|
A professional website is a combination a six factors:
1. Design
The key to a well designed site is to create the right balance of
stile and content, for example if your site is an informative site
then you want to keep any movement to a minimal so as not to
distract the viewer or you may have a site that is product
orientated in which case you want to make it memorable by adding
movement, product demonstrations and/or flash galleries. Whatever
way you go it is always good to remember that the site is for your
customer/viewer and not for the owner, for example just because you
may think shocking pink and lime are a good color combination
doesn't mean the large majority of your viewers agree.
2. Content
This is the single most important aspect of your site whether
your selling/promoting a product or sharing information if you
content has no substance people will lose interest and you will lose
sales/return visitors.
Content should always be approached in an adult professional
manner and not as a lot of webmasters do by replacing substance with
annoying childish in your face tactics such as pop-ups, flashing
adverts misrepresentation of product/service etc, people have been
using the internet for long enough now to develop what's called
ad-blindness which means 9 times out of 10 their brain will ignore
the used-car-sales-man approach to sell or promote, here is an
example of methods that some sites use to try and milk every person
that lands on their site:
- Disabling the back button - you may have experienced
this yourself you go to a site and for whatever reason you find
out the site is not for you so you try to leave by clicking back
but it just keeps loading the same page, imagine if this happen
to you when you went into the 7-11 if you didn't buy something
the attendant locks the door so you cant leave? I'm betting you
would be in no hurry to return.
- Pop-ups - Most browsers now have pop-up blockers but
the tacky-webmaster has managed to get around this by including
layers with flash pop-ups the cover the content you are reading
trying the get you to buy something else, this is just as rude
as the above method and you would not tolerate it in a bricks
and mortar store so don't expect your viewers to tolerate on
your website.
- Bait and switch - A company that makes promises it
doesn't intend to keep is a company that doesn't plan to stay in
business too long, If a customer/viewer feels cheated they will
do one of two things 1. complain to you and everyone else that
will listen or 2. nothing which is worse for you as they are not
coming back to your site and they not going to tell anyone else
to visit ether.
- Contact info - you can always tell a reputable site
by how easy it is to get in touch with them, every site should
have at least one direct method of contact should it be an email
address or phone number you would be surprised how this one
simple thing will inspire user confidence.
3.. Navigation
This one is a no-brainer but it is surprising how many webmasters
have no clue how to direct traffic around your site. A well
designed site will have all the important links on every page and
important information such as contact info should never be more than
one click away at anytime
4. Load time
High speed internet is still relatively new in terms of user
acceptance, you should never alienate dial-up users by only having a
high-res images and large flash files weighing down your site this
will be more important in the next few years as cell phones and
PDA's with their own browsers become more common so is the need to
keep your websites load time to its absolute minimal, this does not
mean you have to have text only websites as there is a lot of
methods to keep file size down without sacrificing presentation.
5. browser compatibility
The truth is that unless your site is text only there is no real
way to make sure it is 100% viewable on all web browsers with that
being said you should be shooting for 99% this is not done by
stripping away all your bells and whistles to your site this is done
by making sure it is not noticeable, for example if you are viewing
this site on internet explorer you will notice the the scroll bar to
the right is dark blue yet on Fire fox and opera this is not
compatible yet the site is designed in such a way that these viewers
will not notice.
6. Accessibility
Website accessibility is making your website visible to the
visual impaired and to text only browsers, you may think this is not
a big deal but the reward for this makes the effort worthwhile, the
way your site looks to text only browsers is the way WebCrawler's
see your site when searching the web so if your site is optimized to
viewed in a text browser there is more chance your site will get
good page position on web searches.
|
