Some guidelines for Website Design
You have a great product. You also have a great company image and marketing model. Now it is time to implement all your plans and bring together a website. You know very little about websites. Finding websites that have failed is easier than shooting fish in a barrel. Many people come into the internet business with the notion that if they are on the web, they are guaranteed to make money. Not so. The internet market is flooded these days, and in order to get noticed, there is a way to do things.
So, your first idea for a website is one with lots of things that move, flash, talk, or whatever. Most people think this is the best way to draw attention to their website. It draws attention, but if no one knows what your company is, they won’t find the website this way. It also can be a little annoying to visitors. Websites must be picked up by the search engines in order for people to start finding them. However, search engines do not like all those elements because in the search engines view it is the equivalent of a novel, when all they are looking for is a one page report. Granted, once you are a large established business like a television network or a shopping corporation, people will come to your site no matter what, and search engines lessen the penalty for using lots of heavy files.
Now you think you want the easy way out and want to go with a template website. Templates are a cheap and quick way to get a website live on the internet. There are different types of templates, but the ones you want to stay away from are those which are nothing but images. These websites are created in a photo editor so that all the components of the site like buttons, information, and descriptions are all just pictures of text, and not actual text. Search engines use programs that review your website to read what it’s all about. If all they see are image files, it doesn’t really tell them anything about the website. You also run into the same problem of presenting a book rather than a piece of paper. Images are large files, while pure text is not. It is in fact quite small in comparison.
So you realize you are going to have to put some work into the site to have it look how you want, and also be functional for search engines looking at it. Text is very important. All your buttons should be text. All your descriptions and company information should be text. Choose a layout that is easy to navigate with menus to locate all pages within the site. Also important is a site map. A site map will help you keep your site organized and it will help the search engines when they come to visit your site.
Choose a search engine optimization company that will help review your site. They can pick out things you may not notice. For example, design editors can help clean up html code and find any spelling errors. They can also help you choose the best web site design elements that will make your site look how you want, and also make it search engine friendly.
About the Author
This article was written by Angela Oliver for Web Submission Services as an informational piece for website owners. Please visit Web Submission Services for more information about web site design and search engine optimization. -
Are you losing customers because of a poor website design? A slow-loading site can mean web shoppers give up - meaning shoppers are likely to abandon a website if it takes longer than four seconds to load, a survey suggests.
The research by Akamai revealed users’ dwindling patience with websites that take time to show up.
It found 75% of the 1,058 people asked would not return to websites that took longer than four seconds to load.
The time it took a site to appear on screen came second to high prices and shipping costs in the list of shoppers’ pet-hates, the research revealed.
Akamai consulted those who shop regularly online to find out what they like and dislike about e-tailing sites. About half of mature net-shoppers - who have been buying online for more than two years or who spend more than $1,500 (?788) a year online - ranked page-loading time as a priority.
It found that one-third of those questioned abandon sites that take time to load, are hard to navigate or take too long to handle the checkout process.
The four-second threshold is half the time previous research, conducted during the early days of the web-shopping boom, suggested that shoppers would wait for a site to finish loading.
To make matters worse, the research found that the experience shoppers have on a retail site colours their entire view of the company behind it.
About 30% of those responding said they formed a “negative perception” of a company with a badly put-together site or would tell their family and friends about their experiences.
Further research by Akamai found that almost half of the online stores in the list of the top 500 US shopping sites take longer than the four-second threshold to finish loading.
The survey questioned 1,058 net shoppers during the first six months of 2006. Consultants Jupiter Research did the survey for Akamai.
About the Author
Find out more about accessible web design at Accessibility101, SEO at Hobo, and Internet Marketing at InternetMarketing101.
