Minisite Design – Why It Is a Better Option than a Conventional Website

Internet marketing based on direct response is getting competitive with every passing day. You will find an endless and relentless stream of marketing campaigns on your computer screen while surfing the internet. ‘Banners Blindness’ is getting more prominent to show the business owners’ increasing marketing endeavor for quick response. However, many of these banner works go unnoticed or irritate the visitors who are on hunt for necessary information at once.

True it is that direct response marketing brings you success in terms of monetary gains and increased subscription rates. However, to take your business to that level, you need to have proper planning and right kind of arsenals to snare a dib in the market.

There are many people who still stick out with conventional websites to promote their products and brand. Yes they get success – if the website looks good and functions well – but at the expense of time and cost. It requires more work, frames and placement of several links, which ultimately clutter the space to the point where you easily get lost into images, words and colors, so much so that news of new launches or offers escape your attention.

Minisite, being one-product centered website, provides a much uncluttered platform for internet marketing. There is no need to upload blogs regularly, deal with PHP scripts and HTML coding as well as other kinds of difficulties. All you need is a simple layout design for your minisite which will contain header, footer and web copy on the right places. ‘Rinse & Repeat’ – that phrase can perfectly describe the process of minisite making in nutshell.

You might have often heard about cheap minisite design. Designing minisite does not require you to pay a hefty sum though highly creative web designing experts, who definitely belong to rare breeds, demand high payment for their service. Still you can find a few experts who can offer you excellent service without going beyond the ‘LOC’ of your affordability.

For those looking for a cheap option should go to the websites offering minisite templates. Some of these websites are free while the rest demand a charge to allow you to avail their design contents. There are so many layouts available that you will almost get spoilt for choice. Chose that can rightly capture the essence of your business theme and product/service. High relevance between several website elements, attractive design and call-to-action feature of your minisite are what pick up glances from the target visitors.

Your website is doing well; do you still need a minisite? Yes. But why? Let’s clarify those points which clearly show how minisite can benefit you more than the conventional website on certain fronts. 

Focus on Lesser Target: The objective behind direct response marketing is to generate feedbacks from the prospects. This goal can be more easily accomplished with a minisite design. It usually contains only one link to direct the traffic to ‘Click Here’ section whereas the regular websites have multiple links which often confuse the visitors as to where they should go to place an order or fill up subscription form. 

Better Utilization of Powerful Graphics: A minisite is focused only on a few points instead of many. When powerful graphics are optimally used in your minisite, it increases conversion rate. Smart, not a shoddy layout, keeps the visitors coming to your minisite. After all, it is the appearance that makes your minisite click with the audience.

Choosing Right Font Type for Your Ecover Design

For an outstanding ecover design, it’s important to choose the right type of font. But what will work best for the ecover look? Does it depend on the type of images chosen for cover page? Or is there any uniform rule (though unwritten) in this context? Let us consider some points.

·         Usually a combination of typefaces is used for ebook cover. But what is the most happening combination? Sans-serif in combination with decorative font faces is most popular. Serif or script type font is a typical choice for decorative font faces.

·         Placement of text is an important consideration during cover designing. Do you like any special kind of effect like emboss, drop shadows, gradient, bevel or anything else? There should be much of empty space to give some soothing relief to your eyes; otherwise the cover will look cluttered.

·         Most of the writers and publishers prefer cool typeface. But they are often confused as to which type will look best on their book cover. A particular type does not look great for every cover. For example, Bodoni. For many ecover experts, it is a stunning font but they never use it as a one-fits-all solution. The reason? It has a classic feel which is most appropriate for the likes of women’s magazine. In true sense, it is a luxury font not suitable for every kind of ecover. 

Now Let’s Get to Work

You should be working with two or three fonts on trail basis to find out which works better. While doing so, follow these points:

·         Text should have a lot of white space around it.

·         Lower case letters are preferred as these enhance power and beauty of images and also give a shining effect to the title.

·         Keep yourself abstain from applying even little filter effects.

·         Use two different types of font faces, one for the title and another for author and byline

Even if you use the same image but apply a more professional use of the right font type, it will truly represent the essence of the story.

·         The first thing that you need to take care is to follow ‘less is more’ concept. Images should be given ample of room to breathe; otherwise these will divert all attention away.

·         Typography complements the design.

·         You have to apply decorative treatment to a flat ebook cover. Apart from font type, font size is also a factor to be taken into account. Just make sure that the book title and author’s name are readable even at a thumbnail view.

·         I personally prefer not playing with a riot of colors. Your ecover is not about any celebration but projecting what lies within. Don’t choose a color for the title that makes it look ‘greyed out’ as compared with the background. What is most important is maintaining a balance between all aspects of ecover design.

·         Some ecovers use grid line but it often hampers otherwise easy readability and therefore, should be avoided if you are not confident that doing so will make the cover more engaging.

Creating a great ecover needs many ingredients, the first of which is surely having a high level of creativity. At the same time, you should be in good knowledge of color use, font selection, image placement and many other aspects that together create a stand-apart design.

Optimization of Minisite Design Drives Traffic in Droves

If your minisite features all those elements in their best form to attract audience, still fails earn you good business, the fault should be put down to lack of optimization. A non-optimized minisite design might take long time to upload, a good reason to irritate the visitors. So, you need to be equally focused on website optimization to achieve your web objective of enjoying both traffic and return in profusion. 

Attractive design – A key factor

There is no need to stress it any further that an engaging look appeals strongly to the customers. But good look is not the last word; there are a lot of other factors to influence the buyers. Have you ever wondered why a website that has an awesome look, out-of-the-box design and engaging content fails to drive the customers wild and make them go gaga over the products on offer? You should search the reasons elsewhere, which the website owners have not taken seriously. 

Optimization comes into play

All they have to do now is to get their website optimized by a professional. The problem with most of the business owners is they are not in knowledge of website optimization and how they can earn benefits from it. The first thing they should know that optimization makes a website fully functional and also gives it a good rank in the search engine result pages. 

Just imagine a picture; a minisite template takes a few couples of minutes to upload. Are you ready to wait so long? It is not about awaiting a friend or your beau at a shopping mall or movie theatre. Real life is far different from your life in virtual world. The online shoppers are very finical and fickle minded. They need everything ready and immediately as soon as they place a request. All these point out that your website must have minimum download time to offer everything on demand. 

Make it easy to navigate 

Those who visit your website often to make a purchase are well aware of which links will lead them to which pages. They won’t find it difficult to get information from your minisite, everything seems to be at their fingertips. But that is not the case with newcomers.

So while designing your website, always make sure that whoever visits your site for the first time, should find it most easy to navigate through the links, contents and images to get what they want. The links and images should be self-explanatory and none of the web pages should be cluttered so that you don’t find yourself lost into the words’ web.   

Don’t use unnecessary codes

Coding builds up website structure. However, unnecessary coding only adds to the file size and download time. Never use big images as these destroy look and also adds more bytes to your website file size. Smaller images are much preferred but also make sure that these are not scaled down to thumbnail size. Use Cascading Style Sheet to avoid repetition of codes in writing, this will make the web pages lighter in byte size.  

Video marketing – An innovative punch

Videos are finding a use in minisite design. Though it is yet to find an extensive use like static images, they up the ‘appeal’ factor of your website by manifolds. But videos increase the file size considerably and so must be optimized if used in your minisite.