It seems like everyone is marketing things online these days, but some of the internet marketing examples you find online or in marketing strategy books just don’t seem to fit with your site or your marketing plan. Some, in fact, deal with spamming or posting your website all over, and you may not be very comfortable with that. Below are some marketing examples that may be more in like with your personal philosophy.

The more important practice in internet marketing is to be careful with your website. Many people, especially those who have never done a website before, want to make it very colorful or use a lot of fancy animation and such. After all, the idea is to make it grab the viewer’s attention, right?

Not exactly! While walking past a decorated store window may grab people’s attention, it doesn’t quite work that way online. No one is simply walking past your site—if they’re on your page, they you’ve got their attention. What you want to convey right off is what your site or business is about and what you can offer them, not blind them with bright colors.

Those fancy flash menus, movies, and animation aren’t necessary, either. The menus can be fine, but you want to minimize the number of animations and large graphics on your main page. These graphics can take extra time to download, and the animations might actually cause your viewer’s computer to act up if they don’t have the right version of Flash or other add-on installed.

The menus, too, can cause some issues with older versions of internet browsers. Look for some internet marketing examples that use menus that require no extra add-ons or use add-ons that are very, very common. You don’t want a potential customer leaving your website in annoyance because your menu didn’t load or work correctly.

Be aware of the amount of content on your pages, too. Users don’t always want to read huge chunks of text on their monitors, especially since it bothers some people’s eyes. Instead, break up your text into different pages. That’s not to say that you want a bunch of short pages, but you want each major topic or area to have its own page.

If you’re selling items from your website, make certain to set up a way to search your site for particular items. You’ll also want to allow the user to browse your products by different ways—product name, price, and product category are good ideas. Give your customer as many options for finding things as you can.

It’s hard to say exactly what a “great” website is, especially since what’s good and bad can differ by industry or niche. The best advice for designing your website and for marketing on the internet in general is to look at sites in the same market as your site. Incorporate things you like from those sites into yours. The best internet marketing examples, after all, are successful site that attract a lot of customers.