By Michaleen McGarry
Published in Club Solutions Magazine / September 2005
This article concentrates on the things you should do when designing a website to add to the experience of the visitor and make your site easier for him or her to use. This is important because each visitor to your site is a potential customer and the more they enjoy their visit to your site the more likely they are to buy from it. As with the don'ts of webdesign I have put these do's of webdesign in a point by point format so they can be easily read.
Do tell your visitors what your site is about on the main page. This saves them time if they're not interested in what your site offers and gives you the chance to use some keywords when describing your site.
Do optimize every page for the search engines by including keyword rich titles, keyword rich meta tags, a keyword rich introduction to each page and by using heading tags around your most important keywords wherever possible.
Do have a constant style and navigation system on your website. If your style and navigation is not constant then visitors will find it difficult to know if they're still on your website and may just leave.
Do have an email address or at least a "Contact us" link on every page. Make it easy for people to contact you, if they've to search for an email address they'll become frustrated and probably leave altogether.
Do link home on every page. Not all users will enter your site via the home page, many will come through other pages via the search engines and when they get there they will be stuck unless you direct them back to the home page.
Do make navigation as easy a possible, every page should be accessible via two links from the home page and no more than three from any other page. This enables people to find what they want quickly.
Do use alt text to provide people with images turned off an idea of what your images are, also some search engines index keywords inside the alt tag so including alt text may actually help your rankings.
Do define height and width in all tables and graphics as this aids download time. Nobody wants to wait an eternity for a page to load so this is a must.
Do use space to break up long pages of text as long paragraphs look unprofessional and are hard to read. If something's hard to read people just won't bother reading it.
Using all or most of the above when designing your website will surely enhance a persons visit making them more inclined to buy from you.
Your website is the life and soul of your Internet presence, if your website appears and acts unprofessional your company will seem unprofessional and people won't feel confident buying from you.
With that said webdesign is a complex issue and I could discuss it for days with you but for this article and for the moment anyway I'll concentrate on sharing the things you shouldn't do when it comes to designing your site as ultimately bad webdesign affects people more than good webdesign. These don'ts of webdesign are in point by point format.
Don't use frames. Frames are a thing of the past and are out of fashion, they mostly confuse visitors and they basically destroy your chances of getting good search engine traffic, not to mention the problems associated with bookmarking and printing pages that use frames.
Don't limit access to your site by requiring visitors to already have or download a certain plug-in, this is the same as increasing download time and most people won't bother to wait for the download, they'll just visit your competition instead.
Don't have scrolling pages which require the visitor to scroll sideways to see the whole page. This is so annoying to most visitors that they'll leave straight away. This happens when you design your site at a certain resolution and someone visits with a resolution lower than that. Design for a resolution of 640x480 if you want to be sure that your pages avoid having scroll bars. You're pretty safe however designing and maximizing your pages for an 800x600 resolution because most people nowadays surf in that resolution.
Don't annoy your visitors with blinking text, pages full of banners, continuous background music that slows down everything, pop-up windows, text that's hard to read because it's a similar color to the background etc. If you do annoy them you can bet they won't return.
Don't use under construction pages, you're only wasting peoples time if you direct them to a page that's not ready so never link to pages unless they're finished.
Don't make visitors wait, if people have to wait for a page to download because it's bogged down with too much graphics and other media they'll just leave.
Avoiding the above don'ts of web design will at least give you a chance of retaining visitors and maybe even have a few of them return.
