Designing a website is not as easy as most people think it is , the concept that web site designing is relatively easy and you can do any thing with front page and dream weaver is unrealistic, you mustn't forget to follow the 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 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 a professional person and you do not care about 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 consistent. Although the World Wide Web has a lot of important non-textual, more graphical uses, most people who use it spend an overwhelming amount of their online time reading. So well written, well edited quality content are all important for the success of any website.
4 - Don't use Animated or still splash pages
Splash pages are the 1st page 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 provide 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 concerned about traffic of your Web site, but Page counters, especially offsite counters, do not tell you anything useful. The page counter is of limited use to the reader and you can get the same information from the 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, especially 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, 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. With excessive javascript google spider always finds it difficult to crawl the pages. 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 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 jump 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 - A Few small things to consider before publishing the web page.
a - A web page must load in 10 sec or max 20 sec for 56 kbps
b - A web page should have 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 - I must add - keep your pets away from your website. A picture of your Dalmatian is all very good on your 360, my space or any other blogs, but it will not look good on your business website.
