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Building a Better WebsiteTips for Making Your Website Even Better
In the Corporate World, they call this: "Product: Continuous Quality Improvement" or "CQI".
Related to this idea of CQI is an old saying I once heard:
Once you stop learning, you stop having something to offer.
Making improvements doesn't have to be an everyday, 8 hours a day job. It's something you can work at on a less stressful schedule than what you had when you first set up your Website. I think you'll find that making improvements to your site will be more fun than work because the big job will be over. You will be tweaking your site and watching it get better and you will be learning new things as you go which will give you a feeling of accomplishment. As you think of improvements, observe your competition, see what they do and learn from them. Use Multiple Browsers to Checkout Your
Site
Your Websites success or failure depends on your visitors and the impact your Website makes on them. When you build your website remember that visitors will be using many different Web Browsers. The most popular Web Browsers in February of 2008, according to Market Share by Net Applications:
When you are checking out your Website, you'll want to use several of the browsers listed above. You will find that different browsers display some things differently, so you'll need to make the appropriate adjustments.
If there's one thing that Web users hate, it's pages that take too long to load. In the beginning of the Web, fancy graphics and online applets were cool. But now, if these graphics cause the page to take too long to load, they become obstacles in your path of getting to the information. Now, every second counts on the Internet. Recent studies show that users are getting more impatient and may go to another Website if they don't get sufficient visual results within 10 seconds after a page starts to load. So you may have great content, but if your visitors will not wait until it downloads, then they'll never see it and all your work will be in vain.
Have you ever seen these statements on a Website? Guess what the Web Builder has just done? He just told the visitor that if you want to experience my Website, go download this particular 25 meg browser file, install it on your computer, make the proper adjustments so it will work on your computer and also make the necessary adjustments so you can view my site. Then reboot your computer and then and only then, come back and visit my site. This is called "How to turn off visitors in EASY STEPS". People are influenced by the esthetic look of your design, and quality web design lends credibility to what you have to offer. Although good design is not the main reason people come to your site, it is a good way to keep them coming back.
Java Applet By adding a Java applet to a Web page, you can add special effects, interactivity, and more. Because some Web browsers provide settings for disabling or limiting the functionality of Java applets, an applet may or may not work correctly for all of your site's visitors. Applets can run slower and have a tendency to crash certain browsers, which can also crash a users machine. JavaScript Despite the name, JavaScript is only distantly related to the Java programming language, If you decide to use JavaScript or Java applets on your web site, just don't use them where the proper functioning of your website depends on them running without problems. For example, don't use them for your main menu system. If they break, then your visitors won't be able to navigate through your site. So I would recommend that you use them sparingly and only when absolutely necessary.
Browser Safe Web Colors are a group of 216 colors that work identically across platforms. Some years back, different web browsers had their own unique palette of 256 colors, but they all had these 216 colors in common. Back then, if you designed a graphic with colors that were not in the Browser Safe Color Palette, then your monitor would dither those colors in order to display them. Many times, the dithering would result in a dotted pattern that would be quite unsightly. Most computer monitors used today can display thousand or millions of colors and this is not an issue for them. If you want to make sure people with old computer monitors (that can only view 256 colors) can properly display your sight, then you'll want to use only the 216 safe colors. A good compromise to this situation would be to use Browser-Safe colors for flat-color illustrations, logos with flat-color, and areas in an image that have a lot of a single colors (like bullets, buttons, backgrounds and rulers). Simple graphics and flat colors look terrible when dithered, but photographs don't look near as bad.
Your navigation structure needs to be easy to understand. Do you have to supply a "user's manual" for your visitors to be able to navigate your site?
Don't Use Technical Terms or Web Jargon . The point of most Websites is to inform visitors about what you have and what you do. The last thing you want to do is turn off your visitors by speaking in a language that they don't understand. There are some Web savvy people on the Internet who will be able to absorb this kind of talk, but the majority of people who surf the Web are average people and it will be over their heads. If you have a business, neither do you want to use Marketing Lingo and Buzzwords. Most of the people you are talking to don't work for your competition, so they won't understand this kind of talk. Try and be as clear as possible. Provide information, not advertising puffery and grinning people. Just tell your visitors what you do.
Avoid using content that makes your business, product or information sound too good to be true. Yes, you want to increase your traffic and/or sell your products and services, but when you boast and brag more than you inform, most people will be skeptical of what you have. Some people will bite on this kind of bait, but you will turn off many as a result. You want your visitors to feel comfortable and welcome, so use your content to achieve this and to simply tell them the facts, not a "a big fish story". One sure way to irritate a customer is with pricing secrecy. Don't make a customer fill out a form to find out how much something costs. You'd be annoyed if you walked into a grocery store and had to fill out a form just to find out how much a loaf of bread costs. If you have a business or service where you must develop a quote in order to give a price to a customer, then you can't publish a price list. But you can set up a page that calculates several variables and gives rough quotes or a have a page listing some of the jobs you have completed and the costs. Customers want quick information, so give them as much as you can.
Don't make your visitors listen to your music. Just because you like it does not mean that everyone else will. It can be very distracting when someone is trying to figure out your site for the first time. If you must use music, then offer a clearly visible way that the visitor can turn it off.
For businesses, a Flash home page that moves and jumps so much that it makes you car sick or a splash page (which is a special landing page) may be a great way for a Web designer to show their talent, but for many customers it can be an annoyance. If you must have a splash page, at least provide a "Skip this" link Keep in mind, big flashy intros with loud, pulsating music can take forever to load and many visitors will go someplace else rather than wait. If you are setting up an informational or family site, you can be a little more adventurous with audio and visual presentations, but you still have to be careful about overdoing it. If you are doing it just so you can show everyone what a techno-wizard you are, then that's not a good reason. Remember the whole reason for having a Website is that you are offering something to the visitor, whether it be a product, service or information (including family). A good Web design with good content will go a long way in impressing your visitors without trying to use AV magic.
Something that use to be pretty common a few years ago was the use
of pages that had headings or graphics on them that said "Under Construction"
(UC). It's not very common now, and probably because Web Developers
have figured something out. UC pages are
a "frustration to users", they are "unfriendly" and "tacky".
If you are selling something or trying to promote your business, you need a clearly visible means of being contacted. Put your business contact information on as many pages as possible. Be sure you list your phone number, email address and business mailing address. If your site is an informational or personal site, then you still should have some means of being contacted such as email, fax or telephone. You want feedback from your visitors and if they can't get a hold of you, you can't get the feedback.
Once you've published your site. Relax and take a well deserved break - but don't forget about it. Just as important as keeping your Content fresh, is keeping your Site fresh. No, this doesn't mean a total redesign every six months, but remember, competition for visitors on the Web is fierce and in this age of hyper-fast Web information, something over a few months old will have lost it's "newness" and "zing".
Even if your site is not rich in content, a key to getting repeat visitors is to offer something new when they come back. It could be new graphics, new product information, new offers, new articles, new links, etc. Be user friendly, design usability into your site:
Just like your favorite store. One reason you feel comfortable shopping there is that you know where most everything is. Similarly, there are online standards now to help orient visitors, making them comfortable and ready to learn more. In a recent study by the consulting firm of Nielsen Norman Group in Fremont, Calif., they found the following page elements on roughly four out of every 10 sites.
Check out the sites of your competition. If you decide to be different from the convention, have a good reason.
Offer your visitors a guided tour. Collect Web statistics on your site to find out who your visitors are, then based on your findings, make suggestions about where they might want to go. This is like having a salesperson greet you at the door of a business and wanting to show you around.
Once a visitor hits your home page, you have the opportunity to "Show Your Stuff". For a business, you want to tell your story, one that positions your company ahead of your competitors. Include clear information as to why your company is different from the others in you niche and what you have to offer. An "About Us" page gives you the opportunity to present the human side of yourself or your business. Tell your visitors something about yourself. For a business, you can profile your management team and detail your company's history. Try a company news sections that lets you announce new clients, new employees, new products or features. Also post press releases there. These are considered standards to many users, so don't diminish their value.
When you change or upgrade your site and add new information and pages, don't just delete the old information and pages. It takes little effort to add an archiving channel to save this information. There's two good reasons for this:
Do not leave out a very important step in your Website design and
construction:
It may sound like testing takes a ton of time and money, but it doesn't. For a small site, it should take about 30 minutes per user. Try to get more than one. Four or five would be a good sample for realistic and adequate feedback. After testing, you will have changes to make but spending another day or two to make them will be small price in comparison to the amount of time and effort that you have already invested into creating your Website. These revisions will pay off in the long run, giving you more satisfied customers and raising the likelihood that people will make return visits. Consider giving your testers something for their time, maybe a small gift or a gift certificate to a restaurant. Their time is worth something, just like yours.
Many experts say that the most common mistake Web builders make is to do everything right when putting together a site, but then after it is published they walk away from the consumer information it can yield. You need to constantly monitor your site statistics to see what your visitors prefer. Check out the report logs on your server to monitor visitor and consumer behavior and traffic patterns:
Most Web hosting companies will have reporting programs on their servers that can collect and analyze this information. If they don't, or you want something they can't provide, there are inexpensive, automated software programs (such as Microsoft's FastCounter Pro) that can quickly analyze Web traffic and provide you with easy to understand reports. Use this information to improve your pages, fix the navigation structure, change links, change your content, and alter your search engine marketing so you can respond to the customers needs. For example, if you find your "New Items" page is the most popular, you might want to consider adding more of those pages.
Although your picture may seem like a friendly way to greet your visitors, many Web experts say that, it can detract from why the visitor should be there in the first place. When you meet someone for the first time and are about to shake their hand, you don't say, "Ask about me", you say "Hello, How are You". For a business, your first priority is to get them interested in what you have to offer, not in you. The exception to this is if your Website is about you. If you are someone noteworthy, an actor, musician, author, politician, etc. and you are touting the services that you provide, then a picture can be worked into the content. But you don't want it to be the main attraction of the home page. Remember, it's your services that you are offering so that's what you should highlight.
Review your Website content for any material that may lead to security or privacy problems. Hackers and spammers are constantly scanning for Websites that reveal personal information and the underlying technologies used on a site.
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