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If your site is for a business, you've got to make sure visitors
have every opportunity to spend money at your site. The opportunity to
contact or instigate communications should be clear on every page.
Do not miss the impulse buyer.
Take extra care in
designing your site so it looks professional, is easy to navigate, and gets marketed
properly.
If your home page fails to entice because the images are too large,
you're using sound
files for no reason, the page takes forever to download, there's offensive material,
the
text isn't readable, and so on
- then your visitors will hit the Back button faster than a
politician changes position on the issues.
Navigation of a site is consider to be one of
the most importance aspect of a site. You DO NOT want visitors to get lost in your site.
There are three things a home page should convey to the visitor:
1. The site's purpose - the who, what, when, where, and why
2. What kind of content is contained in the site
3. How to find that content (Navigation or search)
When designing a navigation system on a website, you need to consider the following
factors:
1. The first screen
2. Navigation tools -
buttons, text links and sitemaps
(avoid frames if you can)
3. Consistency
MS Publisher produces image heavy sites
with voluminous code when converted to HTML
(The coding that the Internet uses). This
will make your pages slow. If you have a
WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get)
program such as MS FrontPage, it would be
better to use that.
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So to expand a little .......
1. EFFICIENT NAVIGATION.
Make it easy for the user to navigate your site. If you are selling
something, let the client find it in three clicks. Make
certain there is always an obvious way to return to the home page from anywhere within
your site.
2. ORGANIZED MESSAGE.
The user should be immediately presented with a description of your site ... what it's for
and what's in it.
3. MARKETING.
Basic marketing rules apply to
websites as they do to bricks and mortar stores.
Have a marketing plan and apply it
4. LOADING TIME.
Users will not wait. You have about 10-seconds to
catch and keep a visitor. Your home page should load quickly. Ensure this by keeping
graphics small and backgrounds simple and by using height and width tags with every
graphic. The height/width tags will force the text to
load first giving the user something to read while the graphics load. It is also a good
idea to use ALT tags with the graphic tag so that the graphic is identified to the user
while it loads.
5. UPDATE FREQUENTLY.
Ensure that visitors will return to your site by constantly updating its content. The home
page should include the date your site was last revised.
6. GIVE SOMETHING BACK.
It has become commonplace on the Internet to give you visitors useful related information
in addition to what you are "selling." Most common example is to provide links
to other, similar sites on the Internet.
7. LINKS
Try and obtain
links from an existing successful web site to your new site. This
will help being recognised on the Search Engines.
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