I must be honest with you: I don’t know. Simply because I never have used Joomla.

Fortunately I found someone who does know, Carol Brown.

She writes today’s guest post and if you’re interested in using Joomla to develop small business websites, listen up.

Here comes Carol.
Enjoy!

Why Joomla Website Design is Great for Small Businesses

Joomla website design is ideal for small business websites for its ease of use and zero licensing fees. It also makes site updating a cakewalk.

Over the last few years the web development professionals are opting for CMS (Content Management System) web design over other options for designing the client websites.

In fact, the business owners are also looking for web design professionals who are proficient in CMS web design.

There are some inherent advantages of CMS web design and a website design Company should adopt it for flexibility of work and speeding up site development.

In particular, CMS fits the bill very well for the small business websites.
There are a number of CMS applications available in the market and a web design company needs to pick the one that offers it the best performance.

The small business website design is more than just making the online profile for a company.
On the contrary, it needs integration with other plug-ins and software to expand the site’s capability.

Using Joomla website design over other CMS apps for small business website design makes sense as the software has matchless flexibility and ease of use.

Photo Credit: cocoate.com

For instance, with a Joomla based online store a business owner can handle order management, customer data storing, and order processing from a single intuitive interface.
For this, the Web design and Development Company might need to use Joomla template and extensions.

Everything can be smoothly administered from the admin dashboard.
Some of these can be achieved with other CMS applications like WordPress.
However, when it comes to making a business websites that lets the owner deal directly with customers in an efficient way, Joomla races ahead of the competition.

Joomla web site design can enhance the online business experience for the users and business owners alike.

When a web developer makes a CMS based online store for a client, he needs to use extension or plugin which enhances the basic installation of the application.

With Joomla this is very simple. All the developers need to do is installing VirtueMart and the online shop gets equipped with comprehensive order management capability.

The small business websites that need to be equipped with CRM software can also benefit from Joomla web design.
The CRMVJ Joomla extension makes linking the Joomla online store with the CRM app a cakewalk.

It is true that for availing the powerful capabilities of Joomla website design a web developer will need Joomla hosting. In fact, Joomla web hosting is not drastically different from general web hosting.
The web servers need to be optimized and configured for Joomla properly. The web itself is an excellent resource for locating reliable and reputed Joomla web hosting service providers.

A business owner opting for a Joomla based website can save on the charges he needs to pay the web development firm.
Since Joomla is open source and comes for free, the web design companies using the application charge less from the clients compared to the design firms using commercial apps.

The small business owners can implement changes in a website made in Joomla fast and without much hassle.
For instance, if the website needs to be updated with new image portfolio, that can be done within a few minutes in Joomla. Adding a blog section or customer feedback section in a Joomla based business website can also be done smoothly.

Joomla Website design for small businesses is also beneficial from the SEO perspective. Joomla is quite SEO friendly and making a Joomla website attractive to the search engine bots is not difficult.

So, what’s your opinion on Joomla website design?
Post your comments below.

Is Joomla Website Design Good for Small Businesses is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

Therefore it’s wise to think thoroughly about the colors you’re going to use on your website.

Should you use green, red or blue? Or when is yellow the right choice?

Jack Simms has some great tips about website colors.
That’s why I publish his guest post today.

Enjoy!

—–

When it comes to building a website, colors are often overlooked.

However, the human eye can see approximately 7,000,000 colors – colors that can enhance your productivity, make you tired, or even make you hungry.

When choosing website colors, you must make sure they complement the message you are trying to convey and the audience you are targeting. Color is a means of communicating with your visitors and can even decide how long they choose to stay and look around.

Photo Credit: debs-eye

In order to optimize the use of website colors, consider the following tips.

Less is more.
It is best to choose three to four different colors and mainly use those throughout the web site.
Furthermore, it is best to have each color focus on a specific aspect of the site. For example, have all your titles or headings in dark blue.

Using five or more colors throughout your website may become a distraction for your readers and take away from the actual message you are trying to get across. Keep your colors consistent in order to keep your website visually appealing.

Cater to the main demographic you are targeting.
Keep in mind that different people have different preferences and reactions when it comes to color.

For example, older people will prefer more relaxing colors while teenagers may prefer colors that are bright and vivid. Consider the age group you are targeting when you are choosing your website’s color scheme.

Furthermore, if you are targeting a certain gender, keep in mind that men usually prefer orange and blue over yellow and red.

Studies have shown that women perceive and notice more colors than men.

If you are targeting different nations, take time to read about how certain colors may have different meanings in other countries. For example, while white symbolizes purity in America, it is a sign of unhappiness in Asian countries.

Make your website colors complementary.
Whichever colors you choose, it is important that they harmonize with each other.
If your website involves a lot of reading, the best option is a white background with black font. Other color combinations are also possible, but it is often best to stick with a dark colored font and a lighter colored background.

Whichever website colors you decide, it is important to make sure your background color strongly contrasts the color of your text in order to prevent visual eyestrain.

Avoid using bright colors for large portions of your website.
Your eyes contain cones that respond to different wavelengths of light. Although bright green or neon yellow will attract your reader’s attention, these bright colors will cause visual eyestrain and cause the cones to become overworked and fatigued.

This in turn will result in your reader not wanting to stay at your website for a prolonged period of time. Furthermore, using less startling colors will make your website appear more professional and mature.

Colors evoke emotion.
Different colors can evoke different emotions, and this can work to your advantage.

When choosing website colors, consider what kind of mood and atmosphere you are trying to create. For example, if your website is food-related, consider adding a splash of red because red evokes hunger.
Furthermore, red stimulates your metabolism.

For a business site, consider using dark blues and greys because these evoke a sense of professionalism and power.

Green and brown are understandably good color choices for a web site dealing with environmentalism.

Furthermore, green is also a good option for finance-related sites because it evokes the thought of money.

So, which website colors do you prefer?
Post your useful comments below.

Website Colors – 5 Tips To Choose the Right Ones is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

Of course you can learn how to create professional graphics, but that takes (a lot of) time!

Until you have mastered the necessary experience, your efforts will always result in poor quality graphics.

Another way to go is to pay hundreds of dollars to a professional graphics artist.

If you have a big wallet, that surely is a great solution, but it will cost you.
These experts aren’t cheap!

Also you are not their only customer; they have a dozen other customers to serve, plus the back and forth communication between you and them means it’s going to take some time for your site to be completed to your liking.

So what does a smart marketer do?

Yep, take the faster and cheaper solution…minisite templates!
By using them, you’ll save yourself quite some money or a tremendous amount of time that you can spend on design and marketing issues you do master.

That’s why I want to offer you 10 free minisite templates with lots of selling power.

Before I do, let me emphasize the importance for your site to use excellent graphics.

You see, an excellent minisite uses an appropriate header that visually enhances the purpose of your site or your company name.

PLUS it confirms your visitors that this is where they should be for the answer to the problem they’re trying to solve or that they absolutely arrived at the right place to find the product they are looking for.

Using professionally created graphics of high quality make a great first impression on your visitors and conveys trust and increases your credibility.

Here’s a minisite template example:

There are more where this one is coming from. Check out these other minisite templates.

The headers in these free minisite templates don’t come with text, but using a program like Gimp, a free graphics editor, it’s a piece of cake to add them.

Download and install that program and open an image with Gimp.

Just click the Text-icon in the toolbar and create a rectangle in which the text will appear.
At the bottom of the work-area you can see the dimensions of your rectangle.
A little window pops up where you can type the desired text.

Use the text manipulation window at the bottom of the toolbar to adjust fonts, size and always use the anti-alias feature to create a smooth graphic text.

Using the filters you can even add a shadow effect.

That’s how easy it is to use minisite templates.

Download them now and apply them.

10 Free Minisite Templates to Make More Money is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

That is, having the same height.

There are lots of reasons why two or more columns should have the same height, but that’s out of the scope for this article.

Point is, if you use simple CSS, a column ends whenever the content ends and thus you almost always end up with columns of different heights.

Like when you have a lot of content and only a short menu bar. In such a situation you may want to create equal columns.

I usually solve this problem using the ‘faux columns‘ feature by Dan Cederholm.

If that is way above you head, just relax (I have an easy solution below) and consider this.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), was brought about by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and not by evil programmers with too much time on their hands as originally believed, to develop a standard which could be interpreted by different browsers. This became a necessity as Microsoft and Netscape battled for world domination and kept adding html attributes which were only understood by their browser. Great for them, bad for us.

Now, through the implementation of CSS, we can design ONE website for all browsers instead of multiple websites, one for each browser.

CSS really makes your life as a webmaster easy. Yet lots of people don’t know how to use CSS or even are afraid to start using it. We really should change that right now.

You see, in the past I wrote a CSS beginners guide called ‘Taming the Beast’. It’s an easy read and a really simple way to learn CSS and start using it.

Keep your wallet in your pocket, as it is a free download for you.

Download your CSS tutorial.

Read it and start using it.

Now, back to the equal columns height using simple CSS.

Last week I was asked to modify a CSS file of an existing site in order to correctly show the menu bar.

It used a ‘position:absolute’ feature to get the menu bar exactly where wanted, but that didn’t work well.
Because position:absolute is relative to the screen instead of the page.

So I deleted that part and made some changes in the HTML page in order to have the menu displayed well.

But that immediately lead to another problem: the equal columns problem.

The columns didn’t have the same height, as the owner wanted. And since I wasn’t in control of the site, I couldn’t add a background image in order to use the ‘faux columns’ solution.

So I searched Google for an instant solution and found an easy one.
Maybe easier than the ‘faux columns’, because you always have to change your background image whenever you change the width of a column.

The solution is is very simple and has a few advantages over the ‘faux columns’ one. You can read all about it at Equal Columns.

Worked like charm!

Don’t forget to download your CSS beginners guide.

Then let me know what you think.
Do you use CSS or are you planning to use it?
Post your comments below.

Create equal columns with simple CSS is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

Like last year when they introduced Page Load Time as a ranking element in Google AdWords ads.

And the more recent launch of a DNS resolving service called Google Public DNS that uses Google’s infrastructure to improve page loading time.

Watch this WebProNews interview: Matt Cutts Talks Caffeine and Site Speed

There are many more discussions going on about this topic, and it is believed that having a slow website may influence your rankings, now or in future. Some seo experts think a slow website may not be penalized (yet), but you also won’t earn extra points.

Do a search on Google about the topic.

I started the week with studying my Google Analytics info. Not blogging for a couple of months due to a heart attack decreased my visitor numbers drastically and I have to do something about that.

I also took a look at my Webmaster tools. There I discovered my incoming links have decreased also.

But what really was hitting me hard was my site performance.

It appeared that over time my site loaded slower and slower. At first I thought it had something do to with hosting capabilities, but I wasn’t sure. I had to find out, because, on top of the earlier mentioned problems, I also had a slow website!

So I installed Page Speed, a Firefox browser add-on to evaluate the performance of website pages and get suggestions on how to improve them. I had installed Yslow before, but hadn’t done anything with it.

Using Page Speed, I discovered several causes of slowing down my site, like insufficient caching and using a lot of redundant info that wasn’t really necessary.

So I went to my fellow countryman Yoast for more advice and took the time to watch his outstanding presentation on SEO Improvements on WordPress at WordCamp NL.

Strangely enough, despite the topic, he isn’t talking about SEO at all, yet, in the end, it was all about SEO. In hindsight it wasn’t that surprising, because Yoast is more a marketeer than a geek (well, maybe he’s a geek by nature, but he certainly behaves as a marketeer).

Anyway, I was a satisfied user of WP Super Cash for some time, but one of the things I took away from Yoast’s presentation was a new plugin called W3 Total Cache. I researched it as far as I could understand (sometimes it really gets technical) and installed the plugin immediately.

Because W3 Total Cache goes far beyond caching.
It also tries to restore what people should have done in the first place when designing themes. Like compressing files and keep code to a bare minimum.
I must say, pages load much faster now.

Then I went back to Page Speed and let it run. Based on the performance analysis, I managed to add a couple of valuable lines to my .htaccess file to enable caching for images, css and javafiles and to enable compression of files.

Page Speed uses these small red images to represent the largest potential performance wins for relatively little development effort and these issues should be addressed first.

The only thing I haven’t found out yet is how to enable proxy caching for external images. I found a few resources, but I wasn’t able to clearly understand what they were talking about. And I certainly don’t want to make mistakes playing with .htaccess files when I don’t oversee the implications.

So, if anyone has some advice about proxy caching, I’m all ears.
Meanwhile I suggest you check out the links in this post to at least familiarize yourself with the topic.
IF Google will penalize a slow website in future, you at least know what to do about it.

Here’s another resource that you can use to prevent your pages from loading slow: WebPageTest

Don’t let this technical topic scare you. Listen, I’m NOT that technical at all. I only add what I can understand and doing so with the above mentioned I’ve reached my limits. All I’m saying is that when I can do this, almost anyone else can.

I’m still busy investigating and in the near future I may delete a few gimmicks from my blog as a result of that.

In the mean time let me hear what you think about a slow website and long loading times.
Do you think it’s a good idea for Google to use speed as a ranking factor?
Post your reaction below.

EDIT April 10, 2010
It’s now official: speed IS a ranking factor!
Prevent a slow website from getting penalized by Google. Take action now.

Slow Website Penalized By Google? is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

I was about to post a comment there, but it became a bit long, so I turned it into a post.

Of course I use WordPress sometimes to create websites.
This blog is an obvious one, but I also use them as content management system (CMS) without having them look like a blog. Without comments, because comments kill every attempt for search engine optimization on blogs.
Works great and results are satisfying.

However…

…using WordPress as a CMS results in overhead here and there. Extra css files, plugins that add extra code and comments to the source, plugins that become redundant because of better alternatives, there’s always something to worry about.

The argument that search engines LOVE blogs is an overstatement. Search engines love fresh content and since that is generated on a lot of blogs, their chances to rank well in search engines, on average, are better than those from static sites.

However…

Photo Credit: Andrew Mason

…I’m convinced that frequently adding content to a static site delivers the same results.

Of course WordPress has other advantages, like feeds. Every time content is added, a fully automated process spreads the word about that through the Net using ping services. Hmhm. True. I’ll get back to that in a moment.

Because I think a static site can do better than a WordPress site!

The only condition is that it must have clean code and a simple, yet highly effective internal linking structure.

Back in the previous century I learned HTML. You know, tables, fonts, meta tags, the whole shebang. And I experimented a lot with different website designs. Along the way I added CSS to my sites and made them error free, so the source code is clean. A long learning curve.

The most important thing I’ve learned in all these years is that the source code should be clean, because that’s what the search engines are able to read AND that the main content should be on top of the source code.

Most websites, including WordPress, have too much clutter on top of their source code, including all kind of menu’s. The content is hidden somewhere in that source.

Not in my website template. Content is always as far to the top as possible.

Other features of my template are an XML sitemap that can be used by the search engines. But it also contains an HTML sitemap that can be used by visitors. OR… by the search engines and that’s exactly what I’m using it for.

It even has an RSS feed. Works a bit different than usual, but it does the trick. I told you above I would get back to that WordPress advantage. My template has it too!

The only thing that doesn’t work automagically is pinging, but there’s an easy solution for that. I just go to PingOMatic, submit my RSS feed to have it pinged and create a bookmark. Next time, one button push will do the trick.

That’s how I create websites Lynn.

Get them up and running in 5 minutes (development of unique graphics excluded).
Then I just put in a title, a good description and the body of the text, upload and presto…
another page ready.
The only difference with blogs is, that I use TextPad or any other text processor.

Here’s an example: Healthy Food.
Created it 2 days ago. Works in 5 minutes, including Adsense.

So how about you dear reader?
What do you use to create websites?
Post your comments below.

What do you use to create websites? is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

I think that popularity is a result of the increasing demand for Private Label right products. After all, you can by PLR content all over the place, but you still have to design a website for it. Minisite graphics are great tools to achieve just that, since they’re ready to go and simple to use.

Also, most Internet marketers avoid having to deal with graphics, whether it’s promotional banners, ebook covers or website layouts, since it requires specific skills to create them. A real marketer stays with his job, marketing, and doesn’t have time to fiddle around with complex software and to read the bulky tutorials.

When it comes to creating graphics for their authority sites, they will always find a professional graphic designer to do the job.
But when it’s about monetizing niches using their PLR content, minisite graphics are high in demand.

Minisite graphics have another huge advantage. You can easily customize them by changing the text inside. Thus you can profit from great professional designs and customize the text inside the graphics to suit your own needs. That’s a really simple and fast job when you use free graphic software like Gimp.

Or you are able to even build a completely fresh design based on minisite graphics! Thus they serve as a source of inspiration and ideas for a entirely new design. Wich isn’t possible from a blank canvas, right?

So, using minisite graphics, you are really saving a lot of valuable time that you can otherwise spend on more crucial matters like marketing and developing new products. When you buy minisite graphics, all you only need to do is edit a thing or two to apply an identity of your own wich creates more time and flexibility to work on other stuff.

In addition to that, it would be ideal to use some sort of search engine optimized website template, that allows you to quickly use the minisite graphics and create a successful website.
Real good website templates are rare, so if you can get one, don’t miss the opportunity. It will save you tons of time, again.

 
Ok, now let’s talk about this not so unrelated story.

I’m a member of a very special group – The Internet marketing Inner Circle.

In this supportive community, we share experience and knowledge, network with other marketers and business owners, and have fun.

We also take care of our fellow members.

That’s why, when we heard about Lynn Stivers and her fight to save her home, the members rallied around in support – and came up with a mind-blowing deal about …

Minisite Graphics.

I’ll let Lynn tell her story, but you really should check out the graphics that she offers. I didn’t hesitate for a moment and bought them. They’re great.

And…

I contributed my ACE Website template (don’t buy there before checking out Lynn’s story below) for easy and fast web design. You can get it for free with Lynn’s package!

Willie Crawford, owner of The Internet Marketing Inner Circle, contributed an interesting package too, as did our members Joanne Mason and Justin Brooke. Completely free!

Read Lynn’s story and check out her outstanding offer.
Make sure you get your copy. Will save you tons of time.

After buying them, let me know what you think about these minisite graphics.
Post your comments below.

Minisite Graphics And A Not So Unrelated Story is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

But passwords can be cracked, so if you want to KEEP that information confidential, you’d better use a good and strong password.

And that certainly applies to your most important online accounts like bank or other money accounts. To a certain extent, I can understand (not agree!) why people want to have access to your PayPal or bank account, since there’s money to get. Greed and an easy way to make money is their motive.

Photo Credit: Mel B.

But otherwise, I have NO idea why people would like to crack password for things like blogs and web2.0 sites, other than the morbid delight of destruction.

But it happens!

I had it happen to this very blog last month. Using brute force (see below).
So the lesson here is to defend your Cpanel, blog, bank and all other accounts with strong passwords that are hard to crack.

Now, I’m NOT a security specialist. All I can do is try to explain this matter in my own layman’s words and that’s what I do below.

Suppose I used a ONE character password to protect my site and that one character could only consist of the letters a to z. That would give me 26 possibilities to create my password.

If someone wanted to crack that password, all this person had to do is fill in each letter on my login page and hit submit. Including the response time this requires, this can be done at a pace of 3 times per minute. On average it requires 13 tries to find the password, so that only takes less than 5 minutes.

Now suppose I add another character to my password. Then the total number of possible combination would increase drastically, since for every character in the first position, there are 26 possibilities in the second one. Total number of combinations: 26 x 26 = 676. The average time required to find my password would become 338 / 3 = 112 minutes.

When we allow to have numbers in our password, the possibilities per character would be 36 and the total number of possible combinations when using 2 characters would be 36 x 36 = 1,296. Average time to find my password: 648 / 3 = 216 minutes.

Finally, when we also allow all letters to be in capitals, that adds another 26 options per character. So now the total number of possible combinations for a 2 character password becomes 62 x 62 = 3,844. Average time to find my password: 640 minutes!

If we would allow for more characters to be included in the password, the figures will be:

See how the column at the right increases drastically?
THAT’S all you have to remember from this exercise.

Of course anyone doing this would be a fool, because we have computers to do things like this. And hackers and crackers use computer programs to do this. Their software starts at the left most character with ‘a’ and work their way to the most right character, scanning all combinations possible.
That is called ‘brute force’.

But for computers the same effect applies. The more options per character and the more characters used, the more difficult it becomes to find the right password combination.
Therefore, it’s wise to use at least 8 characters in your password, using a combination of upper and lower letters and numbers.

So the name of your little sister simply won’t do! Nor does the name of anyone else. You also need to include numbers and, if allowed, special characters.

If you use names, then at least don’t use names that are easy to guess. Use at least one capital and also add a number. A great way to combine everything is to replace an ‘a’ by 1 and a 1 by ‘a’. That makes names more difficult to find.

IF it’s allowed, you can also add special characters to your passwords, or even add a space, so you can make your password a phrase. Which, in general, is easier to remember.

But the fewer characters allowed, the longer your password should be!

If you’re really good in math, you can see from the table above that a 15 character password only containing letters is stronger than an 8 character password containing all possible characters on your keyboard, simply because the total possible number of combinations depends on the power of the number of characters in your password.

It’s also very wise to periodically change your password using the information above. Doing so avoids all possible hacks or cracks of your passwords since anyone on their way to compromise your passwords would have to start all over again.

Here’s an online password checker where you can see how strong your password is. There are more available, just google the phrase ‘password checker’.

Remember this:
- the more variety in possible characters, the better and
- the longer your password, the harder to crack.

Don’t let it happen to you. Avoid having your passwords cracked.

Had a similar experience or want to react to this post?
Leave your comments below.

How To Avoid Your Passwords Being Cracked is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

It also reports more than 85 percent of the world’s online population has used the Internet to make a purchase—increasing the market for online shopping by 40 percent in the past two years.

That’s impressive!

Are you prepared for this? Do you have your own online shop?

If you haven’t, why not?

There are many advantages.

And there’s an opportunity to have your own online shop within minutes, featuring over 28 MILLION products from over 1,300 merchants who offer their products through Commission Junction, LinkShare, LinkConnector and ShareASale (plus a few others).

All these products are put in a huge database from where you can select on keyword or brand, generate some code to put on your site and presto… you have an online shop, updated in real time.

Or …

… you can have little snippets with a few products displayed in the sidebar of your blog or site. Or use them instead or in conjunction with Adsense ads.

Many options available.

More info is at Your Online Store In Minutes!

Check it out and let me know what you’re thinking about this development.
Do you have your own online shop already?
Do you think it will be valuable to have one in the near future?

Post your comments below.

875+ Million Online Shoppers – Time For Your Own Free Online Shop! is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

Last Saturday John left a comment on my ‘About’ page. My bio reminded him about … him. Hmmm, very flattering.

But he also asked my opinion about his site and since John was smart enough to mention he came to this blog via Copyblogger – thus positioning himself as quite smart in my opinion – I immediately went over to eVentureBiz.

Mind you, this is not to bash anyone or anyone’s site.
It’s just an example from someone who asked my opinion and I only use his site to make the point, mentioned in the title of this post.

So…

I see a nice design. It’s not too cluttered, nice colors, easy to read.
Same applies to the navigation panes on top and at the left.
So far, so good.

But then I noticed something that I wonder about on many sites: why should I buy here? In other words, how is this site different from others and how is it unique. What’s the USP?

In the header it says: eVentureBiz, which is branding his website. Great, but what does it tell us? I’m still in the dark.
And below that it says Social Entrepreneurial Web Hosting. Huh? What’s that?

I mean, the majority of people coming along will have some idea about web hosting, but what the heck is Social Entrepreneurial Web Hosting?
The term may be a great USP, but in my opinion needs to be explained immediately at the beginning of the page.

Now, the page starts with: Welcome to eVentureBiz.
That’s nice, but all visitors at this specific point want to know is “What’s In It For Me (WIIFM)”! If you don’t tell them here and right now, they’re gone!
Stating ‘a Web Hosting and Entrepreneurial Development Company’ isn’t going to do the trick.

Then the page continues with ‘Purpose of this Site’. Which is great, because now we can learn what this site is about, try to discover what’s in it for us and investigate further or click away.
(Always remember that you can’t please everyone, so people, even in your target group, still will click away. No time, to confused, not appealed to your site, whatever reason, you can’t please them all.)

Ok, on.
Reading the purpose of this site, I would say that it targets the product (web hosting) to beginning online entrepreneurs. But the product, if I understand correctly, is not just web hosting, it comes with tons of extra and even personal help.
If that is the case, don’t let them hanging.

In general, the first halve minute some stranger spend on your site, she has to see three things:

1. Who is it for.
2. What exactly is offered.
3. Why is it offered.

Number one and two are clear, number three is ‘reason why’ marketing (see Michel Fortin’s Your Reader Wants To Know These 5 Things). It binds your visitor with you… or not (that’s why some, despite a good offer, will not buy from you).

The fastest way to accomplish this is to put that in head- and sublines, like:

Now, I’m not saying this is the ultimate headline. It’s just a quickie. Can be improved, thousand times. Go back to Copyblogger and read Magnetic Headlines.

But it does the job! It answers the first three questions.

In the intro paragraphs, you build on these headlines. Since you understand where these newbies are coming from, tell them about the problems they have, right now!
Briefly make it clear you’ve been there too, so you can relate and they can begin trusting you.
And then tell them about the solutions you’ve found for these problems they have and how you can help them.

Then, take down that blue logo at the right and replace it with a small picture of yourself, so they can SEE who they’re dealing with.
By now it’s time to introduce yourself (briefly, you only have to show that you’re the expert, they don’t care about you personally).

After that, expand on the solution you are offering and make it so, that it blends in with your USP. Remember, social?

That’s how you differentiate yourself in 30 seconds.
Work your USP!

So…. marketers and copywriters, did I leave anything out?
Can you help John with an excellent headline?
Leave your comments below.

USP: Differentiate Your Site In 30 Seconds. is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.