| If
your site is for a business, you've got to make sure visitors
have every opportunity to spend money at your site. The
opportunity to contact or instigate communications should be clear
on every page. Do not miss the impulse buyer.
Take extra care in
designing your site so it looks professional, is easy to navigate,
and gets marketed properly.
If your home page fails to entice because the images are
too large, you're using sound files for no reason, the page takes
forever to download, there's offensive material, the text isn't
readable, and so on - then your visitors will hit the Back button
faster than a politician changes position on the issues.
Navigation of a site is
consider to be one of the most importance aspect of a site. You DO
NOT want visitors to get lost in your site.
There are three things a home page should convey to the
visitor:
1. The site's purpose -
the who, what, when, where, and why
2. What kind of content is contained in the site
3. How to find that content (Navigation or search)
When designing a navigation
system on a website, you need to consider the following
factors:
1. The first screen
2. Navigation tools - buttons, text links and sitemaps
3. Consistency
MS Publisher produces image heavy sites
with voluminous code when converted to HTML (The coding that the
Internet uses). This will make your pages slow. If you have a
WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) program such as MS
FrontPage, it would be better to use that.
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So to
expand a little .......
1. EFFICIENT NAVIGATION.
Make it easy for the user to navigate your site. If you are
selling something, let the client find it in three clicks. Make
certain there is always an obvious way to return to the home page
from anywhere within your site.
2. ORGANIZED MESSAGE.
The user should be immediately presented with a description of
your site ... what it's for and what's in it.
3. MARKETING.
Basic marketing rules apply to websites as they do to bricks and
mortar stores. Have a marketing plan and apply it
4. LOADING TIME.
Users will not wait. You have about 10-seconds to catch and keep a
visitor. Your home page should load quickly. Ensure this by
keeping graphics small and backgrounds simple and by using height
and width tags with every graphic. The height/width tags will
force the text to load first giving the user something to read
while the graphics load. It is also a good idea to use ALT tags
with the graphic tag so that the graphic is identified to the user
while it loads.
5. UPDATE FREQUENTLY.
Ensure that visitors will return to your site by constantly
updating its content. The home page should include the date your
site was last revised.
6. GIVE SOMETHING BACK.
It has become commonplace on the Internet to give you visitors
useful related information in addition to what you are "selling."
Most common example is to provide links to other, similar sites on
the Internet.
7. LINKS
Try and obtain links from an existing successful web site to your
new site. This will help being recognised on the Search Engines. |
