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Successful
Website Design Tips
There's
more to creating a professional website then having a nice
look and feel. Make sure your website lives up to the W3C
standards (www.w3.org). Test it with their 'tidy' tool. This
will make it easier for search engines to crawl your site,
and also helps to allow disabled users to navigate your website.
For example, a site with fixed font sizes (font sizes set
in pixels for examples) will make it impossible for people
that can't see well to view your site. In your browser, if
you go to 'View' and change the Text Size, you should still
be able to view your site without having the template stretch
or appear askew. This can be trickier then it sounds, but
good and proper use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can do
a lot to accomplish this.
Avoiding
'landing pages' also known as a 'splash page'. The majority
of people browsing the web have a 5 second limit to their
patience in having a web site load. If your site takes longer
then this you're going to loose a lot of traffic. You want
your site to inform anyone viewing it of exactly what your
website is about. This is also a key point in Search Engine
Optimization.
The
first headline on your home page should describe exactly what
you are about. Keep your site consistent. Do not have one
page appear differently then another if it can be helped.
Changing the format of your pages from page to page easily
confuses visitors and will cause a lot of people to hit the
'back' button before they get involved. Which brings us to
the next point; get the visitor involved. Your opening lines
should grab their attention, depending on the product or service
you may be selling, let them know why they should choose you
over your competitors.
Allow
for the possibility that your visitors can't see images, or,
for security reasons, have Javascript disabled. Any of your
website images should have an 'alt' (or alternative text)
set, that describes what the image is, even if it's something
as simple as 'placeholder' (e.g. for spacer images).
Many
of Search Engine Optimization articles will tell you how imperative
it is to 'splash' related keywords in your content. Looking
at a lot of top-ranking websites you'll see that this is hardly
the case. You will of course naturally use keywords in your
content that are related to the search phrases people will
use to find you. That is the key point, keep it 'natural',
search engines have evolved to expect this, and if anything,
penalize obvious 'synthetic' use of keywords. It looks like
spam to them.
Spend
time researching your target market. See what successful sites
in your avenue are doing. Your closest friend is your 'enemy'.
Think about what they've done and see if you can take it one
step further. Avoid popups. In all cases popups are considered
obtrusive and annoying. Anyone telling you that they are a
good way of grabbing peoples attention haven't spent any time
doing real market research. The fact is they drive people
away, I have in fact seem traffic greatly decrease on sites
that insisted on using them.
If
you plan on using database driven scripts, avoid the use of
'CGI' queries in your URL's. A good example of this would
be a URL that looks like
'http://localhost/mysite.cgi?page=my-designs&id=4934b'
There are methods that can be used, known as URL rewrites,
that will allow you to take cryptic
URL's
like this and have then appear 'friendlier'. A URL like that
can be rewritten as 'http://localhost/mysite.cgi/my-designs/4934b/all-about-my-designs.html
The later part of the URL does not even have to be used in
the script, but allows for a detailed description of what
that page is about. This makes a big difference in the way
search engines can index your pages as well.
I've
been designing and developing websites for over 7 years now.
This is a very condensed FAQ but I hope it will get you started.
You can view more information about me at http://www.techintense.com
Author: Colin Fredericks
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