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That really isn’t a pretty sight to see, and it’s going to send you into a daze if you stare at it for long enough. Hence why there is a nice distance between this text and the horrific image above. But anyways, on with the article…

The animation above was actually taken from a real website. In fact, the actual website looked a lot worse; if you scrolled up or down the page it didn’t look much better. The saddest part of it all is that the webmaster may have thought that this looked good in some way, but unfortunately for him or her, 99.9% of the visitors to that site won’t be able to find the ‘back’ button quick enough.

You might think that this site is just a one-off; however, banner-farm-syndrome is ripe amongst poker webmasters. For many starting out in the poker affiliate industry looking to build their own site, good web design skills are often not immediately at hand. Therefore it is common to find amateur webmasters filling up their self-designed sites with these free banners, thinking that they help the site look more attractive in some way.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

The main cause of banner farms is that new webmasters have limited ability in web design, and so in an attempt to compensate for this they use a large numbers of banners on their sites. Whilst these banners may be professionally designed, their flashy nature will be overly distracting and will simply look like a mess if a number of them are in a close proximity.

How to avoid creating a banner farm

The best way to avoid creating a banner farm is to simply restrict yourself from using any banners whatsoever on your site when you first start. This may sound a little extreme, but trust me; in my opinion flashing banners make sites look worse on almost every occasion. Poker room logos are fine to use in the right situation; in fact I recommend you use some classy logos in your reviews and such. But banners should be a big no-no.

If you look at some of the best performing poker websites (case studies), you will notice that many of them will not have a flashing banner anywhere on their site. This is because these webmasters are aware of the fact that they have a very low click-through rate, and so they are happy to leave them out from the site. Big banners will also often make sites look a little unprofessional, so it’s easy to see why the big name poker sites are not using them

There always seems to be the underlying idea that more banners = more signups. In reality however, the more banners you have on your site, the uglier it is going to look. Now if your site looks ugly and unprofessional, you can guarantee that you will be turning away visitors. So your banner will unintentionally be doing more damage than good.

Realize that your site will do just fine (if not better) without banners and you will save yourself a whole load of trouble. Focus on writing lots of quality content and you will be on the road to creating a resourceful and profitable poker site. Put banners at the back of your mind, or you will be doomed to fail as a new poker affiliate.

What you can use instead of banners

A lot of the time flashing banners are thrown into a page because a webmaster feels that they are necessary… this is not the case. So a lot of the time you shouldn’t really be looking to ‘replace’ a banner with something, because ideally that banner shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Instead of looking for reasons to add a banner, look for reasons to avoid using one.

However, it is common to find webmasters using banners within articles to help break them up, or at the end of an article to try and give the page more ‘substance’. Instead of using a banner, try a text link like “Try out our top rated poker room X Poker” or something similar. I am 99% sure that this text link will convert much better than a banner, and I’m 100% sure it will look better too. So give it a try

Summary

If you want to be successful in this industry, you want to avoid making a banner farm at all costs. If you end up creating a site packed full of banners with little to no content, you are guaranteed to fail; there are no two ways about it. Google is not impressed by how many banners you have on your site, but they are impressed by how much useful content you can provide to your visitors, so work on that.

To help get you started creating a content rich (and banner free) site, try using one of these free templates. This is a good way to start making a website with a solid design, and they are perfect for new webmasters who might be struggling with web design. Alternatively you can pay a web designer to create a unique template for you, which will cost around $200 if you use these guys.

Both of these options will set you on your way to making a useful and great looking site. So don’t mess them up with loads of banners! ]]> http://www.newpokeraffiliate.com/design/dont-become-a-banner-farm/feed/ 0 http://www.newpokeraffiliate.com/design/5-ways-to-make-a-good-first-impression/ http://www.newpokeraffiliate.com/design/5-ways-to-make-a-good-first-impression/#comments Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:09:35 +0000 Greg http://www.newpokeraffiliate.com/design/5-ways-to-make-a-good-first-impression/ Continue reading →]]> Web browsers will quickly jump from one page to another until they find something that catches their attention enough for them to read on. With all the half-finished and useless sites out their, people are getting used to clicking the ‘back’ button on their browser as soon as they realise that a site is not worth their time. Visitors are not as willing to give your site the benefit of the doubt if they are not immediately enticed to browse around after visiting the homepage

This means that making a good first impression is vitally important in making sure that your visitors stick around your site when they chance upon it. If you can’t make a good first impression, a lot of your traffic is just going to move on until they find another site that does. So here are my top 5 tips on how to make a good first impression with your poker website…

1) Tell them EXACTLY what your site is about

When someone visits your site, you want to make sure that they can find out exactly what your site is about within the first 5-10 seconds. So make sure you have a clear title describing the nature of your site, and have a concise but direct description to accompany it placed prominently on the homepage. The last thing you want to do is confuse your visitors, so make sure they know what they’re getting.

For example, imagine you pop to your local superstore looking for a tin of beans. As you browse the aisles, you are quickly scanning the shelves waiting for something to jump out at you. A tin with the word “beans” prominently written on it is going to catch your eye, and it’s likely to be the one you reach out to grab.

So don’t be the one that babbles about and mutters that you were a tin of beans; stand out and shout about it, let your customer know exactly what they’re getting. (Sorry about another random analogy, best I could think of at the time).

2) Catch their eye with an image

Many of the top websites have an image on their homepage highlighting what their site does, or what their site is about. Images always stand out more than plain text, so they are a great way to catch a visitor’s eye and get them interested in your site or product. Text is a great way to describe something, but passing visitors are not always prepared to do too much reading unless they are already interested in the site.

For example, rakeback.org has a simple yet effective image on the homepage highlighting exactly what their site does. I’m sure that catches a lot of people’s attention

So think about adding an eye catching image to your site to hook the loose passer by. Heck, even if you can’t think of an image design to accompany your site, a scantily clad female usually goes down well in the poker industry. Just use anything to brighten up your page and improve on just having text on the homepage.

3) Have a good layout

If your homepage is a mess, it’s not going to say anything good about the rest of your site. If you have lots of text on your homepage that has been clumped together with randomly placed images in and amongst it, there’s not much chance that a visitor is going to delve deeper into your site.

Visitors like to see well-laid out front pages so that they can quickly scan over all of the different services and information that your website provides. The more cleanly laid out your homepage is, the more opportunities you have to provide your visitor with something that interests them. A good way of doing this is to put small chunks of information in boxes, so that each different segment is clearly defined and can be scanned over quickly.

Pokerlistings is a great example of how you can effectively use boxes on your homepage.

4) Fast loading time

As already mentioned, web browsers like to quickly hop from one page to another until they find something that catches their attention. Although they may not be in any real hurry, they do not like to wait around as they scour the web. If a site is taking more than 5 seconds to load, there is a high chance that they will just cut their losses and try out another site.

It would be terribly disappointing if you had a great site, but turned away the majority of your visitors with a slow loading time. So make sure that your homepage isn’t too large, otherwise you will be missing out on some valuable traffic. Keep your image files small, and don’t add unnecessary text or images if you can help it. Keep it as quick and clean as possible.

5) Less is more – keep it simple

When you design your homepage, you obviously want to let your visitors know how great your site is and provide them with lots of useful information about it. However, the last thing you want to do is swamp your visitor with so much information that they have no idea where to look or start reading.

Try your best to give your visitors quick and easy information on a plate. If you want to have a big article highlighting what your site does, make a new page and link to it from the homepage. It will make the homepage look a lot cleaner, and it will give your visitor time to digest what you already have on the homepage. People want to put the effort in to read in their own time, so try not to force it to them.

The Dreamweaver templates feature

Dreamweaver has an incredibly handy feature that allows you to create one template page that will have control over the rest of the pages on your site when you change it. So if you create a new page from this template, every time you decide to alter the main template, the rest of the pages will change with it.

I’m not great at explaining things, so hopefully that was clear enough. Nonetheless, if you give it a try you will realise how simple it is, and you will wonder why you didn’t try it out sooner.

The only problem with this method is that any pages that you currently have will need to be made again from this main controlling template. But it is well worth taking the time to replace these pages and create them from the template, as it will save you a hell of a lot of hassle in the future. So here we go…

How to do it

1) Open up Dreamweaver, and open up the main page that has the design that you want the rest of your pages to look like, with all the navigation you want included on future pages. This will normally be your home page.

2) Highlight the text or boxed area that you will add content to on future pages. For example, if you put articles and content in the centre are of your page, highlight the text in this area or the table surrounding it. This will become the part that looks different on each page; the rest will stay the same.

3) Click on insert > template object > editable region. Click OK when it tells you that the file will be converted into a template. You will then be asked to give it a name, so give it whatever you like, it doesn’t really matter. I normally call it something like ‘content’.

4) You can add a few more editable regions if you like, it all depends on how much of the page you intend you change on future pages. It’s a good idea to think about how you intend on expanding your site and how the navigation will turn out when adding your editable regions.

5) Save the page, it will be saved as a template.

6) Now the next time you decide to make a new page for your site, click on: file > new, and then choose the ‘template’ tab, which will show you a list of templates that you have made. There will probably only be the one, so click on the one you just made and open it up. Now add content as you wish to your editable regions, and save the page as you would with any other normal page.

Done!

The next time you decide to change your navigation across all of your pages, all you will have to do is open up the main template from your files and edit away. When you decide to save, it will ask if you would like to update the rest of the pages that have been created from this template. Click OK and the rest of your sites navigation will change. Pretty simple.

It will probably be a good idea to give this a test first, just to see how it works. It’s not too difficult, but it’s always a good idea to know exactly how everything works before creating all of your pages from one template.

Also, be sure to add enough editable regions, so that you won’t want to add content to one place but be unable to because you forgot to make it editable.

Have fun!

Unfortunately, many visitors to your website will be lazy, and so if they don’t find the content they are looking for after a few seconds they are probably going to leave. Web browsers want their information provided to them on a plate, and they don’t want to go looking for it. Visitors are going to be happy to click through a few links that may lead them to the information that they are looking for, but they are not prepared to go on a big hunt looking for it; they would rather visit another site instead.

Before I made this website, I spent a very long time thinking about how I was going to structure the site and where I would put my content. I used to brainstorm frequently and think about the best ways I could organise my work and provide the most important information to my visitors. All the work I spent structuring the site will almost definitely go unnoticed by most of my visitors, but it would be noticed by all of my visitors if I had a poor structure to my website. So it was important for me to keep my visitors on the site as long as possible by providing them with the information they needed.

This is something that you should be thinking about also… You may have the best content on the web, but if you have a poor website structure then nobody is going to be able to find it all, which will be an incredible shame. So here are my own personal tips to building a solid structure to your website…

Write Down Your Article Titles

When I first started to brainstorm for the website, I wrote down the potential articles I could write for the site. This not only helped me to remember all the content that I could write, but it also helped me to see the bigger picture for the site and start to look at how I could structure the site. As you can see my little plan was pretty scruffy, but at least it gave me something to look at and work with. It was far easier for me to think about structure with all the article titles in front of me, rather than trying to sort out 30+ pages in my head.

Group Together Similar Articles

After you’ve got all of your articles down, its time to group together the articles that are on a similar topic to each other. For example, if you have a few articles based on Holdem strategy and Stud strategy, you can group them together in their respective categories. However, if you have lots of articles on Holdem strategy, you can put them into further sub-sections such as Holdem psychology, tips, mathematics and so on. It all depends on what articles you have written, and how you feel they can be best grouped together.

After a while, you should be able to see more of a structure to your articles. It should already look a lot more organised when you put everything into groups, rather than having a long list of articles.

Create a Hierarchy

After you’ve created your groups of articles, you should try and sort them out into a hierarchy. This will obviously depend on the number of articles you have written or have planned, as you may be fine with just grouping articles together. However, if you have a number of groups, it may be a good idea to try and order them into a hierarchy.

For example, if you have groups of Poker Strategy, Omaha Strategy, Texas Holdem Strategy and Texas Holdem Mathematics mathematics, you could order them in the following way.

By doing this you will have a logical order of articles that will be displayed neatly, and your visitors should have no problem getting to the information that they are looking for.

Now that you have your groups of articles and possibly a hierarchy of these groups, you can start to think about how you will link to the groups from each of your pages. The standard structure for most sites is to have a top navigation bar, and then a side navigation bar that will accompany each page. This will make it easy for visitors to browse around and allow you to create a nice hierarchal linking structure.

However, at the end of the day, the decision is yours. As long as you feel you can deliver the content well enough to the visitors, then you can play with different structures as you see fit. Just follow the simple linking steps and you will be fine

Big Article Group > Smaller Article Group > Article

You can find lots of different web design tips on the web, but these are my own personal ones that I think everyone should be reminded about before (and whilst) making a website.

Use a good font

If you are providing content to your visitors, it should be obvious that you will want to make the content easy to read for your visitors. Yet you will be surprised at how many people will use a font that they feel makes the site look funky and unique, but all it does is deter the visitor from browsing through your site. Its not fun trying to read through a big article that has been written in a strange font, so make it easy for your visitors to absorb all the quality information you are providing them.

Another thing that people fail to notice is that the Times New Roman font is not as good as people think. Although it may be the default font for a few programs, it does not necessarily make it the best. Some of the best fonts to use are Arial, Verdana and Tahoma, as the letters are clearly defined and spaced out nicely as you can see below.

Keep your font consistent

Throughout your site, you should always try and keep all of your text in the same font. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that the font you use across your site does not really make a difference, because it really does. It is surprising at how unattractive a site can become if lots of different fonts are being used in different places. It makes it look as though the site is not quite the finished article, and that it is still in construction.

A prime example of this is www.pokernewstoday.com. This site has a nice clean design and structure, but it is being let down by the fact that it uses a different font for its content than the rest of the site. On top of this, the font that is being used is Times New Roman, which as you should know by now isn’t the cleanest font that you can use. Even if the content is great, I am immediately turned off by the fact that different fonts are being used, and the font isn’t easy to read. So I am sure a number of people will be looking elsewhere for their poker news, when all it takes is a quick change of font.

Don’t make your pages too wide

Another thing that can instantly turn me off about a site is if it has a horizontal scrollbar across the bottom because the page is too wide. Nobody minds a vertical scrollbar; it’s what web users are used to. But a horizontal scrollbar is just an inconvenience, and it’s going to be really frustrating for me and other people to have to scroll back and forth on each page to see what is going on, because a lot of the time something will be hiding across the page.

There are not that many people that use 800×600 anymore, so just make sure that your page fits on a 1064×728 screen and you will be fine. If its any bigger a lot of your visitors will get a horizontal scrollbar, and a lot of your visitors won’t want to stick around for too long. It may sound picky, but it’s surprising how annoying an over-sized site can be.

Use static banners instead of animated/flash banners

If you are going to use banners or ads on your poker site, it’s going to look a lot more attractive to have a static banner rather than something flashy and animated. If you come across a site with lots of flashy banners all moving around at once, its just going become annoying and make the site look tacky. But if you do want to use an animated banner, use them in moderation.

Don’t worry about people not noticing the banners if they are not flashing, because most people have blindness to these sort of ads after years of web surfing. I can safely say that people are not more likely to click on your banners because they are flashing, because it is unlikely that they are paying attention to them in the first place. If anything I am more likely to click on a subtle static banner rather than a big flashy one, and it will make the site look a whole lot better. So as well as static banners looking better, they have the ability to convert traffic well. Have you ever based the quality of a poker room on whether or not the room had a big flashing banner? So keep it classy, not tacky.

Keep it easy to navigate

If you want people to hand around your site, you want to make it easy from them to navigate. You want to structure your website well enough so that your visitors to can find the information they need easily, without overcrowding all of your pages with too much content and links. It’s your content, so you want to provide it to your visitors in the best way possible.

This is easier said than done, and it can be difficult to get the right balance. You don’t want to over-fill your navigation with a long list of links, but then you don’t want to have it so sparse that people have to search all around your site to find what they are looking for. To help get a user-friendly structure, always take the time to think about the layout of your site, and take a step back from time to time and look to see if you can make any improvements.

As an aspiring webmaster, you may feel that the design of a website is going to be placed solely in your hands, but this really isn’t the case. When I first started, I thought that it was going to be my responsibility to learn how to design websites and make them myself. Luckily however, it wasn’t too long before I was informed that it would be much better to leave the website design in someone else’s more capable hands.

This was a great piece of advice, and it saved me a lot of wasted effort and time trying to create something that I had very little knowledge in. Because at the end of the day; I am a webmaster by trade, not a web designer. So unless you are a very capable web designer, it is going to be in your best interest to get a design from someone that knows what he or she is doing. It will save you a lot of time by outsourcing your work, and you will have a much better looking site at the end of the day.

How much will it cost?

A website design can cost as much as you are willing to spend. But I’m guessing that’s not really the answer you are looking for, so I’ll try and elaborate a little…

It is possible to get a solid template or design for your website for free. If you browse around Google you are sure to find a whole host of free template that you can download and play around with in FrontPage, Dreamweaver or whatever editing program you may be using. free-templates.org and oswd.org have some great templates that you can download and use. Because these are free you shouldn’t expect anything fancy, but it is still going to be perfectly possible to make a great and profitable website with a free website template. These free templates are also great because they will allow you to get to grips with working with html and working with website designs, which will prove to be very handy for the future.

On the other hand, if you have a little bit of money to spare, I would highly recommend that you look into getting your own custom-made website design. A lot of places on the web will charge ridiculous amounts for some pretty basic templates, and so you might think that web-design is a pretty expensive business. However, you can get some brilliant custom designs for about $200, which really are worth every penny you pay for them and more. You can get some great templates for around $200 at www.customwebsitetemplate.com – these guys are highly recommended.

If you have a little more money in your back pocket to spend on a design, then you can always look elsewhere for some really up-market work. Just be sure to shop around before you buy, because a lot of places will over-charge for templates that aren’t really up to scratch, so make sure you get a good deal.

WordPress

WordPress is a great alternative to creating a standard static HTML website. But for those that do not know, I will just going to point out what each of these are as well as highlight their differences:

Static HTML simply describes your everyday website that most new webmasters might create; a ‘standard’ website if you will, that has been created in notepad or a WYSIWYG editor. Essentially, your website is created on your computer, and then is uploaded by you up onto the web. This is what most people will think of when asked about creating a website and it has been what we have talked about up to this point.

WordPress on the other hand is relatively new, but is becoming a popular way of creating websites. After you have bought your hosting and domain, you can download a script from www.wordpress.org that you can upload onto your web space. After it has been uploaded and installed, you can pretty much create your website whilst on the Internet, as very little work is needed to upload files from your computer to update and expand your website. Essentially, all of your content and design can be created whilst on the Internet, which makes WordPress a very popular way of making websites amongst new and veteran webmasters alike.

You can’t really go wrong with either of these choices, and it pretty much depends on what you would like to do with your website when it comes to picking one or the other. In general, WordPress works best for blog-like websites, where information as going to be added regularly and people will visit to find out the new articles that have been created from day to day or week-to-week.

Static HTML sites on the other hand are great for people that want to have complete control over their websites, and design the navigation and structure in a way that they see fit. This is how the majority of websites on the Internet have been made, and is the main option taken by new webmasters.

WordPress however is going to be easier to use as a new poker affiliate, because all you need to do is install it and you are already set to add content and work with your design. Static HTML is going to take a little longer, because you have to spend the time creating each page and uploading your work to your site. I would recommend WordPress to those that want a website quickly up and running, but it will be an invaluable experience to make a static HTML site and learn how typical websites are made.