Best Practices for Web Site Success

Theres really no excuse nowadays to make the mistakes previous companies have made on the web. Your site should be tasteful with a balance between look, functionality, readability and also optimized for search engines. Stay away from heavy flash animations and images. Avoid using text inside images. Instead use html text over images. Text is your friend. Remember the more relevant and unique content on your site the more you’ll be crawled by search engines spiders which in turn results in better organic ranking.

Here’s a quick checklist for your website launch.

Grammar, writing style and spell check. Make sure the customer can easily understand your offering. Don’t ramble on about your products. State the facts in bullet points and a few sentences. An simply resolved issue such as misspelling lends to a lack of credibility so always double spell check. If you don’t take the time and effort to check your work, that ultimately represents you and your business. Write with the masses in mind. Use simple and short as your guideline to writing content for your site. Too much content even if well written will be skipped over. We are a headline driven culture and have learned to read that way. We like short to the point headlines. So stick to small paragraphs and bullets.

Navigation. So important. Most commonly, top navigation or left bar navigation. Many sites have un-intuitive navigation layouts that confuse people. Be sure every page links to its proper section and can cross link back via a site-map. Try and use an easy to understand naming convention for your navigation sections and the pages they link to. Create a site map. Site maps list out every link on the site with its proper section. Site maps also carry value with Web crawlers since this gives a quick snapshot of your sites layout.

Broken links. Ugh, sometimes it just happens when designing a site that you may mis-link a page that won’t exist. Test every link on your site before launching. Not only does it look bad to have broken links on your site, web crawlers may even rank you negatively because of broken links. The best thing to do is to make a custom 404 page instead of getting the default “page cannot be found” that your browser displays. Creating a custom page with a link back to the homepage ensures a better customer experience. This gives the user the option to look around on your site rather than just leaving your site.

Add a sense of community. Add a review and comments section or even better a discussion forum. People want to know about a businesses service and track record before they buy. To build credibility, user reviews are important as well as making other users feel a sense of community on your site. Adding a forum is a great way also of letting your customers speak to each other regarding your product.