1. Keep the load time for your website below 10 seconds.



Use the online tools provided at http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test or a straightforward dial-up service to check your website's load time. You should be able to clock how long it takes for your website to load on a high-speed internet connection (i.e. broadband) in the United States.

If your results tell you that your website is too slow, then you must find the source of the latency. The two most common reasons for slow-loading websites are graphics and tables. Try scaling down your images so that the file sizes are small, but the quality of each image is maintained.

You might have noticed yourself that websites which are slow to load can materialize suddenly as a whole following a 20-second period where you didn't see anything at all. The reason for this phenomenon is usually because all of a site's sales pitch is housed in just a single table on the site.

A better way to go is to take advantage of 'cascading style sheets' or CSS, a novel method where content is separated from structure. It uses fewer (say, 2 or 3) areas at the beginning of a page to display content which keeps a customer busy reading; he or she hardly notices as the page's remaining elements are loading.

2. Your website should look consistent on all display resolutions and sizes.

Not everyone has upgraded their 15-inch monitors to 24-inch wide-screen monsters! Keep in mind that display resolutions vary widely, and while some web surfers use 1280 by 1024 resolution, some people still use 800 by 600.

One of the big problems with fixed-pixel website design is that web surfers with smaller monitors or lower resolution will be unable to view the full width of your page, forcing them to scroll sideways. Side-scrolling is annoying; as a sales website, annoying your visitors is the last thing you want to do.

3. Your website should be easy on the eyes.

Material on computer screens is harder on the eyes than traditional printed information. For this reason, it is important to design your website with more commonly-used and clear sizes and types of fonts.

Here, much can be learned from direct mail marketers. They almost exclusively use 12 point courier font because it's easy to read. As far as font availability, if you use a font that's not available on the reader's computer, the default font will be substituted and it may not look like you want it to.

For signatures, you should use a scanned image of your actual signature. Although many website designers use a script font, a website visitor may not have the script font installed.

Also, break up long text passages into shorter paragraphs and sentences. Long paragraphs without much 'white space' are more difficult to read. Leave the fine print for those sections of your website that are required but law, but almost no one reads!

Simply use these three techniques on your website, and the time visitors spend on your site will increase, as will your sales.