Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet By Tasos Vasilopoulos Part 7 - Time to design - Design the layout of your web pages Introduction This article makes part of a series of 20 articles. The subject of this series is the creation and promotion of a website as a cost-effective method to establish a profitable home based business on the Internet. In my previous article, “Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet – Part 6 - Design the structure of your website”, I have presented to you important issues to take in consideration regarding the structure of your website. In this article I will show you the way to design the layout of your webpages properly. Design the layout of your web pages The structure of the first version of your website does not need to be complicated. It will comprise a home page, the links pages and the link exchange procedure page, as I have presented to you in Part – 6 – Design the structure of your website. But, still you will need a way for a visitor to navigate in your website from one page to another. You will need a menu in each page containing links to the most important pages of your website. So, each one of your pages will contains at least two elements, the content and the menu. Consistency MUST be a virtue of your website. You must keep the layout of all your pages the same. You must decide where the content will be placed and where the menu will be placed. The options are not many. You can place the menu above, below, in the right or in the left side of your content. You can see each one of these layouts in the examples below: 1st example – The menu above the content: Title of the web page Subtitle of the web page Menu Content 2nd example – The menu below the content: Title of the web page Subtitle of the web page Content Menu 3rd example – The menu in the right side of the content: Title of the web page Subtitle of the web page Content Menu 4th example – The menu in the left side of the content: Title of the web page Subtitle of the web page Menu Content As you may have noticed I haven’t mentioned anything about the title and the subtitle of each one of the web pages in your website. These two elements have also to do with the layout of your web pages and they must reside at the top of each page. The truth is that you have only two options to choose from: - The menu below the content - The menu in the right side of the content And this constraint has to do with the optimization procedure of your web page. Remember which are the elements Search Engines use to extract the theme of a web page and measure the relevance of a web page regarding its theme? They examine mainly the “metatags” in the “header” section of the web page and then they examine the first paragraphs in your web page starting from the top and moving from left to the right. It is much better for you search engines to find text to examine than to find links in a menu, which lies above the content or in the left side of it. Both layouts are good. Here are two examples of these two layouts: First example – The menu below the content: Go to http://www.free-work-at-home-job.com. See where the menu has been placed (in the yellow line at the bottom part of the page). Second example below – The menu in the right side of the content: Go to http://www.computer-work-at-home-job.com. You can easily spot the menu in the right side of the content. Remember to keep the consistency in the layout of your pages. If your visitors loose time to understand how to navigate in your website, they won’t have time to read the content. From the very first moment a visitor comes to your website, no matter the web page he is entering from, you must train him to navigate himself easily through your web pages. Your website must look like a newspaper. He must understand quickly the layout of the web pages. Where is the menu placed, where is the link to the home page. Where is the link to your email address, where is the content. And he must also understand that the layout is the same in all pages, so he can move fast. -------------------------------- Next article in the series “Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet”: Part 8 - Create your home page --------------------------------