Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 18 years 4 months 27 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
You have to look at your website from a customer standpoint, and make every page have the same identical buttons, all located in the same place etc. That’s important, because people will decide in less than 1/4 of a second if they’ll stay on your site or not.
There’s no point spending money to drive traffic if you’re not going to capitalize on those visitors that do arrive. Determine your goal for your site visitors. Is your desire to receive a phone call or quote form? Then that should be the focus of every page, with the phone number and “Get a free quote now” graphic on the header of every page.
Every single day I look at company websites that have no visible phone number, or hard to find contact information, and a general lack of insight about what their customers might actually be looking for. Unfortunately, these sites don’t just need search engine visibility, they need a user friendly redesign!
By contrast, every single day I also look at websites designed by industry leaders. Helping them fine tune their conversion rates (getting visitors to act in some fashion) and defining what their customers want has really opened my eyes.
One of my favorite websites, used to be http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/suckframe.htm which was updated quite a while ago to this more modern version http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/.
Both examples are chock full of bad design tips that may be hurting your website to this day. If you’re a business without a big budget, look at those sites for examples of what not to do that can quickly improve your websites profitability.
