1. Include your logo in all
pages. Position it at the top left of each page.
2.
Complement your logo with a tagline or catchy sentence that
summarizes your business purpose. For example "Always low
prices" is the tagline for Wal-Mart.
3. Create a favicon. A favicon is
that small graphic that appears next to the URL in the address
bar of Internet Explorer.
4. Have a consistent look and
feel in all your pages. Use a color scheme and layout that are
clearly recognized across your site.
5. Have an About Us section, that
includes all relevant information about you and your business.
6. Include a copyright statement
at the bottom of each page.
Tips On Website Navigation:
7. Design your pages to load in
less than 10 seconds (50Kb maximum size, including pictures).
8. Group your navigational
options in relevant categories.
9. Use common names for your menu
options: Home, About Us, Contact Us, Help, Products. Avoid "clever"
or "trendy" alternatives.
10. If your site uses Flash, also
provide an HTML version for users who prefer a less fancy,
faster site.
11. Provide simple text navigation links at the bottom of
long pages, so users don't need to scroll back up.
12. Link your logo to your
homepage, except in the homepage itself. Put a link to your
homepage on all your internal pages.
13. Display a "breadcrumb
trail"; it is basically the path from the homepage to the
page where you are. A breadcrumb trail looks like this:
Home > Section > Sub-Section > Page, and it greatly
facilitates navigation.
14. If your site is too big,
provide Search capabilities. Include a search box in the upper
right corner of your homepage, and a link to a Search page
from your interior pages.
Freefind offers a
free and powerful search engine for your site.
15. Set your search box to search
your site, not to search the web.
16. Create a custom error page
that displays a simple site map with links to the main
sections of your site. That way, you will not lose visitors
that have followed a bad link to your site or who have
misspelled your URL.
Tips On Layout And Content
Presentation:
17. Save the top of your page for your most important
content. Remember: good content must flow to the top.
18. Lay out your page with
tables, and set the width in percentage terms instead of a
fixed number of pixels. That way, your page will always fit
the screen, without the need to scroll horizontally.
19. Optimize your page to be
viewed best at 800x600 (the most popular resolution at the
time of this writing).
20. Use high contrast for the
body of your page: black text on white background, or white
text on black background work best.
21. Don't use too many different
fonts in one page. Also, avoid using small serif fonts (like
Times Roman): they are difficult to read from a computer
screen. Verdana is the most web-friendly font, since it is
wide, clean and easy to read.
22. Avoid long blocks of text.
Use tools that facilitate scanability, like bullets,
subtitles, highlighted keywords, hyperlinks, etc.
23. Avoid amateurish features
like: numeric page counters, wholesale use of exclamation
points, all caps, center justified blocks of text, excessive
animated gifs, busy backgrounds, etc.
24. Don't use pop-up windows.
They distract your visitors and are immediately dismissed as
ads.
25.
Test your site so that it looks good in different browsers and
resolutions.
Tips On Writing For The Web:
26. Write in layman's terms so
that everybody can understand your content, unless you're
running a technical site for technical people.
27. Reading from a screen is
painful: use 50% less words than you would use on print.
28. If a page is too long, break
it into several pages and link to them.
29. Don't use font sizes smaller
than 10pt. for the body of your page. Specify your fonts in
percentage terms instead of pixels to let users set their own
size preferences using their browser's text view options.
30. Use a
spell checker. Spelling mistakes are embarrassing and hurt
credibility.
Tips to Know Your Customers:
31. Ask for feedback: include a
feedback form in your Contact Us page.
32. Publish an ezine and include
a subscription form in your homepage. Give your customers
valuable information and encourage them to contact you.
33. Include polls and other tools
to gather market intelligence.
Tips on Linking:
34. Make your links descriptive.
They should indicate what the user will be linking to, as
opposed to just saying "click here".
35. Don't underline anything that
is not a link.
36. Underline your links and use a consistent color for
them across your site (preferably blue).
37. Use a different color for
visited links, so that your visitors know where they've been
(preferably purple or a more subdued tone of the unvisited
links color).
38. When linking to a non-HTML file, such as Excel, Word
or Acrobat, make it evident, by including a small icon next to
the link.
39.
Don't link to "under construction" pages.
40. Make sure that your links
work and that you don't have broken links. There are free
online tools that can help you with this.
41. If you use graphic links,
don't forget to use the ALT attribute. The ALT attribute
should describe what you are linking to.
Tips On How To Use Graphics:
42. Optimize your graphics. Use
only .gif and .jpg formats. Make your image files as small as
possible while maintaining acceptable quality. Use a free
online graphics optimization tool.
43. Use thumbnails (miniature
versions of a picture) and make them clickable to the actual
size picture.
44. Avoid graphics that look like ads. People ignore them.
45. Use
the ALT attribute on pictures, even if the image is not a
link. It helps users with disabilities and people who have
turned off graphics.
Tips To Optimize Your Site For The
Search Engines:
46. Create short, descriptive
page titles, to entice search engine users to click on your
links.
47.
Create a site map containing all your pages, and link to it
directly from your homepage. Search engine robots will follow
the link to your site map and will most likely add all your
pages to their index.
48. Decide what the two or three
main keywords are for each page (the words you believe search
engine users will type to find your page) and repeat them
often in your page title, description meta tag and page body.
49. Create a Links page and call
it Resources. In it, place links to those sites that have
agreed to place a reciprocal link to your page. The more
inbound links you have from quality sites with a topic related
to your site, the better your site will rank with the search
engines.
50.
Use more text than graphics, and minimize the use of Flash and
_JavaScript. Search engines heavily favor text and will crawl
and index your site faster.
Mario Sanchez publishes
The Internet Digest,
a collection of web design and Internet marketing tips and
resources to help you design a better website and market it
more effectively.
Many small businesses have found ways to earn money from visitors to their Web
site, even though their sites are not equipped to handle Internet transactions.
How? By joining an affiliate marketing program.
After taking the time to create and promote your Web site, you, too, may find
that joining an affiliate marketing program is a cost-effective way to enhance
the value of your own Internet investment. That type of "virtual" alliance may
help you increase revenue without increasing costs. In addition, an alliance can
increase the value of your customers' visits by increasing the quality of your
Web site, thereby encouraging more visits and increasing your opportunities to
establish and maintain relationships with your customers.
Affiliate marketing programs came into their own during the Internet boom of the
mid- to late-1990s. Organized to create virtual business relationships, they are
an agreement between two companies to steer business in the form of Web traffic
from one Web site to another in return for compensation. If organized correctly,
they are a win-win situation for both partners. They help large companies with
elaborate, transaction-oriented Web sites increase their Web traffic while
providing increased cash flows to smaller businesses with brochure-style Web
sites.
When you join an affiliate program, you will be able to download an icon or
button to add to your Web site. Visitors to your site who click on that button
will be sent to the transaction portion of your partner's site. Your partner
should have specialized internal computer systems in place. Those systems track
all sales generated during the visit that originated from your Web site. In
other words, you will own a portion of all sales generated during that visit. If
the visitor places an order, you will receive a percentage of the proceeds of
the sale, based on the original agreement. A typical revenue-sharing arrangement
is for 5 percent of the total sale, regardless of the size of the sale.
Keep some important points in mind when choosing your affiliate partner:
* Don't partner with a company that charges a fee or requires a minimum level of
sales to waive a fee. An affiliate program should not cost you a dime. Programs
with conditions are little more than pyramid schemes and should be avoided.
* Do choose a company with which you already have a working relationship. If
you've worked with a large supplier or customer over a period of time, you know
whether they are trustworthy or not, and have a good idea of the kind of
reputation they have in the local or national business community. That gives you
the opportunity to avoid partners who are not ethical.
* Choose a partner that will enhance the value of your site to your customers.
By making a link to a company on your Web site, you are making a statement about
the quality of that company to your customer base, your most important corporate
asset. You don't want to jeopardize the goodwill you've built with your
customers, so choose your partners wisely.
A well-planned affiliate-marketing program can accomplish two important goals
for your business without increasing costs. The first and most important is the
real opportunity to grow revenue. Second, by aligning with the right partner,
visitors to your site may find it a good jumping-off point to the rest of the
Internet. That could turn your site into a "portal," which could help get your
customers into the habit of visiting your Web site more frequently.
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