First, I want to let you know that I use a free tool called Wblogger to do all my posts. It has a build in spell check plus it will save a copy of all my posts on my local drive. If I just did my posting the normal way then I would have a lot of spelling errors and people might think that I only have a 3rd grade education like Jethro from the Beverly Hillbillies.
A list is the single most important item in any business. You have to have a list of potential customers and you have to have a relationship with everybody on your list. Now there are a good number of ways to establish a list like you could give away a free report or a piece of software that you found. Another way, and a lot of marketers have told me hos successful this was for them, is to join a co-reg like Mark Hunter's "The 12 Days of Christmas". This is a promotion where Mark gets a bunch of marketers each to give away a product and then this is sent to people lists offering them 12 days of free gifts. In order to get the gifts the person needs to fill in a form with at least their fist name and their email address.
Now you can buy lists of optin names from some list brokers but from what I have heard usually only a very small percentage will become your subscribers. Some of these brokers are offering double and triple opt in and these will have a higher percentage of subscribers for your newsletter but Co-reg is by far probably the best way to build a list. A good authority on these co-reg service's is Ed Thorpe of Lazydudepublishing.com .
It helps greatly if you have a website where your potential subscribers can read about you. There are a lot of marketers that are offering templates but the fastest way to get a site up would be to just visit blogger.com and create a blog. You can have Adsense on your site but unless you are getting ungodly amounts of traffic I would not count on Adsense to provide a great income for you. The best way would be to sign up as an affiliate for various products through a site like commission Junction and get the text links, not the banners, if you want a site that will load fast and not keep people waiting. I created a site called hosting-choices which gives links to various Web hosting companies that I have checked out. If someone signs up for hosting by clicking on one of my links then I could earn about $100.
Building a list of subscribers and by having affiliate links on your site are really the only two ways that you will make money unless you are able to create your own products. If you know how to program you could create a nice little software utility that serves some purpose or if you are into gardening or refinishing furniture then you could create a how to ebook on the subject.
To get traffic to your site you have a few options and the best is by using a pay per click campaign but not a lot of newbies, I know I can't, can afford to do this. Writing articles and submitting them to article directories can be a great route to become know as an authority on a subject. I have written articles and within a few days of submitting them I have seen a sizable increase in the number of sites that link to me and the number of results that show up on me in sites like Google or Yahoo. I try to submit an article every two weeks or so.
One thing I must caution you about is these sites that provide free articles where all you have to do is add your information to them and submit them. I tried this when I first got started and it got be banned from certain article directories because other people had submitted the same article. The only way to effectively use these type s of articles is for you to read them and then in your own word write your thoughts on the article. You may want to read several articles on the same subject and write a summary of what you learned from these articles.
David Watson has this great product called websitecontentwizard but he sells this product for almost $200 and I know that most of us that haven't made any money yet in the internet arena will not be able to afford this. He would have been smart if he had offered some sort of installment option or I even thought about creating a bundle with his product, an article submitter and a website builder and offering the whole thing for under $40 per month.
With article directories, there are some sights that tell you that for a fee they will submit your articles for you but I signed up with one of those and later found out it was much easier to just submit them myself manually. I use a piece of software called Article submitter which I had paid 3 payments of $19.95 for. I found out later on that I could have got this software at no cost elsewhere.. There also some groups on Yahoo where you can submit your articles to and all you would have to do is put your article in the body of an email and send it to a certain address.
If you go to Articledashboard.com you can get the software to have your own article directory completely for free which is probably a better bet than having these Adsense sites that some marketers will give you. The reason these marketers will give you these Adsense sites is because your Adsense ID will be rotated along with others including that of the marketer that gave you the sites. He is figuring that if he gives these sites away to 1,000 people and his Adsense code will show up 30% of the time then if these people were each making $10 per month from these sites then he would be earning $3.00 per user times 1,000 users which equals about $3,000 per month for him.
I just finished reading somebody's post about using these free PLR article as website content. I will not mention the marketers name but the whole thing is garbage. You have to ask yourself when somebody send you these free PLR articles how many other people are receiving the same articles? how do the search engines treat duplicate content? If you receive some of these PLR articles and only add your name to them you have to ask yourself how many other people are doing the exact same thing. Even adding an intro and footer paragraph to them their bodies will still contain the same text.
The Only way to take PLR articles and make them work is to read the articles and completely rewrite them in your own words.
Adsense ready sites, If you have a simple word processor like MS Word or something like openoffice.org then all you need is to log in to your Adsense account and follow the instructions and Google will generate the code you need to display a nice Adsense banner right on your site. Simply copy and paste this code right into either your word processor or your HTML editor and then use the free Filezilla to upload your site. No need to buy these ready made Adsense sites, no need to waste your money on these. If you still think you need a template then email me and I will send you one completely for free.
With buying traffic for your site do not do this unless you are guaranteed that it is targeted traffic. Why have traffic from people who are only interested in knitting or bowling or something of the sort when your target is horse back riding. Targeted traffic would mean that they would only send you people that are interested in horses. If you have a site that is recipes for baking why get traffic of people who only want recipes for brewing their own beer? Also unless you have great copy on your site that will take visitors and turn them into customers or at least subscribers then there is no reason for you to waste your money on traffic.

If you want to see how good the copy is of your site you may want to sign up at a Hit Exchange. Usually for every 5 sites you visit you will get one person visiting your website. You may even want to purchase a very small amount of targeted traffic or you can go to Williecrawford.com and sign up for his free Saturday brainstorming calls where he will critique three sites. A lot of times if you email him that you would like to have your site looked at on one of these calls he might just do that.
Internet marketing, once you get it up and running can be a great place to make good money but it is no get rich quick scheme. It takes work. There are some marketers that will try and sell you a push button method giving you a blueprint to follow but the best way is trial and error. If you are looking for a place for some great ideas about business along with step by step instructions then go to your local bookstore and see whether they carry Millionaireblueprints.com magazine. Another great place are these forums on internet marketing like the Warrior Forum or on Willie crawfords site.