In our new online world your business MUST have a website if you don’t you might as well not exist for the the millions of users who access the internet to find a restaurant, shoe store or simply to look for answers to solve a problem. Your business website is the equivalent to having signage on the street. The impact it has on your visitors is essential to your success. Provide a memorable experience and your audience is like to return, do just the opposite and your site will quickly begin to collect virtual dust in this over crowded world.

Let’s take a look at five keys to creating a website that sells.

Key #1 Make your website interactive.

As the competition increases on the internet it’s becoming increasingly more important to build a community around your business. It’s important to figure out ways to engage your visitors and customers, you can do this a few different ways – here’s some samples…

* Have a forum (something like a bulletin board in the virtual world, your audience can come and post comments and get feedback on their issues). Wordpress has a great interactive, quick to install system called BuddyPress that can foster a full blown community.

* Post surveys or polls – ask you audience what they want to see. Using a service like SurveyMonkey can make the process quick and easy.

* Enable visitors and customers to review or rank items. For example a “How valuable was this article?” question and a scale of 1 to 5 stars or a ranking from 1-10. The GD Star Rating plugin can be added to your blog to give your audience a chance to rate your pages, posts. Hey why not rate this post when you’ve finished reading it!

* Offer a blog and inspire comments and feedback

* Publish video and audio content as well as...Click here to read the rest of this post at Redhead VA's Biz Bits.

The Redhead VA's Biz Bits Blog is authored by VAF member Renee of Redhead VA.


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Great tips Renee, thanks for putting this post together!

I was especially happy to see this one listed under Key #3 "Test your website’s appearance on different browsers to make sure every visitor has a good experience." - it is so often overlooked, and a site may look great in Firefox but horrible in IE [if only Microsoft would catch up with the rest of us! In the meantime, we must tweak!]

I'm curious to know which browsers you always check your sites in?
My own list includes Opera, IE 7 and 8, Firefox, Safari for Windows [or check on a Mac], and of course Chrome.

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Yep, I check all of them as well and will start checking on IE 9 shortly as well (even though it's in beta).

So many people still use IE because it's the default browser installed on any PC, but I usually work hard to get my clients to move over to either Firefox or Chrome (my personal fave).

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Renee Shupe, Become a Techie Virtual Assistant
eMail Marketing & Aweber Training Starts May 15! - Save 50% using VAFAweber

I found this site a while back and tested my website's main page on a bunch of them. Took quite a while because I had chosen so many. Most of them showed my site fine, including IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. (I use Firefox pretty much exclusively.) I plan on testing my other pages at some point as well.

Check Browser Compatibility


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Pam Deyerle - Transcriptionist in the Richmond, Virginia area
The Perfect Word Transcription Services

Hi:

My husband does my web site and he does test it. I will pass on some of the ways that y'all test. Should help.

Interesting options.

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Penelope Myer
Penelope and Partners

Renee, re IE9, don't remind me! Hopefully the new release will fix many of the issues that cropped up with 8.

Just out of curiosity, how many versions of IE do you support when you build a site for yourself or your clients? We work in the most recent two versions [currently 7 and 8].
And when 9 comes out of beta, how long after that will you continue to support 7, if at all?

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