The Best Website
Having a professional website is as important to your business as greeting
your customers with a smile. Your website is often a customers first impression
of your business so it needs to be right.
What follows are some of the problems you may face after deciding to
build a website or have one built - and the ways to overcome them.
Then, predictably, we make a case why you should choose us
as your website developer.
Getting straight to the point, many websites have critical
problems caused by their design - and some of these may suprise you. Be
sure your new site does not suffer from these deficiencies.
critical factors
Lets look at the critical issues first! These are in the "I want
it fixed or my money back" category.
ISSUE | RESULT |
| Website looks unappealing and unprofessional. | Visitors will not
be impressed - the perception is that if the site is poorly structured, so will
the business. |
| Web pages are slow to load. |
Visitors will simply leave before your web pages load. |
| Pages
display incorrectly on different computers. |
Images and text look fine on your computer but appear in random
places on others view your site. |
| Your site cannot be found by search engines. |
Like a party without invitations, you will get very few visitors,
if any at all. |
| Processes have not been put
in place to exchange links with other website's. | You will find it very
hard and time consuming to improve the popularity of your website. | | Hosted on an unreliability
server. | Your website will be frequently inaccessible. | | Hosted
on a server with low bandwidth. | At peak times, reaching your website will
become almost impossible. |
All of these are very big
issues and absolutely must be addressed from the
onset.
desirable features
Now lets look at what we would hope to find in the perfect world!
FEATURE | COMMENT |
Home page will load quickly! | There must be something
to look at within seconds (it should be the name of your business). The entire
page needs to load within 20 seconds! | The
purpose of the website is obvious! | Get to the point. If a product
or service is being sold, what it is! Or does the website have an educational
purpose! |
The home page immediately grabs your attention! |
Describe the problems you may be having and offer a solution! Make it known that
you have the answer! | The sites structure
lends itself to easy navigation! | It must be easy to locate the information you
need - be it directly or by easily found links! You should never get lost or frustrated. |
| The site gathers the names and email addresses of interested
visitors. | An easy
and simple way of signing up for email newsletters is essential to build a web
client base. |
| The website is clear and readable! |
Headings,
bulleted lists and tables should be used to condense the information into an easy
read. | | The text and images are relevant and
well constructed! |
The text must be focused and to the point. Images, fonts and colors
must reflect the content of the website! |
| The site
is easily found and well ranked by search engines. The website is coded correctly. | In
dependant to how the site looks, the invisible design must be sound.
For example, words unique to your site must occur within the first
few sentences and, where possible, be 'tagged' as heading text (H1,
H2 etc). |
Jakob Nielsen's website on design and usability is a great resource -
see it here.
the tricks
The enthusiast web builder (or
webmaster) can be a character with a bag of tricks that would make
a magician envious! Your new website may look fine on your computer but
how will it look on your customers!
TRICK |
COMMENT |
A $1,000,000 look - but only at one screen resolution. |
Before accepting a website right click on your desktop, select
properties then change the screen settings to each resolution. For
each setting, view the website to see how your visitors will see
it. |
|
A $1,000,000 look - but only with one browser type. |
Mozilla Firefox is beginning to threaten Internet Explorer's
dominance of the browser market. On one of our sites, 40% of visitors
are now using Firefox. Check how your new website looks with Firefox
(or Internet Explorer if you are already using Firefox). There are
significant differences in the way these browsers display content. |
A $1,000,000 look - but no visitors to see it. |
In most cases, it is absolutely pointless to have a new website
if nobody visits it. Like a shop with no customers, your site will
fade away and be forgotten. To attract visitors in numbers (called
traffic) requires a linking strategy. Linking is the unspoken bain
of web developers wishing to achieve a fast turnover. |
Flash movies with bells and whistles. |
If your site has fancy movies to create special effects, queue
the alarm bells. Not only are movies slow to load but they hide
your website content from search engines and often distract visitors
from the real information. |
| The Site Award. |
90% of website awards mean nothing. They are simply a way for
the award giver to get a free website link - by placing an award
logo on your web page you help increase the search engine ranking
of the award givers website. |
And now, to comply with the "optimum page size rule" we can
say no more - not on the home page anyway.
contact us
If you are interested in having us build you a website and an associated
promotion system please email us
here.
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