Communicate Your Message with Words ? Words communicate ideas. They are necessary to describe your products/services and their benefits. To be effective, your message must be focused and appropriate for your target audience. Don't try to sell to everyone. If you target the wrong audience, they won't buy. Tell your visitors what's in it for them by telling them how they will benefit from your products or service. It's also important to speak your audience's language.

Keep your text readable. if your information is hard to read, or you take too long to express your points, your visitors will lose interest and go elsewhere.

Long sales copy is okay as long as it's interesting and easy to read and provides benefits to your audience. Here's how you keep your pages easy to read.

? Get right to the point.

? Keep your sentences and paragraphs short.

? Emphasize headlines and subheadlines by using color, bold, and different text sizes. People skim text. If your subheadlines get their attention, they'll go back and read the rest of your copy.

? Break up long text with white space, color, columns, lines, and graphics.

? Break up copy into easy-to-read smaller sections.

? Use white space or images to divide sections.

? Use subheadings and bulleted lists to highlight benefits.

? Limit the width of your text to around 500 pixels.

Communicate Your Message with Images - The right image can often make a point more quickly and clearly than several paragraphs of text. To accomplish that, your images must be targeted and appropriate to your audience and topic. Use colors and images that are appropriate for your audience and topic.

Your images also have to be optimized. If your images are too big in physical size or in file size, your web pages will open more slowly. The more big images you have on your site, the slower your pages will open. Limit the total number of images to just those that support your message. Most visitors will not wait very long for a page to come up. Keep them waiting too long and they will be gone and you will lose sales. So, optimize every image!

Check your web site and see if it accomplishes your goal. Does it effectively accomplish what you intend it to do? Do you cover all of the important points that you want to get across? Is your message focused and targeted to your audience? Does it provide benefits to them?

A good way to test how well you completed the above steps is to ask several people to visit your site and give you feedback. Ask each person these simple questions:

? Who do they think the web site is targeted to?

? What's the message they got from it? Is the message clear or confusing?

? Does the web site provide enough information? And if not, what is missing? Do they have any questions you didn't answer?

? Is it easy to read?

? Do the graphics make sense or are they distracting?

? Overall, did they find the web site to be appealing and easy to get through?

With this input, make any changes that seem appropriate to get your message across effectively to your audience.