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. |
