With millions of competing websites, designing a website, let along a successful website with a high ranking, can be quite daunting. The following ?Ten Secrets for a Killer Website? will help give you an edge on your competition: 1. Custom vs. Templated ? A Custom website is a website that is totally designed and formatted with original material. A Templated website is constructed from a list of premade designs and formats that you pick from. Which is the best route to go? If you are interested in attracting customers to your site and converting them to a paying customer, then a custom website is the only way to go. A Templated website does not receive a high search engine ranking in Google or Yahoo. Search engines do not like sites that are duplicates of other sites, so they give them a far less ranking. What is the use of a website if people can?t find you? A Custom site gives you a uniqueness that fits your business and message. A templated website restricts you in choice of colors, images, and layouts. Custom is the best way to go. 2. Fonts, Content, and Placement ? Do not use font sizes that are too small. You should use 10 point or larger. Smaller font sizes are too difficult to see and read. Never run more than 52 characters across the screen, so as to not lose the reader. That is why news print is in narrow columns. It is easier to read. Pick a font style that is widely used on the Internet and personal computers. If you are using too fancy of a font, the text becomes difficult to read. Some safe fonts to use are Times New Roman and Arial. These are fonts that are available on most all computers. If you use a font that is not supported by a user?s computer, they will not see the text in the font you chose. They will see it in the font that is set to default on their computer. It is very important to use only common fonts. Make sure that the content (text) of your site is useful information; information that your customer can use. Place your most important content towards the upper left-hand corner of your site. Research has shown that your visitor will start in the left hand corner of a website and move across the page to the right and then down. Use bolding and larger font size to draw attention to a phrase or word. Do not use underlining, as it has come to communicate that the underlined text is a hyperlink. All of your text should be flush left and not centered. It is more difficult to read if it is centered. Use good headlines and subtitles to draw attention to an area. 3. Advertising (PPC) ? Once you have a website, how are people going to know about it? It is interesting that some people have this idea that once they have a website up and running that customers will flock to it. “Well,” they say, ?I now have a website and people will do a search and find me there and come to my site.” Don?t be fooled! How many other competitors do you have selling your same product on the Internet? Let?s say that you sell printed business cards. So if you do a Google search on the keyword phrase ?Business cards printed,” you?ll find that there are 20,700,000 listings for that search. That means that there are over 20 million other sites competing for that searcher?s attention. How in the world can you compete with that? Well, if you notice on the first few pages you?ll see ?sponsored links”. Some are in the top left section, and some are down the right side of the page. These are your competitors that are paying to advertise in top positions on Google. Does it work? Absolutely, or you wouldn?t be seeing so many every time you do a search. These ads are called ?paid per click” (PPC) ads. This means that every time someone clicks on their ad, Google charges them. Some ads can be as cheap as 10 cents per click, and some can be as expensive as $20 a click. It is the advertisers that determine the cost based on what they are willing to bid for a position. The stiffer the competition, the higher the bid price. You can learn more about PPCs by going to http://adwords.google.com.