Now that the summer season is practically over, it is time for every business owner to consider updating their website design. The following are a few important things you will need to change for the up-coming fall season.

Avoid the Sales Ad Website Design Look

Web users still discriminate against website designs that look like advertisements. Many visitors dislike ads so much that they will automatically ignore sales ads. Avoid any kind of web design that appears like an ad. A good example of online ads that web users tend to ignore is pop-up ads. Pop-up ads can get in the way of a person's navigation. Remember, your visitors user experience is supposed to be effortless. Whether we want to believe it or not, it is better to have a simple website design than an extravagant website filled with flashing banner advertisements.

Change Visited Link Colors

Make sure you change the color of all links visited. This is why it is so important to know which web pages web users have previously visited. Coloring your links will prevent your visitors from constantly visiting the same pages. When you don't change the color of your links, it slows up the navigation process. When you change the link colors, your visitors will be able to distinguish between which pages they have visited in the past. It also makes your website more user-friendly.

Adjust Default Font Size

One thing that many people fail to do is change the default font size of their text. It is imperative that you change your font size, especially when using CSS style sheets. Usually, the default font size is way too small. When your text is too small it decreases readability. Make sure you resize the text accordingly to make it easier for your readers to review your text.

Make Your Text Scannable

Your website text should be easy to read and scannable. When writing content for the web, it is important to remember that you are not writing for traditional forms of print media such as newspapers and magazines. You're writing for the web. Most web users don't have time to read a 2000 word article about your new product launch.

If you want to persuade your web users to take the next step -- whether it involves making a buying decision or contacting you by phone, your text has to short, sweet and to the point.

To make your text more scannable, use subheadings, bulleted lists and highlight keywords. Avoid using long drawn out paragraphs. Make sure you use a simple writing style. So, instead of writing: To expedite the process of ordering our wonderful products, give us a telephone call today ...Just cut to the chase and write: To place an order by phone, contact us at: (XXX)XXX-XXXX.

Lastly, avoid adding fluff just to make your content appear longer. When your text is too long and difficult to read, your visitors will get bored and leave your website.

It seems like it was only yesterday that you launched your website. Before launching your site, your ultimate goal was to double your online sales within a 12 month period and then expand your business to the next level. However, twelve months later, you find yourself struggling just to maintain the handful of people who visit your website every once in a blue moon.

So, where did you go wrong? There could be a number of reasons. The key is to find out what went wrong and correct the problem immediately. Here are four possible reasons why your website isn't earning money.

1. Your website design is a mess

Prior to launching your website, you may have been a little impatient about to getting your website launched. You're not alone; there are several people who are anxious to get their website up and running. They will hire anyone just to get their website online. People are often motivated by success stories of entrepreneurs who are earning thousands (even millions) of dollars on the Internet. These internet gurus didn't rise to the top by rushing to get their website online. They dedicated a lot of time and invested their money in the top web designers and Internet marketers available. Before you start inviting people to your website, make sure your website's layout is easy to navigate. Each one of your web pages should be interlinked so that your visitors can easily find what they want on your website. It also helps to have a sitemap so visitors can easily locate information on your site. It will also help your search engine ranking.

2. You hired the wrong web design company

Hiring the wrong web designer is a complete waste of time and hard-earned money. Before hiring any web design company, make sure you verify their credentials. Find out if they have ever designed the type of website you are requesting to have built. For instance, if you want an e-commerce website built, you will want to hire a web designer who has obviously created an e-commerce website in the recent past. Ask for samples of websites that they have designed. Some web design companies will post their previous web design projects within their website portfolio. Browse through their portfolio to get an idea of their web design capabilities.

3. You're constantly spamming

Avoid spamming on blogs and social media sites with unrelated comments just to post a link to your website. You should also avoid submitting your URL to link farms because it will only lower your ranking and it can even get your site banned by the search engines. If your website is well designed and you promote it the right way, you will attract people who are interested in your products or services. Most of all, you will keep the search engines happy.

4. You're Never Consistent

Website owners with the highest rankings are successful because they are consistent. Their website(s) are well maintained on a regular basis, they are constantly adding fresh content and they are always promoting their website to their target audience. They also have several quality backlinks to their sites from high-ranking websites. If you want a successful website, you have to be consistent. Don't expect to have thousands of hits to your website when you're not consistent.

It is not impossible to earn good money with your website. All you have to do is find out what you're doing wrong and start doing it the right way. Before you know it, your website traffic will increase and so will your online sales.

You just discovered that last month's traffic to your website has nearly doubled. Now you can take the rest of the day off and celebrate right? ...Not so fast. When you start converting visitors into actual sales then you have reason to celebrate. For now, it's important to find out why your website isn't performing the way it ought to.

Does your site have a high bounce rate?

If your visitors are entering your website and leaving within the first 10-15 seconds, then there is either a problem with the overall structure of your website design or something is missing from your web content. Don't fret; this is a common issue among many entrepreneurs. The key is to correct the problem so you can start generating more sales. The following are a few tips to help keep your visitors on your website longer than 15 seconds:

Keep multimedia flash to a minimum. Flash and Multimedia technology will make your website appear modern and futuristic. However, if your multimedia and flash graphics are making it difficult for your visitors to navigate through your website, this will turn them off. Remember, less is more when it comes to design.

Provide every page with something valuable. In other words, make sure you are providing your visitors with something of value. You can have the best website design on the planet, but if you're not engaging your visitors with web content that they can relate to, they will immediately lose interest. Remember, all it takes is one click to leave a website.

Text should be to the point. It is important to have well written text on your website but if your website is overloaded with useless information, you will bore your readers to death. Make sure you only provide them with meaningful content that is short, sweet and to the point. A person shouldn't have to scroll pages and pages of text just to figure out what your website is all about.

Avoid annoying pop-up ads. According to statistics, website users hate popup ads. It's amazing how some site owners still use this form of marketing. Pop-up ads can be a major distraction, especially if visitors are trying to concentrate on what they're reading. Some websites contain pop-up ads that will actually hold a user hostage until they subscribe to the product or service they're trying to promote. Pop-ups will not only cause visitors to leave and never return back to your site.

Avoid animation and sound overkill. If you're going to use animation and sound, make sure you keep it to a minimum. For some people, this can be a huge distraction. There is nothing more frustrating than objects bouncing off a web page or music blaring non-stop while you're trying to browse through a website.

When you apply the tips above, it will not only improve your website, it will improve your online sales.

When it comes to do-it-yourself website design, there is an exception to the rule, for instance, if you are building a website solely for family and friends and not for the general public. The only other reason would be if you are an experienced web developer and you know how to build a functional site. However, when you attempt to build your own website, it will not only take away a huge chunck of your time, you're actually losing money.

Although it costs next to nothing to build your own site, you can actually lose business by not having a professional looking website. In today's Internet world, it's all about giving your visitors a good first impression. Ten years ago you could get away with having a home-made website but not today. It's hard to fool today's savvy online visitors Online shoppers can spot an amateur looking website as soon as they enter a site.

If your competitors are hiring professional web design companies to build their websites and you're not, this will hurt your business. Here are a few benefits of hiring a professional website designer:

Builds Credibility

When you have a professional website design, you're letting your visitors know you are serious about your business. It's kind of hard for people to take you seriously when your website looks unprofessional.

It is Cost Effective

Although you can save hundreds (even thousands) of dollars on DIY website design, you are actually losing money in the long run. When a website is not user friendly and difficult to navigate, visitors will instantly leave your website and go to another site. Hiring a website designer is affordable when you consider all the time involved in creating a custom website design. Hiring a professional web developer to build your website is a sound investment.

Custom Web Design

Unlike many cookie cutter web design templates out there, a professional web design team can create an original website design that distinguishes your business from your competitors. Having a unique website design is crucial for branding. Plus it can give you an edge over you competitors.

Launch Your Website Faster

Your website will get finished a lot faster. Web designers build websites daily and can build a website a lot quicker than someone who isn't used to building professional websites.

SEO Friendly Website

A professional web design company will create a website that is fully-functional and search engine friendly. In addition, many web design companies offer Internet marketing services to help build your web presence. A professional can help your website get found on the Internet by your target audience. There's nothing better than having a professional website design and a good Internet marketing campaign to help boost business.

Receive Monthly Website Maintenance

A professional website design company can provide you with monthly maintenance and updates to your website to ensure it is user-friendly for your new and existing visitors.

Hopefully, you are having second thoughts about building your own website and recognize the importance of hiring a professional web design company.

An ecommerce web site acts as a store front for window shoppers, aka your browsers. The web design of your ecommerce site is therefore of utmost importance to ensure quality customer conversions. Design your website to gently lead your client through the learning and sales process. Proper text spelling is very important. Place a lot of textual content around your site to provide for the search engine spiders and to keep your visitors accurately informed.

Abandoned shopping carts are a common ecommerce merchant nightmare. In all probability there are a couple of not so finely tuned issues causing this problem.

Many times a site will request personal information before completing a purchase. Filling out pages of information may deter people from finishing up and they may opt to leave the site altogether. Be sure that your shipping costs are clearly displayed. Customers like to to see the charges set out for them. Many times customers who can't locate the shipping fees easily may abandon the whole buying process and leave to find alternative options.

Having a slow loading shopping cart is a recipe for disaster. It is important that your shopping cart loads quickly and that any changes made to merchandise in the cart are done quickly too. If a customer is trying to add an item to their cart and your page is taking a long time to load, they may just decide to skip the purchase. make sure to insert an option for payment other than the US dollar to smooth out the process for your international customers.

Discount code features should be placed in easily recognized locations near the shopping cart. It's best if the discount will immediately register on the total because human nature is to like saving money!

Many a frustrated customer will spend time shopping around a site without completing a purchase and return an hour later to find their shopping cart empty! It is worthwhile to implement a reasonable amount of time that the merchandise will remain in the shopping carts for customers to resume their shopping and complete their purchases. Because with the busy lives we lead today it is very likely that people won't finish their ordering in one sitting. Of course we'd all rather customers who shop and purchase in one sitting but since there are occasions n which this won't happen its best to be optimally prepared to assist our customers in every way.

Before you start sending traffic to your site complete a thorough usability test of your shopping cart. This can be accomplished by having a couple of people mock shop and complete a purchase. Observe them as they navigate through all the steps without assisting them in any way. Give them a discount code to enter and see how smoothly the totals change. This way you can check if there are any bumps in the process that need to be smoothed out before you turn your visitors into frustrated browsers. By creating a a pleasant shopping cart experience you will be sure of happier and more satisfied customers.

Gone are the days when Internet access referred to a clunky computer monitor and screen. Many people now access the Internet via smart phone, Blackberrys or even regular cell phones. Because of this growing practice website designers and developers need to focus on mobile format websites too. But no need to get nervous about having to learn new software and programs, there are a couple of online services available to help you create or convert websites into mobile format.

Google's Conversion Utility's name speaks for itself. A simple program that just needs your website URL and an indication to include images or not, select the 'Go' button and your website is successfully converted to mobile format. Regardless of the fact that it's not so publicized, it's a great program.

The Mobify program is just as it sounds. Mobile modification. This is a web service that uses DeviceAtlas, the leading mobile device database, to provides an efficient way to convert a site for mobile access. Many web designers and bloggers find Mobify a wonderful program for designing visually engaging and easy to use mobile layouts for their existing websites.

Skweezer.com is another user friendly site for mobile conversions. Enter your site URL and it will display your website in its mobile friendly version. It removes any large images, CSS styles and their elements that will not display properly once converted.

MoFuse and Winksite are two really neat programs that have the ability to detect a visiting mobile user . They will then send them over your site's mobile version!

As always when designing a website, it is important to keep things simple, how much more so when assigning styles for mobile devices. Because they in general work slower than computers you want to avoid anything that will slow it down more, like large images or weighty pages. It's also a good idea to scale page elements by screen size rather than fixed pixel widths because handheld mobile devices vary in their own screen sizes and resolutions. You want your page to look top notch no matter on which screen at what time!

To frame or not to frame, that is the question. It may be tempting to use frames in your website design because you may want a clear and clean look throughout your site, like headers, footers, menu bars, etc and frames make these easy to implement. Many users also find framed sites easy to navigate around and to find information. yet many times the disadvantages associated with frames render the whole idea not worth it. If someone specifically wants to use frames they will have to create duplicate pages though with no frame-sets to accommodate browsers who don't support frames and are therefore incompatible to pages with this framework. Additionally many search engines have difficulty ranking framed pages which may result in low ranking for your site for no good reason, other than the fact that you designed your site with frames! When everyone is working so hard to better their SEO why use the number one thing that is known to hinder the spiders?

The fact that the address bar doesn't change from page to page makes it impossible for anyone to bookmark or share a link to a specific page on your site. This means that any time someone wants to return a to a specific page he would need to start searching through your whole site. Secondly, when a page from your site other than the frame-set shows up in search engine results , the visitor conducting the search will just see the sub-page without the surrounding frame. A framed site may also prevent the 'back' button on a screen from working properly. A disabled user employing the use of a screen reader may also find it difficult to navigate around such a site.

There are ways to combat these problems but the clunky javascript designed to help defeats the purpose of the frames in the first place! Instead of having your easy to use frames you are forced to play around with the javascript to combat its problems! in reality The preferred way of having the same elements on a page throughout a site is to use server-side includes. server side includes, or SSI, allow you to construct separate pages for inclusion in another 'main' page. SSI can be very effective when used together with tables. many times you may find one section of a page that you would like to appear on each page of your site. though it may seem ideal to frame it, you can achieve the same effect by using an SSI callout in a table cell within a page, and none of the problems associated with frames arise! So though frames may have their uses, it does seem fair to say that many strongly advise keeping your distance from this website format.

Many a frustrated website developer wonders what makes browsers lose interest in his site quickly. There may be a couple of causes to this problem. Here we will touch on a few.

Stop and look over the pages on your site. Does each page have something valuable to offer its visitors? Presentation of a page won't matter if there is no valuable content on it for the reader. Your visitor is browsing your site for a reason. Try to fulfill those reasons before spending time dreaming up successful designs. You need to have the basic content in place first. This will give your visitors reason to continue browsing through the rest of your site.

In addition, many sites try to make money by posting advertisements for other businesses in their sites. How many of us would bother turning on the TV if it were just commercials? In the same vein, a site developer needs to ensure that the advertisements don't take over the whole page and that there is more content than ads available. Try for a 25/75 ratio, 25% ads to a 75% site content.

Many websites use pop-ups to relay messages to their visitors. If you look from the perspective of a visitor, pop-ups are annoying and distracting, hindering attempts to complete conversion or acquire information. There are many creative ways to get messages across other than springing them in them face of the screen reader. Many times a frustrated reader will just click off a pop-up filled site without finishing his task, vowing to get what he needs from another pop-up free site.

An organized site breeds happy consumers. Ensure that your site is easily navigable and that your content is organized neatly. Besides for a generally more attractive interface, browsers will find their way around and be able to successfully accomplish what they need to on your site. This is at least as important as the overall web design of your site!

Including a menu bar and a way to return HOME on each page. The HOME icon will allow for a lost visitor to redirect himself easily. Posting a menu bar is helpful so that visitors can find their way around without having to return HOME each time they want to reread the menu or available options.

This is but a tip of the iceberg of the many ideas available to keep your browsers loyal and returning. Most of them are applicable in some way to all sites. The great thing about them is that they generally don't call for major site renovations, just a bit of tweaking here and there.

The newest trend in the world of web design is paper design. Paper design is just as it sounds, using the good old-fashioned paper and cardboard look for your website design. This lends a warmer more personal touch to a generally colder computer look. its a fun and creative way to personalize your website and add in a bit of personality.

Some sites may opt to use the notebook paper look. Its definitely a very different look than the traditional computer screen we are used to viewing. Adding in text 'written' in pencil scrawl or precise inked words is a wonderful complement to this innovative idea.

Others may try out the layered scrapbook look. This will usually involve a combination of colors or contrasts displayed in a more haphazard though eye catching way. This concept is wonderful For Camps or extra curricular programs building a website who are looking to successfully transmit over the fun they want to advertise. Browsers generally find a page with a bit more personality to be more compelling to look into further.

The clipboard or spiral look is another interesting idea. This basically involves an image of a clipboard or spirals of a notebook and the main theme of your site displayed on the 'paper' attached to the clipboard. It lends a bit of informality and camaraderie between the website designers and the site visitors. The actual design of the website has an effect on the [future] relationship between developers and customers!

Posting images, graphics, or pictures, in the Polaroid camera look is another twist on the usual ideas. For a business that wants to advertise their services, for example a paint company or mold removal service that would like to display 'before' and 'after' pictures promoting how wonderful their services are, this is a fantastic option. The real life pictures are a wonderful way to show your browsers the miracles you can perform. the space underneath the picture allows you to 'pencil' in any comments you would like, for example, 'before and after' or '3 days after and two months after,' etc. there are numerous possibilities available.

Understandably I only covered a couple of ideas because ultimately your creativity and feelings are what will shine through on the site you design. Using paper inspired design is a wonderful way to blend the physical world with the world of computers.