Many website owners join Topsites List sites as a means of free advertising, to gain more exposure for their websites. It’s great way to get your link out there, and free is in anyone’s budget. Some website owners also create their own topsites list sites; even we have one at OBJ, The Online Business Junction Top 100 Sites list. It’s a great way to let folks who visit or follow OBJ add their link and market their websites.

One of the pitfalls of running a topsites list is the tendency of website owners to completely ignore their list site once it’s setup.  And to me, that’s just not good business. Your topsites list is a direct reflection of your website, and of you as its owner. As such, you should work to maintain that list and the integrity of your professionalism as a business owner. So below are some things that I see all too often on topsites list pages, and they are things you should work to avoid.

1. Broken Image Links: This is really one of the biggest things to avoid because it makes your entire topsites list page look sloppy and unprofessional. If your list contains a lot of broken image links where members’ banners should be, you need to either remove them, or email the members to request the correct URLs for their banners and update them. Make it a habit to check your topsites page at least once a month and get rid of those broken links.
2. Too Many Ads: A lot of topsites list owners sell ad space at the top of their list pages. That’s fine. But when you have too many ads, that’s a problem. I’ve seen topsites list sites with 30 or 40 ads at the top, before I even get the list members banners. Some have more ads at the bottom too! You want to have a well-populated and active topsites list membership, but why should anyone bother to join your list if their own ads will never get noticed? Keep your ads to a minimum–no more than 10 or 15 (less is always better).
3. Reset Never: If your list is set to never reset, that means that new members pretty much have zero chance of ever having their banner link make it to the first page. I visit lists all the time where the front page members have hundreds of  hits in, so this is the tip off to me that the list never resets. Once I scroll down to the bottom of the list, I can usually confirm this because it will say, Next Reset: Never. And guess what? I don’t join those lists. You  need to give ALL your list members a fair chance to reach the first page. What’s the point of having it otherwise? At the very least, your list should be set to reset every 30 days.
4. List Ambiguity: I have seen far too many topsites list pages without a clear explanation of whom their list is targeted to. If you’re promoting primitive or country sites, your list should say so. If you’re promoting WAHM sites,  or Jewelry sites or Doll sites, whatever it may be, your list should say so. Make it clear to potential members and shoppers exactly what kind of sites can be found on your list. Either make it clear in the title of your list, or add a descriptive paragraph at the top of the list page with this information.
5. Unreadable Fonts: Many topsites list pages have fonts that are extremely difficult to read. The fonts may be too small, or an odd color, or just too busy a font to read. Again, this just looks sloppy and unprofessional. If your goal is to help other website owners promote their business and get more traffic, then their website information needs to be readable. So choose fonts that are large enough, simple enough, and a readable color that is easy on the eyes.

And just two final points to ponder…if you join topsites lists. First, don’t put your voting banner links on the main page of your website. The reason is pretty simple: you work hard to drive traffic to your website, so why send it away to other sites as soon as it gets there?! Create a new page for your voting links, and just link to that page from your main page. And second, click on your voting links yourself on occasion! The whole point of joining the list is to get more exposure, and to do that, you need to try to get to the front page of the list (because that’s where it’s going to get noticed!). That won’t happen without votes. So help yourself out and vote for yourself once in awhile.

There are a lot of website owners who want to protect the images on their websites from would-be graphics thieves, and this is understandable. They have every right to protect their intellectual property. However, the mistake that is often made by website owners is the addition of a No-Right-Click Script, a bit of code added to their template, which prevents anyone from right-clicking to steal images.  So why is the No-Right-Click Script a mistake?

1. It prevents people from right-clicking to open other parts of your website in a new tab or window.
2. It prevents people from right-clicking to open links to other websites that you have on your site.
3. It prevents people from right-clicking to bookmark your website.
4. It prevents people with web-based email accounts (like Hotmail and Yahoo, etc) from right-clicking to copy your email address in order to send you an email.
5. It doesn’t stop people who know they can view your site’s source code to get the URL of an image and steal it that way.
6. It doesn’t stop people who know they can do a Print Screen to copy the page the image is on; and then they can use any graphics program to crop the photo they want and save it.
7. If your script generates a message like, “Don’t Steal My Images,” you can offend your customers who were trying to do no such thing, and send them on their merry way…to someone else’s website.

If you really want to protect your images, there’s one easy solution: watermark them! You can do this yourself with a graphics program; there are even websites that allow you to do it online. Or you can pay someone to do it for you. Either way, that is the best way to protect your website’s images.

For further reading…

Watermarking Photos

Graphics Tools

Do you want customers to order from you? If so, don’t hide (or completely omit) information they need before placing an order. It really would be wise to provide a page of information on your website (perhaps called, “Order Information”) that includes relevant information about the ordering process. Include the following items at the very least…

* Forms of Accepted Payment
* Applicable Sales Tax that will be added to their total
* Information on how to purchase Insurance, if available
* Information for International customers (and if you don’t ship Internationally, you are missing out on some great potential sales!)
* Shipping Carriers, Rates, and Policies
* Your Return/Refund Policy

It is really annoying to me, as a customer, to visit a website and not be able to find this information. And I have never ordered from a website where this information was missing! And what’s more, if it cost you my sale, I guarantee that it cost you other sales as well.

If nothing else, provide this information on a FAQ page or something similar. But put it somewhere, and make it easy to locate on your website. A confused or annoyed customer is not going to stick around for long.

Maybe this is just me…but you know, I really don’t think it’s just me, so I’m gonna share this pet peeve with you. It really drives me crazy: folks who sell products on a website, and they don’t list the dimensions of those products!

I really hate it when I visit a website to shop, find a product I like, and I can’t find the dimensions listed for it. And then as I browse around, I find that most or all of the products have no dimensions listed. All I can say is….URGGGH. And oh yeah, you just lost a sale! Because I am not going to take the time to send a website owner an email to ask them the dimensions of the product. I am instead going to go find that product elsewhere. Even if it’s a one of a kind object, I’ll just live without it, on sheer principle alone. And frankly, some folks will leave a website for lesser reasons. So how many sales might you be losing?

It’s worth some thought, and the time it takes to break out a ruler and measure your products. Your next sale may depend on it.

I’ve been noticing some things as I surf some sites lately that get to bugging me. And if they bug me, chances are they bug other potential customers too. And since we want to entice customers rather than annoy them, I just thought I’d share some of these gripes with you, in case you do any of these things. Just something to think about really.

No Wholesale Terms: Do you offer wholesale products on your website? If so, do you have a page that lists your wholesale terms? If not, you really should. I personally cannot stand when I find a site that has some products I might like to purchase wholesale. But after scouring their entire site, their wholesale terms are nowhere to be found. That drives me nuts! Sometimes, it irritates me enough that I will just leave the site. I do not want to go through the hassle of requesting wholesale access, only to find out that your minimums are too high for my budget, or your shipping rates include outrageous “handling fees”, or that you don’t allow resale of your products on another website. Come on, save us all the guesswork (and the bother) by having your wholesale terms spelled out on a page of your site!

New Products, No Photos: Are you adding new products to your website, before you even have the photos of the products ready to upload? Sigh. If so, why? I can’t be the only person on the planet who is NOT going to buy a product I cannot see. And I really hate surfing through a site seeing product after product with no photos! If you want to tell folks what is coming in the future, then just create an info page where you can list those products by name.

Too Many Product Pages: Do you have 10 pages of products in one category? This one really gets to me. If you have a lot of products in one category, use an option on your site that allows a page of thumbnails to be seen before each individual product page. I personally would rather see all the products you have in a category on one single page; this allows me to click on only those products that I have interest in seeing, rather than having to click through 10 pages of products to find the one product I am looking for. You want your website to be as efficient and as easy to navigate as possible, so if you are making customers flip through page after page after page, you are not making it easy for them at all.

Guess that’s it for now. These are just some things that I’ve been seeing a lot lately, and they just bug me, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Can’t hurt to share info like this because not everyone will think of the consequences of some of these things, which can include (Yikes!) lost sales.

Many domain sites, GoDaddy for example, allow you the option of automatic renewal, so that you never have to worry about your domain expiring. But they also will at least send you a notice before your domain expires so that you can renew it before it does. If your domain provider does not have one of these options, then you should seriously consider moving the domain to one that does! I see folks letting their domains expire all the time, and it just makes no sense to me when it is totally preventable. Can you just imagine having a five-year-old website, letting the domain expire, and then having to rebuild the site–and your business and reputation–all because of the expired domain?! It happens!

So do yourself a favor…right now…log into your domain account(s) and check the expiration date. And if you see an option for automatic renewal, save yourself some future worry and use it. Better safe than sorry.

1. You are volunteering to get lots more SPAM. If you don’t already know this, there are programs that are designed to scour the entire Internet, collecting email addresses for the purpose of sending SPAM. The culprits are generally called Spambots. They crawl the Web in search of email addresses that are posted there, free for the taking. And when they get them, guess what, you start getting more SPAM!

2. You put yourself at risk for Spoofing. Spoofing is when an email is sent that appears to be from one source, but it’s really from another (usually a spammer). I have heard lots of complaints from website owners about receiving emails that they appear to have sent to themselves; or they get emails from people telling them to stop sending them emails–which of course, they didn’t send. This is a perfect example of spoofing. And one really easy way to get spoofed is post your email address on your website, or in forums.

You need to protect your email addresses, people. If you must post it in a forum or on your website, do it in such a way that makes it impossible (or at least really difficult) for it to be collected by spambots and other programs. Here are some tips…

* Type Out the Address: MyName at mydomain dot com.
* Insert a BLAH: MyName@mydomainBLAH.com (instruct folks to remove the BLAH)
* Use a Graphic: Instead of listing your email address, put it on a graphic and add the graphic to the page instead. But DON’T use the Mailto hyperlink with the graphic so that people can click the graphic and compose an email. Spambots know what mailto links are and they collect those too! You can use an ALT tag though, for folks who don’t view images on web pages. But do it smartly, make the ALT tag spell out your address as listed above (MyName at mydomain dot com).

There are other things you can do as well, but these are the easiest to use. Be smart with your email address (and other people’s email addys as well!); you really should protect it as much as possible. If you don’t, and if you are careless about posting it on the Internet, you are likely the cause of a lot of your own SPAM.

1. Amazon doesn’t have music playing on their website when you land on it. If it works for Amazon….
2. Music is distracting.
3. Your emphasis and focus should be on your products and creating a professional website, not on music. Music doesn’t equate to a professional website.
4. Just because YOU like that music, doesn’t mean others will too.
5. If I have my speakers up and that music comes on, it SCARES me when it starts blaring out of the speaker!
6. Most of the time there is no way to turn the music off on websites, and if I can’t turn it off, I leave the website. Do you want to send any potential sales away from your site? (If you simply must have music, provide a way to turn it off–and make sure if it’s turned off once, it stays off; we should not have to turn it off on every single page of your site that we open up!)
7. If I want to listen to music, I prefer to choose my own. I may have a CD in my computer that is playing music I actually want to hear, which makes it even worse if your site’s music comes in on top of that.
8. And oh yeah, did I mention it’s annoying?

The bottom line is that in most cases, your customers will find the music annoying and want to leave. The same could also be said of slide shows (which slow your site down anyway) and cursor trailers. And if you’re trying to generate sales, then you don’t want your shoppers to leave before they’ve even looked around. Music is great on photo sites or social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. But it is not going to give your online store a professional look, sound, or feel. So knowing that, why would you use it?

The necessity to scroll is caused by the website creator’s screen resolution, which refers to the viewable area of the screen, measured in pixels per inch, and expressed in length x width. The higher the screen resolution, the more information that can be viewed on the screen at one time.

If a pc’s monitor has a screen resolution of 1024×768, then statistically, that is the most common screen resolution. So for anyone who views websites that were built by someone with that same screen resolution, they will see what the website builder sees as they’re building/editing them. But for anyone with a smaller screen resolution, like 640 x 480, they will have to scroll from left to right to be able to see all of the information.

Since most folks have a screen resolution of either 1024 x 768 or 600 x 800, if you’re building a website and your monitor has one of those resolutions, then you’re not going to have as much of a problem with The Scroll. But if you have a much larger screen resolution–as most folks with a newer laptop or very wide screen monitor do–and you are building your website with a much higher resolution, then when folks visit your site, they are going to have to scroll!

To prevent this, it is best to keep in mind the most common resolutions used, and avoid using graphics or photos that will be larger than the most common viewable widths. For more advanced website builders, there are ways to ensure a flexible design that will adjust to the viewer’s screen resolution. But many sites utilized a fixed width design, so this is not possible. So in these cases, if you have a monitor with a much higher screen resolution as you build your site, you should consider optimizing it to be viewed by a wider range of surfers to include those with lower resolutions.

If you’d like to see how your website looks at various resolutions, go to:

Enter your website’s URL, and then choose each option and click Submit. A new window will open that shows you exactly how your website looks at each of those resolutions. On the views where only part of your website is visible, those are the ones that would require the viewer to scroll from left to right in order to view the entire page.