What You Should Do When Building Your Website Part 2
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.
