What is the best way to design a Minisite?

As the economy is still recovering from recession and domain name buying is not at the best time, domainers are now openly developing their domain names into minisites. Some people develop minisites from own designs like PHP or .NET while others go for prebuilt scripts like JoomLa, Drupal, or Wordpress. All it comes down to is what design should you use for your minisites, here’s what I think should be the best approach into making minisites…

… As we all know, minisites have existed for a very very long time, some people have even developed an empire out of it. What’s different is that some design it really 1.0 ish and some have really stepped up with their designs. What we all need to remember here is that these are ‘investments‘ and like any other investment, we expect a good return on investment (ROI). Common ways of earning money thru minisites are Pay-per-click (PPC), Affiliate Marketing and Direct Advertising.

For this article, I’ll be using my minisite LodgingBeach.COM as an example. LodgingBeach is a minisite catered to give information on various US beach lodging and allow people to compare prices for their hotels.

Logo

– The goal here is for people to remember–

I believe Logo is one of the most important thing in designing a minisite, it has to reflect your domain name more graphically so people could remember it better. It somehow gives you more credibility and a better feel to it. I usually spend a day or two in designing about the logo. I believe that having images will help ease the visitor’s view of too much text (information overload) especially if you use PPC advertisements (Text ads). The overall color of the logo design will then be used as your website’s colors.

Design and Layout

– Clean and easy to read –

The layout must be clean and minimalist (web 2.0 design standard). To save myself a little time, I tried to find all types of free wordpress themes that I felt was suitable. I then tweaked the whole theme to add a welcome remark and advertisements. The Layout was really clean and well structured which is why I chose it. I also added graphics on the top to make it feel more alive. I’ve also added navigation on the top and links to different pages on the sidebar to get people to go around my website easily. Keep it Simple and don’t add to much to it, your design goal is to make it easy for your visitors to understand and be able to use it.

Content design

– Content must be designed for ads –

Considering that it is the content that people land on when they search for something in search engines, it is important that we design it in such a way that we can get good revenues from it. What I’ve always used is to give it a wide space around 700 – 800 px, give it more space and avoid information overload. Images should be added to liven the contents up, there’s nothing more boring than just reading all the text without something to graphical to see. Include links to other pages that your website has, I’ve added a related beach articles on the bottom of the website (not included in screenshot). If they’ve searched for that page, they’re probably interested in other articles that you might have.

Revenue and Advertisement Placements

– PPC, Affiliate Marketing or Direct Advertising must blend in –

What’s most important for me, when designing the minisite, is where should I place the advertisements. It is a very tricky subject and has lots of ways around it, my approach is to include the advertisements without sacrificing the visitor’s experience to just click and never come back and not to cover my contents that people are confused. I believe that we must insert advertisement in every page of the minisite (except the contact and about). Place them seamlessly with the design that it doesn’t block or make people confused. I believe honesty is best that people know that we have to make money to give free information. Use the sidebar to display the ads that are big in size and can cover up a good space (like boxes and skyscrapers). Notice as well the font color is a bit light, this is because I wanted the advertisements to standout and be noticed more. Insert Advertisements in your content in such a way that it doesn’t bother your readers too much, don’t worry if they’re interested they’ll click. In the case of LodgingBeach, I’ve used PPC and Affiliate Marketing to earn revenues. In which case, I have given priority to affiliate marketing as it is supposed to lead to better revenues.

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