Ensure that your site loads fast if you do not want to lose visitors.
Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn't load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure the creme de la creme of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site. Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links, so be very careful about that.
The first method is to make sure the typography of your content is suitable. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can use your site with ease. If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally.
Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes online. Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily. No matter how brilliant your website design is, if it is hard to reach the content of your site then your site is as useful as an empty shell.
Sunday, 21 June 2009
The Importance of a Sitemap
- Navigation purposes A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site.
If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.
- Organization and relevance A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird's eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone. There is no need to get the "big picture" of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors' time.
- Conveying your site's theme When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time.
- Site optimization purposes When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page -- they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.
A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.
If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.
- Organization and relevance A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird's eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone. There is no need to get the "big picture" of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors' time.
- Conveying your site's theme When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time.
- Site optimization purposes When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page -- they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.
A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.
How To Have Websites Built For You The Cheap Way
Have you ever seen those advertisements in newspaper classified ad sections that offer a 5-page website at $500? These companies are established companies with physical locations, therefore they have to increase the amount they charge to pay off some overheads: office rent, designer's wages, advertising costs and so on.
All this can change if you know where to find the best deals, the best designs for the lowest price. Think about it, if you only need 5 simple pages to present some simple information, why waste hundreds of dollars for it? Just spend a little time to sit down and do it yourself. The best way to do this would be to go to elance. Another route you can take is to design your website yourself. You'll be able to design your own sites even if you do not know a single line of HTML code with the help of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs such as Microsoft Frontpage, Macromedia Dreamweaver and so on.
There, you can post the abstract of your project and get thousands of freelancers to bid on your project, so you will surely get the best deal. On the other hand, they will be able to design images with quality similar to those of designers from big companies, so it's a "no-brainer" choice. On top of that, you will be able to choose the designers based on their experience, past transactions and ratings, so your value for money is secured. Com.
Normally, if you want to have professional designers custom build your site, you must be prepared to dish out at least a few hundred dollars. Here's a rough guide: First, you must understand that it is a rip off to get companies to design websites for you. However, choose freelancers with care. Therefore, it would be wise to find freelance designers who work from home. These people are often working from home so they do not have a high operation cost like that of a company.
All this can change if you know where to find the best deals, the best designs for the lowest price. Think about it, if you only need 5 simple pages to present some simple information, why waste hundreds of dollars for it? Just spend a little time to sit down and do it yourself. The best way to do this would be to go to elance. Another route you can take is to design your website yourself. You'll be able to design your own sites even if you do not know a single line of HTML code with the help of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs such as Microsoft Frontpage, Macromedia Dreamweaver and so on.
There, you can post the abstract of your project and get thousands of freelancers to bid on your project, so you will surely get the best deal. On the other hand, they will be able to design images with quality similar to those of designers from big companies, so it's a "no-brainer" choice. On top of that, you will be able to choose the designers based on their experience, past transactions and ratings, so your value for money is secured. Com.
Normally, if you want to have professional designers custom build your site, you must be prepared to dish out at least a few hundred dollars. Here's a rough guide: First, you must understand that it is a rip off to get companies to design websites for you. However, choose freelancers with care. Therefore, it would be wise to find freelance designers who work from home. These people are often working from home so they do not have a high operation cost like that of a company.
Good Design Practices
Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website.
Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. Make sure your website complies to web standards at www. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.
If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size. Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website.
Your website is where your business resides -- it's like the headquarter of an offline company. W3. Org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion. Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary.
This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible. Reduce the number of images on your website. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.
Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. Make sure your website complies to web standards at www. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.
If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size. Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website.
Your website is where your business resides -- it's like the headquarter of an offline company. W3. Org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion. Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary.
This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible. Reduce the number of images on your website. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Generating Revenue With Good Planning
Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks.
For anything to work well, care must be taken to make firm, workable plans to execute it and the same goes for website designs. For this very reason, the advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so a themed page fits that criteria perfectly. For example, you might have a "food" section, an "accomodation" section and an "entertainment" section for a tourism site. Gradually, the webmaster will not be motivated to update it anymore and it turns into wasted cyberspace. With a well thought out website design, you will be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you.
Hence, start tapping in on this lucrative stream of profit right away! As Internet becomes more widespread, advertising on the Internet will bear more results than on magazines or offline media. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking for further information. In fact, may websites turn into online wasteland because they are not well planned and do not get a single visitor. When you have a broader, better-defined scope of themes for your website, you can sell space on your pages to people interested in advertising on your page.
You can also earn from programs like Google's Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing if people surf to those themed pages and click on the ads. The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you want to gain any income from the site.
For anything to work well, care must be taken to make firm, workable plans to execute it and the same goes for website designs. For this very reason, the advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so a themed page fits that criteria perfectly. For example, you might have a "food" section, an "accomodation" section and an "entertainment" section for a tourism site. Gradually, the webmaster will not be motivated to update it anymore and it turns into wasted cyberspace. With a well thought out website design, you will be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you.
Hence, start tapping in on this lucrative stream of profit right away! As Internet becomes more widespread, advertising on the Internet will bear more results than on magazines or offline media. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking for further information. In fact, may websites turn into online wasteland because they are not well planned and do not get a single visitor. When you have a broader, better-defined scope of themes for your website, you can sell space on your pages to people interested in advertising on your page.
You can also earn from programs like Google's Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing if people surf to those themed pages and click on the ads. The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you want to gain any income from the site.
5 Important Rules in Website Design
When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.
1) Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.
2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.
3) Have a simple and clear navigation
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.
4) Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!
5) Avoid using audio on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.
1) Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.
2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.
3) Have a simple and clear navigation
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.
4) Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!
5) Avoid using audio on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
