Site Content You may think that scrolling banners and funny animations are the way to go with a site, but be aware that these will often make a serious shopper look elsewhere. Good content must be the basis of every site. What you include on your web site must be up-to-date, different, brief, interesting and most important, it must grab the reader’s attention. Fresh content is not stale and contains no outdated information and unique content is original with no text plagiarized from other sites. Always stay away from duplicated content off of other web sites. You cannot have random content! It must be relevant to your services or products offered. Your website can look pretty, but it’s the content that will attract new visitors and ensure the return of old ones. Also, content is a huge part in the search engine optimization process.
Time Required For Site to Load Be sure it doesn’t require too much time for your site to load. You site will be slowed down by animations or large image banners and videos which hit page load times. Nobody wants to take 2 or 3 minutes before they see your site. Keep in mind your web site pages should move like the magazine pages turn. Flashes and videos should be included on your site just when you need it. So when you have fewer unnecessary flashes and videos, your site will be easier to use and better for the search engines.
Navigation Say you click on the one hyperlink and find yourself unable to go back to the page you were just on, or back to the home page. This makes website visitors angry. A constant navigation bar should appear in a fixed position on each page of your website. Verify that every page on your site has a good amount of links to different pages. Your navigation should be simple and direct. Stay away from flashy, complicated, dark color navigation buttons or difficult navigation menus that will not work efficiently.
Worthless Page Titles This is an error that most web designers make a lot. Either there isn’t any title on the page or a worthless title such as “here is my company name’. Some absentminded designers actually don’t put a title on the page, which is very unprofessional. Then you will notice all pages on your website have the same title. Page titles like this have no value for visitors and the search engines. Page titles are intended to provide a small description of every page on your site. The main keywords for your business should be included in the page title, if you intend to raise your website engine ranking.
Browser Support You used to only have a choice between a couple of browsers. Now there are many popular options, and each one will make your page appear different to the viewer. As for Internet Explorer, pages are shown different ways in the three versions that are different. While still in the design stage, make sure to test to ensure that your website looks good and is operational with each of the major browsers. Many designers fail to ensure that your site works well with the most popular browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari, etc. A great way to ensure the compatibility of the site, check it with Lynx ( a popular text-base browser in Linux). Once you verify that it’s compatible with Linux, you can work on other web browsers.
URL Structures and Site Map Basically, dynamic and Static URL’s are the two types of URLs. When a database driven website turns up in a search, dynamic URLs are generated, sometimes appearing in this format: http://www.yoursite name.com/product/productid?= 2345&sort=date. Search engines and visitors will be very perplexed by this. Be sure that your page URLs for your site are fixed like this http://www.yoursite name/items/shoes.html. Static URLs are good for users and also search engines.
Also be sure to have your website include a site map. Both visitors and search engines can use the site map as a navigation map. Naturally, you need to create two types of maps for each of them. A website with numerous inner pages can cause confusion in your visitors, and a site map can guide them to whichever page they want to get to. In addition, site maps aid search engines in locating as many pages as possible, as well as tracking those pages that experience frequent updates and changes.
Old Pages As we saw when we started and mentioned about having relevant information on your website, this also means that the information has to be current and the old information taken off or put in the archives periodically. Using stale news and outdated information on websites that provide current news, events and updates is a big no-no, since it makes your audience leery of your company and brand. Be sure all areas on your site are kept current now and then, giving the people who visit your website and the search engines something to think about each time they visit.
Too much creativity Some web sites have too much flashiness, dim backgrounds or music and sounds when the pages of the site open up. Except for the owner of the site, the average visitor will find these sites confusing. It’s just as bad to be overly creative in web design as it is to over-think web design. Try to have a basic web site as much as possible.
These are several important web designing suggestions that all site owners can use to expect to meet their goals and web purpose.
Stephen Grisham, Sr. is a copy writer for InfoServe Media, LLC. Please visit if you are looking to create a website, or if you just need a few changes to an existing site, InfoServe Media also offers website maintenance.
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