Does Your Web Site Need Makeup?
It was Friday night and I was enjoying a quiet dinner at home, when suddenly CRACK! - part of my tooth broke off! "Damn" I thought, "Now what?"
I immediately went online to see if I could find a dentist that is open on Saturday morning. So I searched and searched. The good news was there were plenty of dentists in my area … the bad news was that I couldn’t find whether they were open on Saturdays. After looking through various websites for about an hour, I narrowed it down to three dentists, who were open on the weekend. But in the end there was no competition as only one of the dentists had a professional looking website!
Don’t get me wrong the website wasn’t flash, but it was clean, easy to navigate and most of all, provided me with the information I was looking for. I phoned the next morning, made an appointment and even got to see a dentist that day!
After that experience, it really hit home … what a difference a professional looking website makes! I am sure most of the dentists in my area are great at what they do, but none of their websites portrayed that. As a result they lost a customer who will spend hundreds, possibly even thousands of dollars on their services.
So if you have a website and are hoping it will bring you lots of visitors who will turn into paying customers, it is EXTREMELY, let me say that again EXTREMELY IMPORTANT that your website:
1. Is Visitor Friendly
What this means is that your customers must be able to find what they are looking for easily and quickly. And that means a great navigational system. Most websites either display their navigation bar on the left or at the top. And since most people are used to this type of navigation, it’s best to stick with it. It also helps to include your navigation bar at the bottom of each page to save your visitors from having to scroll back to the top.
2. Focuses on your customer’s needs
Rather than trying to "sell your business", let your prospects know how your product/service is going to benefit them. Emphasize the benefits and solve problems. Make this the focus of everything you write on every page of your site. Don’t try to sell visitors your products or service, help them.
3. There are no spelling mistakes
Ensure there are no spelling or grammatical errors. Check that all links are working and graphics display correctly.
4. Proves credibility
Include testimonials from your current customers to show your potential clients that you are trustworthy, reliable and that you provide great service and/or products. Make sure the testimonials are real and if possible provide contact details of the person who supplied you with the testimonial. If you don’t have any right now, get them! Simply email your customers and ask for their feedback on your business and service. Most happy customers will gladly provide this.
You could also include before and after photos. Show the problem picture and beside it show the picture of resolution, with an explanation of your product’s benefits.
5. Has Contact details
Place contact details in as many places as possible. Make it easy for your customers to contact you. Create a special "Contact Us" page, include your details in "About Us" page and also at the bottom of each page. Information to include: business name, physical address, mailing address, telephone, fax, email, emergency number, website address and most importantly, don’t forget to include your business hours.
6. Offers a Monëy Back Guarantëe
The longer the guarantee, the more effective it will be. It could be 30 days, 60 days, 1 year or lifetime. Remember you are trying to take the risk out of doing business with you.
7. Provides information that people are looking for
If you don’t provide it, someone else will. Content is still the king. You should include as much information as possible - not only detailed descriptions and prices of your products and services, but also free resources, articles, reports, ebooks relating to your industry, service and products. You can easily source free information on the internet. This will ensure that customers will keep coming back to your website, even if it is just to get information. The more they visit, the more you will stick in their mind as an expert and the next time they are ready to order your products/services, you will be their first choice.
If your website features any of the following, your website definitely needs an EXTREME MAKEOVER or at least a face lift.
1. Flash intros, revolving globes, bevelled line separators, animated mail boxes.
2. Loads of pop up or pop under boxes.
3. Autoplay music. Allow your customer to play music only if they choose.
4. Hit counters of the free variety, which say "you are the 27th visitor".
5. Date and time stamps, unless your website is updated daily or weekly.
6. Busy backgrounds.
Ask yourself - does my website portray the professional image I want my customers to see? Have I provided all the information that my customers may want or need to know? If you answered no to either of these, call your website designer today or you could lose thousands of dollars as your customers head to your competitor’s door.
Google Warning: is your site abused through redirects?
Google recently wrote in one of its official blogs that it is possible for spammers to take advantage of your website without ever setting a virtual foot in your server. Spammers can do this by abusing open redirects.
What are open redirects?
Many websites use links that redirect their website visitors to another page. Some redirects are left open to any arbitrary destination. These redirects can be abused by spammers to trick web surfers and search engines into following links that seem to be pointing to your website although they redirect to a spammy website.
That means that people who think that they visit your website will be redirected to highly questionable web pages that might contain adult content, viruses, malware or phishing attempts.
Which redirects on your website could be abused?
Spammers are very inventive. According to Google, they have managed to use the redirect spam on a wide range of websites, including the websites of large well-known companies and the websites of small local government agencies.
For example, the following redirection types can be abused:
Scripts that redirect users to a file on the server can be abused by spammers. The links on your website could look like this:
http://www.example.com/download.php?url=http://www…
http:///www.example.com/get/pdf/?http://www…
Site search result pages with automatic redirect options. If the result pages of your internal site search feature contain an URL variable that sends your website visitors to other pages, spammers might be able to exploit them:
http://www.example.com/search?q=keyword&page=1&url=…
Affiliate tracking links. Affiliate tracking links often allow people to direct website visitors to other pages. Spammers might enter their own URLs in the tracking links. Example:
http://www.example.com/track.php?affid=123&url=…
Proxy pages. Proxy sites send people through to other websites and they can be abused by spammers:
http://myproxy.example.com/?url…
Interstitial pages. Some websites show an interstitial page when users leave a website to let users know that the information found on the link is not under their control. These URLs usually look like this:
http://www.example.com/redirect/http://www…
http://www.example.com/out?http://www…
http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/redirect.cgi?http://www…
How to find out if your website is abused
Even if you find none of the URLs above on your website, your site still may have open redirects. Do the following to check if your website is abused by spammers:
Make a site search on Google
Go to Google.com and search for "site:yourdomain.com". Replace yourdomain.com with your own domain name. If you see web pages that have nothing to do with your website then it’s likely that someone exploits a security hole on your website.
Check your web server logs for URL parameters like "=http:" or "=//". If your redirection URLs get a lot of traffic, this could also be caused by spammers.
If you get user complaints about content or malware that you know cannot be found on your website then your website users might have seen your URL before they were redirected to the malware site.
What you can do to protect your website
It’s not easy to make sure that your redirects aren’t exploited. The reason for that is that an open redirect is not a bug or a security flaw. There are some things that you can do to protect your website:
Check the referrer. Your redirect scripts should only work if they area accessed from another web page of your website. The redirect script should not work if the user accesses the script directly or from a search engine.
If possible, make sure that the script can only redirect to web pages and files that are on your own websites. You could use a white list of allowed destination domains.
Use the robots.txt file of your website to exclude search engines from the redirect scripts on your website. That will make your website less attractive for hackers.
Add a signature or a checksum to your redirect links so that only you can use the script.
Open redirect abuse is a big issue for Google right now. If you secure your scripts, spammers will move over to other websites and leave your website alone.