The greatest challenge to having a presence in the online world lies in having a great website. How can yours be different, provide useful service and attention-catching? That's right, if you don't catch your visitors attention right away, statistics shows us that your visitors will come and go within 15 seconds or less.
1. Get Easy - Easy usable and understandable. Do it right. Let the visitor know it is easy to do business with you. Easy to order, easy to buy, easy to subscribe, easy to contact, get always help. Simplicity is actually key. Avoid the pomp exhibited by illustrations, animations, flashy images, java text scrolling, fade-ins, black spaces and GIF.
2. Site Navigation - Be sure that there is an organized hierarchy of text links on your site. Your home, service, contact page should be accessible from every page. Place the links that would take your visitors smoothly from one page to the next without causing confusion. Also navigation menu name should be meaningful, get easy meaning to reach there.
3. Genuine Content - An information-rich website ends up to a very popular one in the long run. Not only will your visitors obtain relevant data from your site - optimized content will also make your site fair well in the search engine results. Giving your entire web page no more than 40k-80k in size. Anything drastically more will result in the loss of many visitors from slow downloading pages.
4. Placement of Content & Graphics - Don’t over populate your site with images because search robots can’t understand them. But you need those anyway because users get drawn to images than they do with text. Balance is the key.
5. Get sticky - Next, it is important to make your Web site as “sticky” as possible. In the early days of the Internet, many business Web sites seemed like online Yellow Pages-type ad. Today, people expect more. They want a reason to stick around. This takes many forms:
- Have a straightforward site to promote your products or services
- Have an easy way to communicate with you or buy your products
- Have interesting articles or blogs
- Offer an e-newsletter
- Offer streaming video or podcasts
- Create message boards
- Connect with social bookmark sites
You get the idea. If you are going to sell products, make sure they are either unique or useful. Name brands are valuable, too.
6. Bullet Points - People tend to scan rather than read when they are online. Bullet points are good because they separate the text and are easy to scan quickly. Statistics show that odd numbered bullet points work best using 3-5 rather than 4-6.
7. Less is more - If you have seen Google’s website, you know what this means. Less bytes means faster loading of web pages.
8. Consistency in design is important - Don’t overdo your website that every page dons a different color scheme. Visitors may think that they’re in an entirely different site and leave. Go for uniform pages at all times.
9. Site Map & Search Feature - If you website is more than 20 pages, it is useful to have a site map or a “Search” feature to ensure your visitors can easily find what they’re looking for.
10. Browser Compatibility - Test your site using different browsers. What seems good with Internet Explorer may not look well for Mozilla. Test your pages with every popular browser used online to ensure a more professional look for your site. Now the latest browsers also very popular like as chrome and others.
11. Encourage Visitors - Why delay? Order today! Now is good, today is better! This word invites the visitor to take action today. Tell them why today is better than tomorrow and that's even better. Encourage them to buy from you today.
12. Make sure there are no broken links on your site - Nothing frustrates internet surfers more than seeing the “Page cannot be displayed” message on their computer screen.
13. Tell a Friend - Encourage your online visitors to spread the word about your site. Ask them to refer a friend and make it easy for them to do this.
14. Avoid mistakes - There are three mistakes people make when designing their small business site
- The site is too busy or looks unprofessional
- They spend too much
- There is no usability feedback so they don’t know what works or what people like.
15. More Information - Have a secure and automated server. Usage statistics, what's new, what's old (tours, outline), autoresponders, newsletter, bad URL checkers, and search engines are some of the tools webmasters should utilize. Keep notice on the following sections:
- Tracking
- Automation
- Searching
- Security
- Well-organized
- Interactive
- Responsive
- Attractive
Each web page should reflect the intended outlook of the whole site. Your main aim should be inform. Ensure you have sufficient information on what the site is all about. Have publications on the topics as well as tips. The basic rules of design should be reflected clearly. That is, rhythm, design, proportion, unity and dominance.
