Making a living online is a difficult thing to do and it’s something that 98% of businesses that are currently online are not successful at. There are a lot of reasons for this and those reasons increase when websites leave the US.

To start with websites outside the US do not have as many people purchasing items online and for this reason the marketing and the website design have to be much better than those in the US.

A website needs to build trust, guide the visitor in the direction we want them to go and help them to make the purchase.

A major problem in any country is finding a web designer that understands marketing, web design, graphic design, programming and most of all conversion.

Let’s take a look at asicamericas.com.

The website was designed for smaller browsers which are rarely used today and what makes it worse is that the design is not centered. It hangs in the top left corner of the screen like it’s scared to be seen.

Every time someone is forced to click the mouse to find information there will be a percent of visitors that will leave the site never to return. By not having contact information on every page of the site we force visitors to click links and hunt for information.

If it’s a real business then the phone number and contact information should be in the header of every page. And the header and design of the site should tell me something about the business before I ever read the first line of text.

You’ve got less than 3 seconds to get me interested in your product and this is done on the graphical side of the website.
And colors will affect my reaction and the action I will take on your site.

Red indicates anger. It’s a strong color that conjures up a range of seemingly conflicting emotions from passionate love to violence and warfare. Red can have a physical effect, increasing the rate of respiration and raising blood pressure.

Blue would have been a better color to use. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven.

Blue is considered beneficial to the mind and body. It slows human metabolism and produces a calming effect.
Another problem with the site is the scrolling text; it causes your eyes to be pulled in that direction and forces us to read the information at the speed the website decides.

The website has no call to action and in no way tries to get me to purchase any type of product.

On the SEO side of things the website has less than 8 links pointing to it and not meta tags. Meta tags are used by search engines like MSN who will be spending $100 million on advertising their search engine. By ranking on their search engine you get some of the benefit of the 100 million they are spending.

Java script and other coding was left on the site, it should have been pulled out of the code and placed in external folders to make it easier for the search engines to read and understand the site.

It doesn’t take long to come to the conclusion that this site has never made money online.

Online Marketing and Web Design

Believe it or not web design and marketing run hand in hand. It doesn’t matter how good looking your site is, if you don’t market it no one will find it and no matter how much marketing you do, if you have a crappy site you want make the sale.

I spend a good bit of time online and there are some really artistic people out there who lack the marketing side of the coin.

I’ve seen people point to and brag about web design companies like http://www.saizenmedia.com/nightwish/ where if you wait long enough for the website to load you’ll find that the site design tells you nothing about the topic of the site.

And if you use your computer to talk with clients, like I do, then you’ll find yourself shutting down browsers and telling clients to hold on as you try and find out where all the background noise is coming from.

I can only guess that this is the same web design company that built http://www.joinourclub.net/, where I spent 30 minutes just trying to figure out what the heck the site was suppose to be about.

In a world where people spend less and less time on a site and websites have to load faster and grab the visitor’s attention in a matter of seconds, I have a hard time believing these sites are doing any more than taking up bandwidth.

The graphical side of the websites get 10 from me but the marketing side would get a -10. If you’ve got a product to sale and want to make some money online, stay away from sites like these.