22 Ways To Find Advertisers For Your Website
Leveraging Your Own Site
Exploring Ad Networks
Vising other sites in your niche
Using Google
Using Social Networks
Bonus Tip
Labels: Web Design, website marketing
This blog is related to best html, css tricks, javascript, css and provides useful information on Usability, Dynamic Collections of Ajax, xhtml, flash, tutorial, creativity, imagination, testing, web 2.0, Web 3.0, web tools, HTML and other relevant information on web designing.
Labels: Web Design, website marketing
Let's face it: No one likes spending a long time filling out a form. Keep it short and simple and eliminate elements that aren't absolutely necessary or that don't offer a tangible benefit. Make sure every part of your form is pulling its weight, and your users will thank you.
The structure of your form should serve just as much of a functional purpose as its elements. When laying out your form, keep in mind that, at least in the Western world, people read from top to bottom and left to right. They also often use the Tab key to move around the form. Your design should reflect this through intuitive labeling and natural placement of elements. And, of course, your form should never look scattered or haphazard — make sure everything is evenly spaced and neatly arranged.
Here are a few standard form layouts that you should use as a starting point for more creative designs:
Left-Aligned Labels With Vertically Stacked Fields
This form features left-aligned labels with neatly ordered fields stacked on top of one another. This gives the eye an easy-to-follow path down the form, which is especially helpful if you're asking questions users may not be familiar with. Because they're able to read down the list of questions without the visual interruption of an input field, they'll be able to concentrate more on what you're asking. This layout does tend to make for longer form completion times because of the amount of time it takes for the eye to move from the label to the input field.
Right-Aligned Labels With Vertically Stacked Fields
Right-aligning your labels can help make them easier to distinguish and quicker to read, and also eliminates awkward spaces between labels and input fields. However, this can be harder to read. It also looks jagged, which can be a bit unattractive.
Top-Aligned Labels
Top-aligned labels like these make for a form that's quicker and easier to fill out because the eye doesn't have to move as far between the label and the input field. This type of layout also gives you the freedom to place related fields next to each other, which can save space.
Every form you make should be tailored to the specific situation it addresses. When you're planning the design of your form, ask yourself the following questions: What are you asking? Why? What does your Web design look like with and without the form? Is the form something users want to fill out, or is it something they're required to fill out? Your answers to these questions should help dictate the layout and content of your form.
When deciding whether to add an element to your form, ask yourself if you could do without it. If the answer is "yes," don’t use it.
One element that's almost always unnecessary is the Reset button. These relics still make an appearance now and then, but they should be avoided. Think about it: When you want to change information on a form, it doesn't matter if the field is already filled out or not, so why would you even need to erase all the information? The only thing the Reset button is good for is accidentally clearing all the information your user just entered and aggravating them enough that they'll go somewhere else instead of taking the effort to fill out the form again.
You may need to explain why you are collecting certain information on your form, especially when users are loathe to share it, like with phone numbers or e-mail addresses. This not only helps reduce user confusion, but also ensures that the data is accurate and correctly formatted.
Any descriptions and comments should be clean and concise. You may also want to format them with different colors, sizes, or styles to help set them apart. Just be sure not to overdo it — after all, you don’t want your descriptions to look tacky or drown out the rest of your form. This form, which asks for information in order to provide a quote for printing services, is a good example of a form that effectively uses descriptions:
Make sure the wording in your form is friendly and user oriented. Here's a simple trick for writing conversational copy: Pretend you're actually talking with your user.
If you want to know someone’s name, you aren’t going to stare them in the eyes with a rigid expression and demand, "Full name." That would just be creepy. If you were looking to garner a positive response from this person, you would instead open with a smile and say, "Hi, what’s your name?"
Keeping this in mind, instead of prompting your user with the label "Full Name," try something a little more personable, like, "What's your name?"
Communication involves the exchange of ideas in small, manageable sections. You introduce yourself, and the other person does the same. You mention what you do for a living, and the other person has a comment or question. You remark back, or answer, and this prompts another response. In a good conversation, the information is a steady, back-and-forth flow.
A form, being another method of communication, should be the same way. You may be asking for quite a bit of information, but that doesn't mean you have to throw it all at the user in a huge block. Try using horizontal rules, colored bars, meaningful images, or headings that match the design of your site to separate the information into small, easily understood chunks. If all else fails, spread your form out across multiple pages and add a progress bar across the top so users know about how much they have left.
Your error messages should be helpful and clear. Specify in the message which field caused the error, and highlight the label and/or the field itself. After all, no one likes hunting through a form for an elusive field they overlooked the first time around.
When the user clicks the Submit button, they think they're done, and they're ready to move on. They’re basically saying, "Here's the info you wanted. Talk to you later!"
In a real conversation, you'd give them a wave, say, "Bye," and walk off, or give them some other way of acknowledging that the communication is done. Your form should be no different. Have your form programmed so it sends the user to a custom page that tells them something like, "Thank you for your submission! You'll be hearing from us shortly." There should also be a link back to the main page of your Website.
And that's it! Keep these rules in mind when designing your next Web form, and you may be surprised at the quantity and quality of feedback you receive as a result.
For more information about Web Form Builder or to download the free trial, click here.
Labels: Design inspirations, Web Design
If you've got some successful keyword research and PPC advertising under your belt for your own website, why not capitalize on that and make money online without one? Affiliate marketing through pay-per-click makes it possible.
MSN adCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing both allow direct linking to sites that are not your own. (But don't try this with Google AdWords.)
Direct linking means that you can join affiliate programs, create ads for their products, and send click-throughs directly to the merchant's site. There's no need to build an intermediary site or use your own site to direct traffic. When your click-throughs convert, you get a commission.
It's a way to create an extra stream of income--or several--with some big advantages:
If you want your ads to be seen, here's what you have to do. Step 1: Start with a big, broad market
Step 2: Do some keyword research
And as I mentioned in an earlier article, you need to look for specific problems that are shared by a lot of people within a market. Then find relevant keyword terms that clearly show a clear intention to buy or find out more information. Those terms are much more likely to convert. And remember, you pay for every click, but you get paid only when they convert. The Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool can show you almost anything you'd like to know about any given keyword, including similar keywords, traffic, cost per click, and much more. The free Google AdWords Keyword Tool is also a quick and handy way of getting ideas for keywords with high search volume and low cost per click; just keep in mind that you can't use this strategy with Google.
Step 3: Find a good affiliate merchant that targets your niche
When you're choosing affiliate merchants, ask these questions: Step 4: Write a PPC ad that drives buyers to the affiliate merchant's site
You can give your ad an extra boost by adding your keyword, or part of it, to the display URL at the bottom of the ad. The actual target URL will contain a big, ugly affiliate ID number, but the display version can show the domain name plus a subdirectory with a word or phrase that makes it look relevant to the search, like this: Display: internetmarketing.com/affiliates_ppc
Target: http://www.internetmarketing.com/aff-iduao74elksdjdo-2u023f Before you create your display link, check out the PPC competition to make sure it's unique so your ad won't be bumped. The better your ads, the higher the click-throughs will be, which means your ads will be rewarded with better positions for the same money. It's worth polishing them, and then testing them to see which ones are performing the best.
Running a pay-per-click affiliate campaign probably won't generate hundreds of thousands of dollars for you right off the bat--but it is the easiest way to leverage the keyword research and PPC skills you've developed in building your own site. And when Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing join forces sometime this year, you'll get the traffic from both, even if you only advertise on one. That makes direct linking even more appealing.
Allen Moon is Director of Marketing for the Internet Marketing Center. He leads a team of internet business experts who stay on top of the changing online landscape. They constantly research the latest approaches and test them on real commercial websites, then pass on their knowledge in easy-to-use, internet marketing tools, instruction materials, and training services.
Labels: online marketing
Testing for web accessibility (how usable a website is by individuals with disabilities) is an often neglected part of web design and development. Web accessibility is important not only because your content will reach a wider range of audience, but also because correcting web accessibility issues have secondary benefits such as cleaner and more semantic code and better indexibility on search engines.
In this post, you’ll find Top 10 free useful tools to help you evaluate and correct issues which decrease your website’s accessibility. There was a high emphasis on the ease-of-use during the selection of these tools.
The Firefox Accessibility Extension is a Firefox toolbar that allows you to inspect every aspect of a web page to determine its accessibility. A helpful toolbar feature is the Text Equivalents menu which allows you to generate lists of elements such as images and links to see whether each are standards-compliant. You can also launch 3rd party applications such as the WC3 HTML Validator and Link Checker services directly from the toolbar.
aDesigner, developed by IBM, simulates the experience of visually-impaired individuals so that designers can better understand how a web page is interpreted by screen readers. It has a plenty of features including a summary and detailed report of compliancy to web accessibility guidelines and simulations for blind or low-vision impairment.
EvalAccess is a web-based service for testing your website’s accessibility. You can either point to a web page, an entire website, or directly enter your HTML source code. It checks your mark-up against the WC3’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0) and provides a summary of the number of errors and warnings and a breakdown of each error.
WebAnywhere is a browser-based web application that works similarly to screen readers such as JAWS. It’s an excellent way to see how a web page is read and navigated by assistive technologies.
The Web Accessibility Inspector, developed by Fujitsu, is a desktop application that indicates web accessibility issues. You can specify a file, folder, or URL to run the inspection on. It has the “View on the screen” option which opens the web page in a browser window with markers that point out elements that have issues.
Vischeck simulates how a web page or image will look if viewed by people affected with color-blindness. It simulates three types of color-blindness. You can conduct the test by entering a URL or uploading images.
The Accessibility Color Wheel is a web-based tool to help you select the background color and font color. You can enter the hexadecimal values of the colors you want to test, or you can hover over the color wheel to select colors.
The Colour Contrast Analyser, developed by Juicy Studio, is a Firefox extension (currently in alpha) that checks all the elements in the Document Object Model for color contrast to insure that content is accessible by people who are color-blind or affected by other visual-impairments. It uses the color and brightness differences algorithm suggested by the WC3 “Techniques For Accessibility Evaluation And Repair Tools” (AERT).
Juicy Studio also has other web accessibility evaluation tools such as the Readability Test, CSS Analyser, and Image Analyser.
The TAW Web Accessibility Test evaluates your website’s accessibility based on the WCAG 1.0. It marks trouble spots directly on the web page, allowing you to quickly see where the errors are. Clicking on the error/warning indicator will bump you down to a summary of the issue. It’s a great way to visualize the areas of a web page that needs work.
The Web Accessibility Toolbar (WAT) is an extension for Internet Explorer or Opera that offers designers a ton of useful tools and features to help in the analysis of a web page’s accessibility. One helpful feature is the Greyscale (Colour > Greyscale) feature which renders the web page in black in white to help you find low-contrast spots in the design.
Labels: Accessibility