Five Steps to reduce the potential new business your firm’s website can generate.

Your firm finally has website published on the Internet for almost a year now, and it really does not seem to be producing the results you expected. To maintain the under-achievement of your website, be sure these common Internet errors all pertain to your website.

For just a few hundred more in design costs, you took your website designer’s advice and now have a ‘Flash’ entry page. Great flying graphics, sound.,. It’s like a movie introduction.

Downside: Unless you are an entertainment specialist, these intro pages can be a real turn-off, and very time consuming ...waiting for it to load. Many search engines have a very difficult time indexing heavily animated pages. With emphases always placed on the entry page’s content, this can, and has, caused sites to rank far down in standings for your firm’s keywords.

To prevent an overload of spam email, you decided to just have your contact information on your contact page. Plus, you followed your web designer’s advice again, and instead of publishing your email address, potential clients must fill out an on-line form for any concerns.

Downside: It’s a good design idea to place your firm’s complete contact information on each page of your site. You never know on which page a potential client may enter your site. It's a good idea to include this on EVERY page of your site in the same spot on the web page. On-line inquiry forms are fine but should not be used to the exclusion of your special email address. There are email scrambler programs that prevent spammers from automatically collecting your email address from your website. As this occurs in the background coding, the general visiting public will never know that you’re protecting your email this way.

When sending out email messages do not include your name, business name and contact information. People will easily recognize you by your email address such as:

in a day! Make it easy for your prospects to instantly know who you are or risk your message being "trashed". The preferred process here is to set up a ‘signature’ file for your email program. Plus, this signature file should include a hyper-link to your website. Here is my signature file:

Great idea using your free hotmail account for all your firm’s email needs. You can access it from anywhere, it has a good spam filter, and best of all, it’s free!

Downside: If you have your own domain address for your website, you should also have gotten email addresses personalized to that domain address. Example: My website address is www.websitetrafficbuilders.com. All of my staff have email addresses that promotes our domain address every time we use it, such as john@websitetrafficbuilders.com . It’s a turn-off for potential clients to see that you have an {{alphabet soup|everyday}, free mail account.

You were never really expecting much from the Internet so you found a great deal by getting your firm listed in a ‘legal directory’ becasue they threw in a free website.

Downside: To be efficient you must publish your web address on all your printed matter. With a free website, whose site are you really promoting? Plus, what happens if you decide not to continue your listing with this directory? Not only does a sub-domain website address look tacky, such as www.xyzlegaldirectory.com/petterman-law-firm.htm, they are almost impossible to gain meaningful search engine standings from without resorting to pay per click search engines.