One of the primary keys to a successful website is a good design. A
poorly designed site actually discourages visitors from even getting to
your site, and to leave quickly when (and if) they arrive. A well designed
site encourages people to visit and to remain once they find it. In fact,
the best designed sites encourage communication, which in turn causes
people to continue to visit time after time.
So what is this thing called a "well designed web site"? In concept it
can be summarized in a few words:
A well designed web site communicates and encourages communication.
It's as simple as this statement implies. However, the implications of
this statement are far reaching and critical to the success of your web
site. For example, one of the critical questions to ask yourself when you
are designing your site is "who and what are you communicating with?" Why
is this important? Because in addition to your visitors with their complex
requirements, you area also communicating with search engine spiders,
internet mapping routines and other automated tools. These are critically
important to the success of your site.
Okay, so what do you need to do to make your site communicate to
everyone and everything possible? Some suggestions are listed below.
- Design Your Site
- Before you do anything, sit down and
think about your site. Virtually all successful projects begin with
good planning, analysis and design work. Leave out these steps and you
may find yourself reimplementing your site over and over. Think it takes
too long? Well, I have a question for you: "why is it everyone has time
to do it over but over time to do it right?"
- Alt Tags
- To make your site communicate better to those people (and search
engine spiders_ who do not view graphics, be sure and include
ALT tags with each image.
- Metatags
- You want to tell the search engines (and other spiders) about your
site? Include the proper Metatags on each
page. This helps improve your rankings on some search engines.
- Navigation
- Be sure that your navigation makes
sense. Help your visitors get around on your site by making it easy for
them to find things.
- Linking
- Ensure from the first day that all of the links within your own site
work perfectly. There is no excuse for broken internal links - these are
a sure sign of an amateur. As far as
external links go, accept the
fact that these will break occasionally. The web is a rapidly changing
environment and you will virtually never be notified when someone moves
a page or closes their site. Just check occasionally and update your
links as needed.
- Site Map
- A site map is similar in concept
to a table of contents. This is a great way to introduce your visitors
to the whole picture of your site in all of it's glory. It also helps
drive visitors (and spiders) to pages other than the few that they
happen to find via search engines.
- What's New
- Keep your visitors coming back by including "What's
New" sections on your home page and in a special section.
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Since the idea behind your web site is to communicate, why not
create a frequently asked questions
section? This answers the more common questions and helps prevent you
from getting overwhelmed with common, everyday requests for answers.
- Provide A Guestbook
- All good web sites provide a guestbook
function for their visitors. This gives people a way to communicate
their feelings about the site to the webmaster and the rest of the
world.
There are many, many other things you can do to create a good web
site design. Just remember your ultimate goal is to communicate
something. If you are selling a product, you are trying to communicate
about that product in such a way that your visitor wants to purchase it.
If your site is about your cat, than that is what you are communicating.
The better your design, the better your message gets across.
Additional Reading
- A well designed site is a pleasure and a money maker You need to consider many different factors when you design a web site. These include the purpose of your
site, audience and resources available.
- Types of Sites Here is a short list of the different types of web sites
- Here's how to disable the right click You want to annoy some users and make them chose other web sites? Try disabling the right click button!
- Some good design tips This article lists some of the things that you need to do to keep your visitors coming back.
- Some Good Design Tips Here are a few tips to help create a better web site.
- Contingency Design Be sure and help your visitors, even if they do something wrong. Handle misspellings and errors to get them back on track.
- First Things First Before you write one word of HTML code, even before you start your analysis, you must define your purpose.
- Who Is Your Audience? Before doing much of anything, you need to understand the group with whom you are communicating. By doing this, you will make your
job many times easier.
- What Do You Want To Communicate? Once you know who you are talking to, you should take some time to figure out what you want to say.
- How Do You Want To Communicate? Now it's time to decide what methods you want to use to communicate your message.
- Why Are You Creating A Site? It's important to know why you are creating a web site so you know when you are hitting your target.
- How To Get Around Your visitors are more likely to look at your whole site if your navigation scheme is logical and easy to use.
- Pulling Them In Deeper You want people to stay for as long as possible on your site. How do you do this? Great content and lots of cross linking.
- Put ALT tags on all of your graphics Be sure to include descriptive ALT tags on every image. Many search engines use this data. In addition, this makes your pages
better for people who surf without graphics turned on.
- Meta-Tags Be sure and set up your meta-tags properly if you want to be found by some search engines. (See also
HTML tag reference guide - <META>)
- What are Meta-Tags Useful For? There is a controversy among many webmasters - to use meta-tags or not? This article describes my opinion on the
matter.
- Navigation is critical to a web sites success Important fact to remember: search engines index ALL pages of your web site, and other sites may link to any
page. Thus, you MUST make sure that your users can navigate easily from anywhere to anywhere.
- Help your visitors by telling them what's new You want to help your visitors get to your site, and a good way to do that is to list what's new.
This makes it easy for them to get to where you want them to go.
- Good Design - External Links It's good to have some links to external pages, but oftentimes these links are more trouble than they are worth.
(See also Link Exchange can improve your hit count).
- Site Map You can aid your visitors to see your whole site by including a site map.
- Good Design - Custom 404 error page The 404 error page is generally pretty lame. If you can, you can use this as a tool to get your visitors deeper into
your site.
- Change Your Colors What should a good web site look like? Every other site on the planet or should it be unique?
- Avoid Mailto The inexperienced or unknowing webmaster tends to use mailto because it's easy. Avoid the temptation as it's got some problems.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.
