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Building a Better Website

If you don't keep improving your site on a regular basis, you may as well be serving sales prospects day-old doughnuts or sending out holiday cards in January. Want to hold the attention of your Web audience? Pay attention to your site. Here's a roundup of our favorite articles to help you make improvements.

Make Sure Everything Clicks

The Perfect Host: All Web hosts are not created equal. Inc.com's technology columnist Anne Stuart describes how to evaluate Web hosts and to choose the one that's best for your business.
Checklist: Monitor Your Web Site's Performance: Discover what aspects of Web site performance are critical to your e-commerce success.
Make Sure Your Web Site's Working for You: Internet logjams losing you sales? Speed up your site with these smart strategies.
Weed Out Your Weak Links: Everyone likes to link to other sites because, well, that's what you do on the Web. But having too many links -- or outdated links that don't work -- will distract and dismay your visitors.
Site Maintenance Utilities: Here's an overview of various HTML checkers, which can help ensure that your Web-site visitors have an error-free experience on your site.

Content Is King

Writing Well on the Web: Hardly anybody really likes reading online. No surprise there, since so many websites are so poorly written. Here are easy ways to make your Web words more reader-friendly.
Traffic Magnets: With imagination and a clear sense of their customers, Earth Treks and Merriman Capital Management keep their Web visitors coming back for more.
Blogging for Business: Blogging has been popular with teens, geeks, and flamboyant extroverts for years, but today, it's garnering more attention from businesses as a way to connect with customers and prospects.
When Blogs Go Bad: Blogs can be a great marketing tool. But when they bite back, it's all about damage control.
Blog Rules: The blogosphere is a world unto itself, with its own set of rules and regulations. Newcomers break them at their own peril. Here's what you need to know before jumping into the fray.
The Top 10 Things You Should Know Before You Blog: Three business blogging experts share their best tips for getting started in the blogosphere.
Don't Focus on the Razzle-Dazzle: Flashy graphics and shock-wave downloads do not a successful site make. Content is what really brings back customers.
Create Your Own Web Content: To take the last article a bit further, good content brings back customers. Second-rate editorial and graphics will send them away faster than an e-mail chain letter. Here's how can make your site full of the former.
Proofread Your Content: There are a distressing number of typo-ridden, grammatically incorrect Web sites out there. Stand out by showing your potential customers that you pay attention to detail.

Know What Your Users Want, and Give It to Them

The Survey Says...: Want to know what consumers think? Put down the comment cards and poll them online instead.
The Skinny on Survey Software: With more than 100 online polling software packages to choose from, picking the right one can be tricky. Here, three options to suit various needs.
May I Help You: New live-chat software helps Web merchants convert browsers into buyers.
Live Aid: There are scores of live-chat vendors, and finding the right one can be tricky. Here are three options to suit your various needs.
Capture, Capture, Capture: How to make every visit to your website a marketing goldmine.
Pumping Your Visitors for Information: Improving your site means getting inside the heads of your users. Here's how you can do it without seeming like a telemarketer calling at dinnertime.
Come In. I've Been Expecting You: If you don't treat visitors like they are the only person in cyberspace, don't expect them to stick around. And personalization doesn't need to be expensive.

Building Your Brand in Cyberspace

Building Brands on the Web: An Old Game with New Rules: E-commerce may be changing the rules of business, but most of the traditional laws of marketing still apply. Here's how to plan for the long-term success of your site.

Updated Feb 6, 2020