When it comes to website styles, there are too many to list so for this article so we’ll discuss the most popular styles on the Internet today.

Since the invention of the World Wide Web in the nineties, the Internet has become a market place for anyone aspiring to make money on-line by building a website and selling a product or service.

After the Dot Com crash around 2000, Internet entrepreneurs have been reinventing themselves. The Internet still produces millionaires, just not at the same rate as the nineties.

These Internet pioneers have done so based on billions of dollars in sales that are generated each year by way of the Internet and there is no end in sight. If you have a product or service, the world is your oyster and you can also participate in the post dot com market. Websites are going up at rates too difficult to put an actual number on.

Beginners try their hand at building websites and often find themselves getting stuck with how to get a site up and running. The first step is to find the style of website that fits the product or service you offer. Once you have figured out the style of website you want to build, make sure the product or service you offer is something that is in demand.

Technically, you can turn any website into a site that generates sales if you understand the basic needs of consumers. The most popular reasons people buy products on the Internet are simple. They want to be happy, healthy, wealthy and sexy. Keep these motivating factors in mind as you build your profitable website.

Your website must satisfy the needs of consumers. This will require you do market research to see if your product or service is in demand. You can find out by searching the web to see how many people are already searching for what you’re selling. If the numbers are high, you have a good chance of experiencing success.

The big quest for information has opened up a plethora of websites that sell self help EBooks. EBooks can be found on just about any subject you can imagine. People have strong desires to consume information that will help them improve their lives.

The word Infopreneur is a play on the word entrepreneur. An Infopreneur style website has become popular due to authors selling eBooks on how to do things yourself.

eBay on-line stores were made popular when people found out they had merchandise stored in their garage that other people would pay money for; such as old bicycles, shoes, clothes and just about anything you can think of.

Affiliate marketing websites are extremely popular nowadays also. Major companies pay a percentage from sales of their product if the sale of the product was initiated from your website. There is an art to this type of website that must be studied before you try it.

A personal website is tougher to sell from depending on who you are. The famous Kardashian’s are able to sell products from their personal websites mostly because of their fame and notoriety.

Google AdSense websites have made a few website owners wealthy. AskTheBuilder.com is a good example of a successful Google AdSense website. This style of website must be about a popular product or subject and get tons of traffic.

Ecommerce websites can be lucrative and definitely provide a service for the public such as eBay, Walmart, Target and many others. Ecommerce websites usually have a multitude of products and a huge warehouse to store them.

Last but now least is the Review website style. This website model can also be lucrative because it provides a service in the form of sharing a personal experience you had with the product.

You love it so much that you write a review about it and share it with the world. You also highly recommend that consumers buy it based on your experience. Because you recommend the product and help facilitate the sale of it through your website, you get a percentage of the sale.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of website styles to look at. As you surf the net you’ll see hundreds more. As you look to decide on the type of website you want to build to make money, always keep the goals of the consumer in mind.

My Top Three Tips for Building a Successful Website.

1. Discover the style of website you want to build.
2. Understand consumers are driven to be happy, healthy, wealth and sexy.
3. Sell products and services that solve problems for consumers.

About the Author: Wendell Harvey – For more comprehensive info on website styles visit my website at CreateAWebsitePlan.com where you will also find articles on domain registration names, website story boarding, and how to get past road blocks when building websites.

Font type and size. What boring elements, but what important ingredients in any written communication. We often don’t notice font, even when we can’t read it: it’s almost completely transparent.

Writing for the web however forces us to use a completely different set of rules, and those rules created for hard copy writing don’t really apply any more. For example, when writing for print you should really use a Times-like font when writing, because the slight serifs (the small marks at the end of each leg of a letter) allow the reader to quickly separate and identify the letters more quickly than any other letter. This is part of the meta-information of a document: it facilitates meaning without meaning something itself.

However, the rule is different for the web. Researchers have found that sans-serif fonts, specifically Verdana or Helvetica, work the best. People can more easily read on the screen when using these fonts. Thus, when setting font type, these are perhaps the best used.

Actually many specify “verdana, sans-serif;” just to be safe. In such a case if verdana is not available, the available sans-serif will be displayed. This might be a trend, after all web design is design after all, but research has demonstrated that sans-serifs seem to enhance understanding when reading online information.

Maybe it has something to do with how we read online. We scan for information, when we find that information we concentrate on it, and then move on. We tend to skip to topics sentences throughout a page. Thus, perhaps words in san-serifs stand out more. And because we aren’t reading an immense amount of text, we don’t need the same strategies we use when reading hard copy documents (with which we typically read much more than we do online anyway).

With regards to font size: larger is not better! Large fonts make for awkward reading, and it is difficult to use the space effectively to find the information we’re looking for when the words are too big. A font size of what would be equivalent to 11 pt typically are the best. Sans-serif fonts tend to be larger, so scaling it back down from what we would normally use on hard copy (12 pt) is needed anyway.

You can use bigger font sizes, of course, for headings and titles, but try to limit the amount of larger font sizes used: it actually detracts from understanding and it’s hard to see the entire screen easily when the font size of any element is large.

Using colors with text is tricky. Web designers used to erroneously think that bright colors would attract people to read something. They also felt that some type of rainbow effect was useful or would be catchy somehow. It was actually more kitsch than catch.

The rules of contrast apply especially to screen. Light background and dark font need to be used to effectively communicate. Because we scan screens for information, you need to use effective contrast to highlight information. We will quickly miss important information that blends in with the background.

The size of the page, and the amount of text on it are also extremely crucial to aiding people in their task of finding and understanding information. As we graze over a web page, we are scanning back and forth for specific pieces of information. Thus, long paragraphs tend to hamper our attempts. The more information we put in a paragraph, and the longer it is, the more people have to scan.

This will cause a couple of things to happen. People will either get frustrated and leave, or they will not find the information they need because it’s buried under a layer of text they don’t need. Thus breaking up the paragraphs into smaller, more manageable chunks of information–usually by subtopic–is necessary to help people find information.

Many experts recommend what’s called the upside-down pyramid approach to organizing information. Unlike hard copy writing strategies, where we introduce a topic and gradually get to the point, we want to quickly give the important information at first and then fill in the details. Readers will first read the important info, perhaps the first or topic sentence of a paragraph, and then determine what they want to read next.

Also, the length of a page can be a detriment to design. Long, scrolling pages are harder to navigate as well, according to many studies. Users would rather skip to the next page, just like when reading a book, than scroll through a bunch of information they don’t need. We don’t use things like papyrus scrolls anymore, after all, so it’s hard for users to adjust to finding information in that manner.

To enhance the amount of information the user gets, we need to also try to constrain the viewing information as well as the amount of information we are giving. Thus, the viewing size in which the primary information is given should be reduced. This makes the reading task more familiar to users because, again, it’s more like reading hard copy, which is how we were originally taught to read: small pages with small bits of information. We weren’t originally trained on the landscaped rectangles we use to view web pages on, thus it just doesn’t seem natural.

Writing for the web isn’t hard, it just takes a different set of considerations than writing for print.

About The Author – Clinton R. Lanier is a professor of web design and technical communication in Las Cruces, NM. An expert in web design, usability, interface design and technical communication, he regularly consults as a web designer and communication consultant. Contact at www.lanier-infomedia.com.