Here are essential things that you have to understand in web development.

1. Web appearance and Usability

Most newcomers often think that appearance of web site is the measurement of how it will fare in terms of traffic and visitors visiting the site but this premise is not totally true.

Yes, appearance is really important in web design but it is not the sole measurement of success of a site. Of course it will not be good to see if the site is shabby and not maintained properly but aside from appearance, you have to consider the usability of each content and links that you have posted there.

If example you posted large beautiful image but it is unrelated to content of your site, do you think your reader will appreciate that? No, viewers will likely appreciate a relatively small image related to your content than an image that is totally unrelated no matter how pretty it is.

Usability is a key in web design. Do not just put pretty but totally unnecessary images. All images and links should be useful to your site.

If you are building a portfolio, post only related sample projects that you have previously work and you don't have to mention the projects that you did not accept.

If you want use the site to sell products, it will be better if you describe them in brief and concise way and avoid unnecessary description.

2. Purpose

What is the purpose of your web site? Do you want to earn additional income? Do you want to use the site to display your portfolio? Or do you want to sell and trade goods?

Purpose will likely to give you the design that you need. If you are a member of affiliate marketing, then you have to post marketing ads to your site to generate income through pay-per-click method.

If you are designing a web site to use it as your portfolio, then you have to post there your resume and sample projects that you have done in the past.

If you would like to sell or trade goods, then you can have to post all your products, pricelist and payment options in the web site.

3. Information

Information enriched websites are the ones who always get new visitors everyday. There are many web sites being launched in the Internet everyday but not all these web sites will offer new and updated information everyday or every week. Most of these web sites will likely to offer the same articles and tidbits for the rest of the year.

If you don't update your site often, your visitors will likely to loose interest in visiting your site, as there will be another site to offer new and more exciting articles and contents.

Competition is hard in web sites that is why you have to keep it updated to current new trends and new information to make them return to your site.

You can consider weekly newsletter as part of your web design. This is one way to keep your site interesting and informative to readers.

When it comes to building a website you need to build it with one thing in mind and that is your visitors. Your website needs to be structured in a way that makes sense to those that visit it.

While visiting your website if they become confused they will merely hit the back button and you will be left with nothing. Your site needs to make sense and as a consequence you need to lay out the content of the site in a clear concise manner.

Avoid clutter and make sure that your navigational structure is easy to follow so that they can find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Structure it in a way that they will follow the path that you desire them to follow.

Not only do you need to cater to your human visitors but you also need to take care of your robotic visitors. You want to ensure that the search engine spiders can read and understand the content on your site.

This will enable your site to become indexed within the search engines faster for your desired keywords. To ensure this happens you need to focus on relevancy as this will help all your visitors.

To conclude search for things that you like using the search engines and make note of the sites that you find are helpful in providing the information that you are looking for then use this as an example. This will help you stay focused and provide a good site with good layout and content for your visitors.

Ten years ago you could include a hit counter on your website and announce proudly that your site was doing "very well" as soon as the number reached 100,000. The current process is not nearly as simple or straightforward. The internet works in complicated ways that have evolved to solve a number of small problems. Consequently, concrete statistics are often difficult to obtain. If you believe the number of online visitors is a reliable indicator to gauge the popularity of your site or the potential sales of your product, you should consider the following:

1. Hit - Every time a user requests a file on your site (a page, not a picture or link to another site) it counts as a hit.

2. File - When a file or page is actually sent to the user, it counts as a file. Files normally outnumber hits, but neither is very useful in measuring traffic. Any IP can request all of the files on your page several times in one hour without any actual involvement from the user.

3. Impressions - This is a concept that has existed in advertising for many decades. For example, a 2-page magazine advertisement counts as one "showing of a creative concept". This equates to one impression every time a reader sees it. If your web page contains five small banners, you could have 10,000 page views, but 50,000 impressions.

4. Page Views - Almost everyone believe this is the most important traffic statistic. This term simply refers to the number of times any particular page has been viewed. This metric can be useful. However, values can often be over-inflated and should always be considered in conjunction with unique visits.

5. Visits & Unique Visits - A visit is simply logged every time a remote IP requests one of your pages for the first time in a timeout period. A unique visit is usually defined as "one visit per IP per day", regardless of timeouts.

The above are all very important metrics, but understanding them properly is key. The best way to decide how your site's traffic is performing is by creating a formula. If you know what you are doing, you can develop your own formula. However, there are plenty of effective formulas currently available. A basic idea of how to evaluate your traffic involves reviewing monthly averages, unique visits and page views. This will give you an idea regarding how many individuals visit your site, how many pages they view, and how long they remain.

A basic formula from MarketingExperiments.com would be:

C = 4M + 3V + 2(I-F) - 2A

This formula shows that conversions are a product of motivation (M), value (V) and then the friction (F) elements minus the incentives (I). This will help you determine how many customers are likely to purchase your product. However, you need all the values first! You can purchase online analytic tools or download them for an upfront or monthly fee. All of them can return useful data to a webmaster.

If you are not an expert webmaster, or you do not understand many of the technical intricacies of web traffic, you should download Google Analytics. This is one of Google's new free products, and all you require is a GMail account and a web site. The program provides easy to read analytic data in a web-based form for your website. This can make it easy to determine which metrics would be most useful for analyzing your online traffic.

Michael Ehlert
RevUpYourWebBusiness.com