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There are four types of website:

• The Branding Site
• The Sales Letter
• A Blog
• The Squeeze Page

According to Matt Bacak, one of the speakers at Market You Way to Wealth in April, the Squeeze Page is the most important. Because this is the type of page that builds your list.

A squeeze page is a simple but powerful type of website. At it’s most basic it is just one web page tied to an autoresponder. A squeeze page’s sole purpose is to get visitors to provide you with their name and email address. An example of the squeeze page I use for the Women’s Business Gallery can be found at www.womensbusinessgallery.com.

Matt shared with us his three step process for setting up a squeeze page:
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When a website gets much larger than a minisite, as it often does for branding and feeder websites, such as blogs, you really require some sort of content management system or CMS.

Why do you need a CMS?

1. It will improve the load-time of your web pages.
2. It will help you organize and re-organize your web pages more easily.
3. It will let you add and delete pages without having to know HTML.

There are a wide variety of content management systems available: some simple, others robust. Some free, others at a cost. Some are very user friendly, others not so much.
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There are several types of website you can have, and as your business becomes more robust, you’ll probably have some of each of them:

• The Squeeze Page
• The Sales Page
• The Branding Website
• The Feeder Site

In today’s post, I’m going to talk about the first two types of website, which are really just specific types of minisites.

What is a minisite, you say? A minisite is a small website that consists of just a few pages. A basic minisite is comprised of:

1. The Landing Page
This is the page the visitor first encounters. It is the page that asks them to either take the action you request or leave. The action you request can be to opt-in (a squeeze page) or to purchase a product (a sales page).
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It has been said that if you don’t have a list, then you don’t have a business. So, how do you collect prospect’s names and market to them through your website?

You have an opt-in box that collects their names and email addresses and loads them into an autoresponder.

In this post, I’m going to concentrate on the design aspects of these two key parts of your website.

The Opt-In Box

Your opt-in box should be prominent on your home-page. It should be “above the fold” — that is people should have to scroll down the page to get to it, and it should stand out from the rest of the page.

Now, there are some exceptions to this rule — as in cases where the home-page’s primary purpose is not to collect prospect’s names — but, for the most part, these rules hold.
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Before you even think about what your website will look like, you should consider what to call it and where it will live. This is your domain (what you call it) and hosting (where it will live). Even by themselves, these two aspects of your website could easily take up the entire article, but I’ve decided to cover these more quickly, so we can move on to more important aspects of web design in later articles this month.

Your Domain Is Your Website’s Identity

Domain names are to websites as titles are to novels … and a little bit more. Your domain should accomplish several things:

• Clearly identify what your business or website is about.
• Capture interest in visiting the website.
• Help with search engine optimization.
• Be easy to understand and remember.
• Support your brand.

I know there are a lot of domains out there that don’t make sense by themselves: Yahoo.com, Yuuguu.com and more. Most of them are tech companies with a budget to build around branding. And that’s not what I’m addressing here. I’m focused on the domain name that an author, speaker or coach should have.
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