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HTML Web Template Options

By Sharon Housley in Featured

HTML website templates can significantly ease the burden of designing and creating websites by providing webmasters with a ready-made web layout, structure, basic graphics, and color scheme. Templates can generally be edited and customized with any HTML editor. The biggest advantage for webmasters using ready-made templates is the amount of time that can be saved. There are a number of websites that provide ready-made HTML templates. We have compiled a list of some popular sites to make the search process easier.

Webmaster Templates

Webmaster Templates contains themed web templates. Each template includes an HTML layout, CSS file, and graphic images. Individual templates can be purchased, or webmasters can subscribe to the website and download an unlimited number of templates for a specified period of time. The themed and industry web templates are categorized by topic, or can be located using a keyword search feature. New web templates are added on a regular basis, so check back often.

Webmaster Templates - http://www.webmaster-templates.net

Template Monster

Template Monster is a large site that contains website templates, flash templates, and other ready-made web designs. The templates can be used as a basis for web design. Because of the complexity of many designs found on Template Monster, some layouts might be a challenge for a new webmaster to customize or manipulate.

Template Monster - http://www.templatemonster.com/

DesignLoad

DesignLoad is a repository of website templates, flash templates, graphic works, and navigation interfaces. All can be download and modified. All the website templates and graphic works on DesignLoad are classified under a wide variety of product categories.

DesignLoad - http://www.designload.net/home.html

WebTemplateBiz

WebTemplateBiz offers a wide range of website templates for business and personal needs. The site contains everything from WordPress skins to sophisticated flash solutions. These ready-made templates are easy to use and can be customized with a little bit of web design knowledge.

WebTemplateBiz - http://webtemplatebiz.com/

Web Templates Gallery

Pre-existing, and pre-formatted web templates are available. The Web Templates Gallery has a subscription option, or individual templates can be purchased. The graphics in the templates are fairly complex, and graphic design knowledge is necessary to edit the artwork contained in the templates.

Web Templates Gallery - http://www.webtemplatesgallery.com/

BoxedArt

BoxedArt contains a variety of web templates. Each template includes professionally designed HTML files, and source PSD files. All templates in the BoxedArt directory are available via subscription.

BoxedArt - http://www.boxedart.com

Elegant Templates

Elegant Templates contains cost-effective and professional web page designs. Elegant Templates offers website templates that are easy to customize, and the templates are professional without the expense of hiring a custom website designer.

Elegant Templates - http://www.elegant-templates.com/

The Template Store

The Template Store contains professionally designed web sites templates, saving webmasters a great deal of time and money. The Template Store contains Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Expression Web, CSS, Golive, Swish, and ecommerce web templates.

The Template Store - http://www.thetemplatestore.com

TemplateRover

TemplateRover is a modern website template design studio that offers up-to-date website and flash templates. The templates can be customized to create unique website designs.

TemplateRover - http://www.templaterover.com

Trendy Templates

Trendy Templates offers a comprehensive gallery consisting of HTML and Photoshop website templates. The website templates are easy to download, and easy to edit. Webmasters can use standard HTML editors like Frontpage 2000 or Dreamweaver to incorporate custom web content into the website templates. The website templates are available in various categories, which makes the gallery easy to navigate.

Trendy Templates - http://www.trendytemplates.com

In simple terms, web templates save time and allow webmasters to publish a website sooner rather than later.

Author:  Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for RecordForAll http://www.recordforall.com audio recording and editing software.

All Optimized and Going Nowhere?

By Jennifer Horowitz in Featured

It happens sometimes. Here are some of the common reasons you may not be indexed:

Index Time: It hasn’t been indexed yet. The amount of time before the engine indexes your site should be listed on the search engine’s submission page, but these aren’t always accurate or may be out of date. On the average, index times range from one to eight weeks depending on the engine. Some engines like AltaVista and Inktomi offer paid options if you wish to be indexed more quickly.

TIP! Time frame and expectations: Allow up to 4 months, if you are number 10 and want to be number 1, then it may just be time that is needed - but if you aren’t showing up at all, then you need to look at keywords, content, title, description and keyword tags.

Already Indexed: The major engines won’t tell you if you’re listed; it’s up to you to find out. The method to discover if a page or domain has been indexed varies from one engine to another. Never assume you’re not indexed just because you searched through keywords and you never came up in the first few pages of results. You could still be indexed and end up at the bottom of the heap.

Roadmap from Home Page: Some engines have been known to drop pages that cannot be traveled to from the home page. HotBot has been rumored to do this. Think of your site links as a series of roads from one page to another. If there’s no road from your home page to the page you want indexed, a search engine may decide the page is unnecessary.

External Links: Some search engines like Google and HotBot have been known to refuse to index Web sites that don’t link to any other sites. Or, they may index your home page but refuse to index any other pages unless there are links from another domain. Or, they may index you for a while but then “prune” their database later because you didn’t achieve any external links after a certain period of time.

Frames: Content inside of HTML frames can cause problems with submissions because the search engine may index the main content of the page, but not the surrounding menu frame. Visitors to your site find some information but miss the associated menu. It’s generally better to create non-framed versions of your pages.

Spider Blocks: Search engine spiders cannot index sites that require a registration or password, and they can’t fill out forms. This also applies to indexing of content from a searchable database. The solution is to create static pages that the engines can find and index without performing a special action on your site. Depending on your database system, there are both utility programs and companies that can assist you with this.

Free Sites: Because of all the “junk” submissions from free web sites like Geocities, many engines choose not to index sites from such domains or limit the number of pages they accept.

Guilt Through Association: If your Web site shares the same IP address as other Web sites on your host’s Web server, you may find your IP quietly banned because of something someone else did. Ask your hosting service if your domain name has its own unique IP assigned to it. If not, ask them to move it to its own IP to avoid being penalized because of someone else.

Dynamic Pages: Dynamic pages with URLs containing special symbols like a question mark (?) or an ampersand (&) are ignored by many engines. Pages generated on the fly from a database often contain these symbols. In this situation, it’s important to generate “static” versions of each page you want indexed. Fancy scripts and code on a page can hurt your rankings. When it comes to search engines, simple is better.

Large Pages: If your site has a slow connection or the pages are very complex and take a long time to load, it might time out before the spider finishes indexing. To avoid this, limit your page size to 50K or less. A good rule of thumb is that: page size + cumulative image sizes on the page = 50K-70K If it is greater than that amount, visitors with dial-up connections will leave before the page fully loads.

Unreliable Hosts: It pays to have a reliable hosting service. If your web site doesn’t respond when the search engine spider visits, you won’t be indexed. Even worse, if you are indexed and they pay a visit when your site is down, you could be removed from the database.

Spam: If you use questionable techniques that might be considered an overt attempt at spamming (i.e., excessive repetition of keywords, same color text as background) an engine may ignore or reject your submissions.

Redirects: Redirects or meta refresh tags sometimes cause the engines to have trouble indexing your site. If the engines think you are trying to “trick” them by using “cloaking” or IP redirection technology, they may not index the site at all.

Proper Directory Submissions: When submitting to a directory site like Yahoo, Open Directory, LookSmart, and others, a live person reviews your site. They decide if the site is of sufficient “quality” before they list it. These directories can help you get listed with other engines, so make sure you give your directory submissions the attention they need.

Page Limits: Search engines will only spider so many pages of your Web site. This could be a few dozen or three or four hundred depending on the engine. Google is one engine that tends to crawl deeper into your site. How deep they go may depend on factors like your link popularity. Sites with higher link popularity are deemed “worthier” of more thorough indexing.

Random Errors: Sometimes the engines simply lose submissions at random because of bugs and technical errors. Mistakes happen - remember, they’re managing a database containing hundreds of millions of pages.

Author:  Jennifer Horowitz is the Director of Marketing and co-owner of http://www.EcomBuffet.com . Since 1998, her expertise in online marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has helped clients increase revenue and achieve their business goals. Jennifer has written a downloadable book on Search Engine Optimization and has been published in many SEO and marketing publications. Jennifer can be reached at Jennifer@ecombuffet.com

Designing Guarantees that Eliminate Any Possible Barriers to Buying Your Product

By Bjorn Brands in Featured

Why Merchants Fear the Dreaded Guarantee. The same psychological principle of the fear of loss that causes buyers to hesitate on making a purchase causes merchants to often be reluctant to offer a guarantee.

What the merchant fears is having to act on this guarantee when a product is returned. A return is often a psychological blow for merchants, especially when selling their own self created products.

Rather than seize the potential of increased sales from offering a bold guarantee, merchants dread the likelihood of increased returns, and the feeling of rejection they might get from having to deal with such a return.

This feeling is almost always foolish. A bold guarantee may increase returns, but the overall increase in sales usually more than makes up for this.

A merchant starting out with no guarantee may make 50 sales a month and see 3 returns. By advertising a guarantee he may see his sales rise to 80 a month and see returns rise to 10.

His sales rate is up 60% but his return rate is now up over 300%! Is this is a wise decision? Yes! His overall sales are now 70 rather than 47.

One might fear that this scenario may cost the merchant his reputation due to increased returns. This is not true.

Customers will rarely hold a grudge against a merchant if a return is handled properly.

We have received emails from people who have bought our products and returned them, telling us it was not right for them, but also saying they would recommend it to their friends.

If you’re afraid to make your guarantee bold - understand that part of your fear may be purely psychological and like the physicians in the Kahneman Tversky study, you’re operating on a natural human instinct.

You are more concerned with the fear of loss (in this case the loss of a customer when he returns your product) rather than the anticipation of gain. This is an instinct you have to suppress to make a good business decision.

Create the strongest, boldest promise you can offer to your customers and publicize it everywhere.

Unless you have a genuinely rotten product you have nothing to worry about. Bold guarantees will create more overall sales, happier customers and yes, even fewer complaints.

How a Bold Guarantee Can Boost Your Sales

People hesitate on buying from you because of one of the following reasons:

• They are afraid they might make the wrong decision and spend money (a limited resource) on a product that won’t help them satisfy their need.
• They are afraid the cost of the product is not worth the benefit.
• They are afraid the quality of the product may not be as advertised.
• They fear being “taken for a ride” - cheated by unscrupulous sales methods.
• Buyers purchasing a product for a business or organization fear that by purchasing the wrong thing they will look bad in front of their colleagues or teammates.

At the same time, you must understand that a motivated buyer WANTS to own your product, but these fears, all of them expected, keep buyers from moving forward with their purchase.

There is no better time to close a sale than during the emotional “I want it now” moment after a customer first reads your sales copy. Allowing the customer to hesitate will likely make you lose the sale.

This is where the guarantee comes in. A good guarantee will protect the customer against all 5 fears mentioned above. Take a look at the guarantee we offer for this book.

Return on Investment Guarantee:

You have a full 90 days to try all the tactics. If this product does not pay for itself by 500% within 90 days of purchase, just return it to us for a full refund.

Best in Field Guarantee:

Furthermore…we GUARANTEE that you will not find a better book, seminar, CD, or DVD on ecommerce at or below this price. If you do, simply return the book to us within 90 days for a full refund. We truly believe this book to be the best of its kind.

A guarantee effectively attempts to ease each of the customer’s potential fears for not making the purchase. In addition to the usual “30 days to try and return” we expand this to 90 days.

Furthermore, we guarantee that the customer will not find a better a book, seminar, CD, or DVD on ecommerce. A customer looking to shop around will likely spend hours on the net researching various ecommerce products before settling on the right one.

We’re guaranteeing that customers have found the right one and we’ll allow a return and a full refund if they find anything better (they won’t).

What could be fairer than that? A bold guarantee makes it easier for people to feel safe when they consider your offer. You give them a compelling reason to buy today without the fear of looking bad tomorrow.

You thus make it easier for people to buy from you and you’ll find your profits increasing dramatically.

Author: Bjorn Brands is a successfull enterprenuer who transitioned from having his own building company to a great online business. Check out his site and see for yourself how he can help you do the same at http://www.moneyacces.com