I’m back again with more information.  You probably didn’t think there was so many elements to having a website developed.  Well, here’s the beef!

Design search engine friendly pages – What do I mean by search engine friendly?  I mean going with a tableless layout with a heavy reliance on Cascading Style Sheets(CSS).  The beauty of tableless layouts means there will be less code for the search engines to fish through which could lead to better search engine rankings.  Another benefit of tableless layouts is that when the time comes to give your site a makeover, you or your designer could make a few changes in the CSS file, changes up some images, and all of a sudden you have a fresh looking site.

Make your site cross browser friendly – Most people use Internet Explorer to view the web, but some people use Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari as well.  As a matter of fact, these browsers are growing in popularity.  You want to make sure your site looks the same in all of these browsers, so you don’t miss out on any business. 

Make sure you have information on your product or service -  If your visitors cannot get the information they need about your product, they’re not going to buy.  Many business owners think that just because they have a website, the dollars will start pouring in.  This is not so.  Even if your site is decked out with the fanciest graphics, your visitors are still looking for information.  The graphics on your site should be supplementary to the information you provide about your product or service.

Keep your graphics file sizes to a minimum – Website graphics with large file sizes take longer to load, and if the your visitors have to wait more than a few seconds for your site to pull up, they’re going to leave.  Your visitors want information and they want it fast!

Include a way to get back to the home page of your site – Your visitors may not always be able to hit the back button to get to your website’s home page if they got to one of your website pages through a search engine.  Being able to get back to the home page will allow your visitors to start over and get a fresh new start. 

Only link to sites if you think the sites will provide your visitors value – Don’t just link to a website, so they can link back to yours.   The purpose of your website is to inform and/or sell.  Would you just click on any link if it didn’t have anything to do with what you were looking for?  Better yet, would you click on a link if you didn’t know where it would take you?  I didn’t think so.

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about what to avoid when having your website.  Today, I’m going to add to that and talk about what design guidelines should be followed when having your site developed.  

Leave the color of your links alone – The default color of an unvisited website link is blue.  Let’s say you clicked on the link and then went back to the previous page.  That blue link would now be purple.  The reason why the link is purple now is to let you know that you’ve already clicked on the link.  When having your site designed, leave these colors alone.  If you must tamper with the link colors, be sure to make the visited links a distinctly different color than your unvisited links.  Taking this away can lead to some navigation problems for your visitor.

Keep your design consistent – Your pages on your site should have a similar theme.  Keeping the page design consistent will let your visitors know that they are still on your site.  If your main navigational menu is on the top of the website, keep it there on the rest of the pages.  You don’t want to confuse your visitors with different designs for every page. 

Use heading text on every page – The heading text should be positioned right above the main content on every page.  This will let your visitors know which page they are visiting on your site.

Display your contact information on every page – Your visitors want information fast and if they have problems finding your contact information, you may lose some business as a result of this.  Common places for your contact information would be at the bottom of all of the pages, on the side, or on the top in the header.

 There will be more information to come soon!