Having been in online marketing over a decade (really more) I have seen my share of good and bad design. I'm also a certified webmaster and SEO consultant. I have revamped websites for companies and brought life back into a once dying online presence.

There are many facets of what makes a website stand out and shine. Some are pretty darn obvious. While others are a bit more subtle and have great psychological effects on the visitor. I pay close attention to the subtle ones. It could as simple as changing a few words to a site title. Split testing has shown to be incredibly helpful and doubling conversion rates with slight image or text changes.

Another subtle feature is the closing Author Box.

My very first author box was a small photo and a scanned image of my signature. Years back this was popular and effective. It was a step above from the standard name only that was cold and in the same typeface as the rest of the article.

The photo AND the scanned signature provided not only flair, but an emotional connection to the reader. It "felt" more genuine. Conversions were much better when I changed to this format.

Later on, I tweaked it a bit. And, depending on the niche for my website, I would change up the wee images that I chose to embed along with my signature. You may have seen one of my more recent author boxes (signature files) like this: