Designing a
website is not as easy as most people think it is ,
Major Concept among the people is that web site
designing is relatively easy and you can do any
thing with front page and dream weaver and they
forget to follow important basic steps.
Designing a
website is a lot more than just knowing hypertext
markup language or Ms Front Page. When it comes to
your website, additional care and attention should
be paid to every minute detail to make sure it
performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are
ten crucial guidelines to observe to make sure your
website performs well.
1 - Good Design
or website theme/ template Your website is the hub
of your internet business enterprise; it is the
virtual representation of your company whether your
company exists physically or not. When you are doing
business online, people cannot see you physically
like how they could if they were dealing with an
offline company.
Hence, people
do judge you by your covers. This is where a good
design comes in. If your site is designed shabbily
and looks like a five minute "quick fix",
you are literally shouting to your visitors that you
are not professional person and you do not care for
quality.
2 - Avoid
Broken Links If your website is full of broken
links, it damages your web site credibility. broken
links annoy visitors and look very unprofessional.
But broken links to your site (called back links)
can hurt you too. The time you spend building up
"link popularity" is wasted.
3 - Avoid
Irrelevant Contents The content of your web site
should be according to its purposes. Although the
World Wide Web has a lot of important non-textual
more graphical uses, *smile* but most people who use
it spend an overwhelming amount of their online time
reading words on a pages. So well written, well
edited quality contents are all important for the
success of any website.
4 - Don't use
Animated or still splash pages Splash pages are the
1st pages you see when you reach a website's home
page. They commonly have a very beautiful image with
words like "welcome" or "click here
to enter".
As a matter of
fact, they're simply that -- pretty vases with no
real function. Do not let your visitors have a
reason to click on the "back" button! Give
them the value of your site up front without the
splash page.
5 - Always make
simple / uncomplicated and clean website navigation
When you are designing a web page always keep in
mind to offer a simple / uncomplicated and very
straight forward website navigation menu so that
even a newbie or a young child will know how to
navigate to your website.
Never use
complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered
dropdown menus. If your visitors do not know how to
navigate, they'll leave your website, Don't confuse
your visitors because confusion means "abandon
ship"! And always make a site map for the
website.
6 - Avoid Page
Counters. Of course you must be concern about
traffic of your Web site. But Page especially
offsite counters does not tell you anything useful.
Page counter is of no use to the reader and you can
get this information from website stats option in
your hosting control panel.
7 - Don't use
unreasonable banner and text links for affiliates
Never make your web site a link farm specially the
home page, one or in some cases two banner ads are
more than enough for the home page. So Instead of
putting dozens of banners and text links on a single
page, provide more valuable content and weave
relevant affiliate links into your content, and let
your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of
being pushed to buy.
8 - Avoid
Excessive Javascript and pop up ads on your site
Roll over or other javascripts is your choice and
your taste, I do not believe they do much for the
user experience. And Excessive javascript - Google
spider always find it difficult to crawl the pages
with excessive java scripts. And about pop ups i
will only say it's the most annoying invention since
blink tag.
9 - Avoid using
music / audio and Flash on your site If everybody is
using T1 Line or at least one mbps data transfer
then feel free to make a flash sites it will not
scare your visitors away but for 56 kbps try to
avoid flash pages.
About Music -
If your visitors are going to stay a long time at
your website, reading your content, you'll need to
make sure they are not annoyed by some audio looping
on and on on your web site. Unless your site itself
is music related, do not make the user jumping for
the volume controls. They might be at home with
someone asleep in the room. Or worse, at work.
If you live and
die for music, let the default be without music and
let the user choose to activate the music / audio.
10 - Few small
things to consider before publishing the web page.
a - A web page
must loads in min 10 sec or max 20 sec for 56 kbps
b - A web page
has no more than 30 kb in text and 30 kb in
graphics.
c - HEAD, TITLE
and META exists and must be filled out properly.
d - And at the
end I must say keep your pets away from your
website. Picture of your Dalmatian will look good on
your 360, my space or any other blogs but it will
not look good on your business website.
About the
Author
_K_M_
(Certified Internet Webmaster)
KmReports.com
- Reports, Ebooks and articles about search
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