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Home  Online Wealth Developing Your Website
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Page 5 of 6
Step #5 - Special Features
Counters
A counter simply displays the number of visitors you have had so far on your site. Counters can keep a running total or restart daily. You use to see a lot of websites with counters, but there is really no reason for them outside of trying to impress visitors how many people are coming to your site. However, what visitors care most about is quality content.
Flash
Flash is a software program developed by Macromedia®. It allows for various animation type movements of characters and objects, as well as videos and other creative features. However the problem is that most browsers such as Internet Explorer (the most widely used) doesn’t like flash and most people still don’t have computers that can handle the large files that flash create and so, it slows the user’s pc down considerably.Most site visitors don’t like flash, because it takes too long to load.
Some of the best uses for flash can be video presentations or separate sales presentations
Sign Up Box
If you plan on building a mailing list and marketing to individuals that visit your site you will need a way to capture their name and email address. This is usually done by having a “sign-up box”. The sign up box allows site visitors to sign up for free or special offers, e-newsletters, special reports, classes and much more. Talk with your web designer about how you can incorporate a signup box on your site.
Calendars
If you plan on conducting consistent and frequent classes or events and you want visitors to know about it, you might want to have a calendar on your site. However, if you only hold an activity quarterly or a few times per year you simply might have a single page that list any upcoming activities. A calendar is best used when you need to manage a lot of activity and keep it organized within the site for the visitors to see.
Shopping Carts
Outside of using Paypal, Google or Amazon payment systems, you might need a shopping cart to manage your products and allow your visitors to shop for products on your site and check out using their credit cards.
If you decide to use a shopping cart you will also need to accept credit cards and have what is a called a “gateway merchant account” that allows your transactions to take place securely without the risk of someone’s credit card information being stolen. You will also need to purchase a “secure socket certificate” from your web hosting provider as well.
Just remember that when you decide to use a shopping cart you will incur other expenses for add on components as well. This includes paying a small percentage of each transaction to the credit card merchant.
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The African American Experience
Black Genius
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