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9 Essential Items for a Quality Site

A web site is like everything else in life – there are good ones and not-so-good ones! Professional web designers have a check-list of elements that make up those in the first category. Here are the nine main elements to be considered – each contributes to the impact and success of your site.

Visual Impact

Your home page is your billboard or store front – it creates an immediate impression on visitors to your site, so it’s got to create the right impression … right?

It should look:

•Clean
•Uncluttered
•Professional
•Attractive

Aim to “underwhelm” rather than overwhelm! Too many flashing lights, colours, drop-down boxes, graphics etc will be distracting. It’s a bit like those stores that play loud, frenetic music – your heart rate rises, your stress levels go up and you just want to get out – fast!

Content

Whether you have a business site or a personal page, you have to give people a reason to stay on your site – we’re mercenary little critters, we humans, our first question is always, “what’s in it for me?”

That doesn’t mean that you have to give away free programs, books, tickets or holidays – it does mean that you have to offer something. That “something” could be:

•Information
•Entertainment
•Advice
•Help with a problem
•Opportunities to contact similar minded people
•Links to useful sites

If you do have a business site, you need to give information about your product or service that is:

•easy to follow
•easy to find
•easy to order

Loading Time

We all know that speed is the key to keeping visitors. I often catch myself getting impatient because it’s taking me 20 or 30 seconds to connect to some site or other. Then I stop and think about the fact that here I am, sitting in my office on the east coast of Australia, connecting to a site in the north of England, on the west coast of the US, in Canada, South Africa, India or one of the dozens of other places I regularly contact, and I shake my head in wonder. How quickly we become accustomed to technology.

However, we DO get impatient if it takes us too long to make contact – so you must ensure that your home page at least, loads as quickly as possible. That means no big, flash graphics.

Keep reminding yourself that your first page is like a billboard. When driving your car, you don’t have time to read detailed descriptions, or admire intricate pictures on billboards. The signs flash past you and have to make an immediate impression.

Your web visitors are ‘flashing past’ as well, so keep your front page simple and fast.

There are numerous articles on the net about how to improve speed – take the time to check them out and then discard anything that slows down your home page too much.

Colour, Lay-out and Graphics

The graphics and lay-out of your home page contribute to that first impression – think about what image your site is trying to convey and make sure everything on your site contributes something towards that overall image.

If you have a serious business site, you don’t want garish cartoons on your front page – but if you have a games site, then cartoons can be an integral part of the image.

Graphics are what eat up the loading time of your site. A rough rule of thumb to determine good loading time for a page is to keep the entire page around 30k.

Images should be between 6 – 8 k. Each additional 2k adds approximately one second to loading time.

If in doubt, right click the image and then click on Properties to get the size of the image.

Colour is also an important part of your site; colours have different effects on our emotions:

•Red and orange excite the senses and increase heart beat
•Blues and greens are more restful
•Yellow reminds us of sunshine and is a happy colour

Consider the effect you want to create and choose a colour that is appropriate.

When reading Western texts, the eye travels from the top left of the page, across and then down to the bottom right. Remember this when you’re placing graphics on your page.

Any graphic which has a directional aspect should be placed to point the eye towards the most important section of the page. If you have a picture of a bird on the top left corner of your page, make sure it is facing inward and that its beak is leading the eye to the centre of the page, not away from it.

The same applies to all graphics:

•Faces should ‘look’ to the centre of the page
•Cars should be ‘parked’ facing towards the centre of the page
•Roads, neck ties etc should all be placed to lead the eye across from left to right, or down from top to bottom

This is also why you should place your navigation bars down the left side of your page – it keeps them constantly in the visitor’s field of vision.

Readability

This doesn’t refer to the words you use (we’ll look at them in detail later) – but to the way the words look on the page.

Going back to the concept of the billboard, your words need to stand out on your page – you need to surround them with plenty of white space.

Think over some of the sites you’ve visited – some make you feel as if you have to duck your head to read them! Dark backgrounds make you feel as if you’re in a small space and also have a depressing effect on your mood.

Certain coloured backgrounds make it very difficult to read the text; purples, orange tonings and reds dazzle the eyes.

The colour of your text is just as important – bear in mind that different browsers read colours differently – what looks great on your browser, could well be invisible on another!

Take a lesson from the newspapers and divide your text into columns for easier (and quicker) reading – even two columns are better than one slab of text that covers the entire width of the page.

Another element that contributes to text readability is the font you choose. Plain fonts (Arial, Times New Roman, Garamond and Courier) are the easiest to read. Fancy fonts are fine for headings, but not for full pages (imagine trying to read a whole page in Gothic, Script, Westminster, or Cloister). Your eyes would soon tire of the effort involved and you’d be reaching for the back button!

See what I mean?

Segmenting and Sign-Posting

You have to make your page as easy for your visitors to read as is humanly possible and this means breaking it up into little ‘chunks’ for them. We’ve already looked at the need for columns, (which divide the page vertically) – you also need to divide your page horizontally, by the use of headings and sub-headings.

When you were at school, your teachers told you to use headings in your notes – apply the same principles to your web pages. Look for the key points on each page and write a short statement that summarises each point – this is your heading.

Read through each section and see if it can be further divided into smaller points; write a summary of these sub-sections and these are your sub-headings.

Select a font for all your headings and sub-headings (and stick to it). It’s not necessary to have a different font for headings (just go up one size for headings, and then use bold on all headings and sub-headings).

This way it’s easy to recognise which is a heading (large and bold) and which is a sub-heading (same size but bold).

The point of this is to make it easy for your visitors to glance at your page and to take in all the key points. If what they see interests them, they’ll stay and keep reading – so it goes without saying, that your headings should be written with care!

To draw attention to other important points, you can also highlight them – by putting a whole sentence in bold or a different colour (or both). However, take care with the colours you select – some are quite difficult to read – even against a white background.

Navigation

Your main navigation bar should run down the left side of your page, for two reasons:

•We’re accustomed to reading from left to right and from top to bottom
•We’re accustomed to finding navigation bars on the left of web pages – why buck the system (especially when it works)?
On a long page. It’s also a good idea to have a brief nav bar along the bottom of the page (just home | top of page will suffice).

When you’ve found a system you’re happy with – use it on every page, so that your visitors know where to look for the information.

Make a blank page which has your page layout (columns), any logos or standardised graphics, alt tags and navigation bar already built in. Call this ‘blank” and then when you make a new page, you have everything already set up and just have to enter the content, html tags and then save it as “whatever.htm”.

Customer Security

If your site is a business site, then one of the most important things you have to do is to ensure that your potential customers feel confident dealing with you. On the web, you do this by telling people exactly what you’re doing to safeguard their interests – in particular, how you’re protecting their privacy. It’s worth having a separate page which sets out – in detail – your policy towards their email addresses; how you accept orders; how you gather information; who has access to this information; how you use information gathered from children and so on.

Visitors also like to know that real people have used your products or services, so it’s worth asking your satisfied customers if you can quote any positive comments they’ve made about you. Don’t be afraid to ask for testimonials – we all like to know that our opinions are valued.

Set up a separate page for your testimonials and offer to include links to your customers’ pages in return for using their comments. This is one of those “win-win” situations!

Words, words, words

Now we come to the most important element – if this part is wrong, the rest of your efforts are largely wasted. How many times have you been impressed by a site’s initial appearance, only to be disappointed by poor spelling, careless grammar and punctuation?

It reflects badly on the site owner and indicates that whoever is responsible for this page, is sloppy, careless, lazy, unprofessional or all of the above! Would you entrust any of your hard-earned money to someone who doesn’t even care enough to check the expression of his/her own site?

•You can take steps to improve your own writing skills
•You can employ someone to proof read and edit your work
•You can employ someone to write your pages for you.

There are places that will assist you with any or all of these steps. Don’t spoil all your hard work by skipping this one, vital step!

More than making your website beautiful and standards-compliant, it is also important that it is full of relevant content. Our main goal should always be making the site “seen” throughout the web. This is why we do SEO. And this is why you need to make your website “content-packed”. But you have to do it the right way.

There are five (5) most important ingredients of a complete and most of all, search-engine friendly sites:
• Standard-compliant and beautiful design
• Good navigation
• Relevant Information
• Link popularity
• Link exchange

All these elements need to work together properly in order for the site to maximize its potentials and serve its purpose. And content is of major importance because without a good one, there would basically be nothing for the Search Engines to crawl.

In writing website content, you take note of the following:

• Conciseness of information

Keep it short and crisp. Be positive and direct to the point. Never be too abstract and no need to create so many long pages about the same blurbs. Make all your pages relevant to the information or services you offer your readers or target customers.

Do not overload a single page with so much information under one heading. Make it a habit to create subheads and put limits to the number of words depending on what you are writing about and your target readers. The ideal is 400 -500 words generally and 1000-1200 words for the more informative sections of the site.

• Relevance of SEO Keywords

Never forget to include in your content the words that your target audiences are most likely to type on the search fields of Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing, and other search engines. Keep in mind that you need to put these keywords in the title tags, meta tags and descriptions and of course, scatter them all over your content to make them searchable.

• Good grammar and sentence construction

Poor content can be such a turn off to readers, especially those that are absurdly constructed. The web is a universal venue for exchange of information and since English is the universal language, you must learn how to write your content in grammatically correct English sentences so that your site will be taken seriously by readers.

• Relevance of Links

Never post unnecessary links or those that do not have anything to do with what your website is all about. Doing so could decrease your site’s credibility.

There is no use to having a very relevant, greatly designed website on the internet without anyone ever seeing it. Search engine submission is undoubtedly the most important way of promoting your website and getting listed in the major search engines so that people can view your website and allow it to serve its main purpose.

Here is one of the absolute BEST “how-to” tips that I ever got.

Get this software http://www.submiteaze.com/ and submit your website to every free directory it has in the database.

Make sure you mix up the title and descriptions.  You don’t want everything saying exactly the same thing.  I would aim for about 10 title variations and 10 description variations.  You can use this ”spinner” to help you create the variations.

There have been well-documented sites that have started to show results after about 2 months of using these softwares. Results will depend on how much previous optimization has been done.

You may submit at a rate of about 20 sites per day.

Keep in mind that whatever you do to promote your website, do it legally. Never falsely represent your pages in order to rank high.

I was told that they work like magic and are able to put your website on top of the ranks. You just have to put them on your website code as elements of the HTML or XTML. They should provide the metadata, data and detail the page description, keywords and other information about the webpage where they are placed to make that page search engine-friendly.

But further readings on Meta tags led me to realize that these things I learned about them are now mere magnifications of their power and benefit for my website. In short, Meta tags and other Meta elements are no longer as important as they were before.

About 10 years ago, Meta tagging was the hottest thing to do for SEO. Simply by putting these elements on your page, you could easily improve your website’s search engine rankings. But this was until they got misused and abused. Spammers started to use spam keywords with these tags to make them rank higher than the straight and genuine websites. For these reasons, all the major search engines dropped meta tags from the equation.

The improvements in search engine spider technology have also caused the robots to ignore the tags in the website codes. Google, as a matter of fact, no longer uses meta tags, keywords, or descriptions at all.

According to Dave Bush, one of the SEO gurus and experienced developers I once worked with, there are three basic rules in SEO.

Rule number one is that anything that can be abused will be.

Rule number two is that anything that can be abused will get discounted in the equations.

Rule number three is that the more “natural” the links to your website and your site itself looks, the better the chance of making it to the higher ranks.

Although some websites say that it has completely lost it’s worth in SEO, I believe that meta tagging still does work somehow. Some search engines still do utilize these tags and descriptions and Google uses them to search for websites and generate results.

Meta descriptions can still help the click through. For example, your main phrase is “seo wordpress plugins”, the Title tag should have that and the description should lead off with that phrase.

The description should also be basically a sales copy, sort of like writing a Google ad word advertisement. Doing this will increase the chances that Google will use the description rather than using some random text in the middle of the page. Using this technique, you are 7 times more likely to make a sale off natural search than real ad words.

In summary, both meta keyword and content descriptions still have their place in SEO but not too much fuss should be spent on them. Since they are now just small elements in optimizing your website, too much time and resource should not be given them. In short, they don’t work like magic at all.