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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!

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Bruce Simmons asks:

Social Network sites like Digg and StumbleUpon and what not seem to have unspoken rules about who can promote a blog. What I mean to say or ask is: OK, with Digg, one cannot submit their own blog. But Twitter, you can chest thump all day long.

Do have a list of what sites you can ‘chest thump’ on and other sites that you are reader dependent on?

What are social networking sites?

This is an interesting topic, and I feel that we should start with some very basic information. Contrary to what some people might think, social networks were not born online with Friendster and MySpace. Social network, in fact, is a very old term used to describe any social group where individuals and/or organizations form a specific structure with nodes and connections. Here is the Wikipedia definition:

A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission (epidemiology), or airline routes. The resulting structures are often very complex.

The Internet completely changed the way people used to communicate and interact, so it was a natural step to create virtual social networks, or social networking websites. Back in 1979 Usenet, a global Internet discussion system, was already attempting to accomplish this.

Then in 1995 you had perhaps the first online social network as we known them today, ClassMates.com, which the purpose was to allow school mates to connect.

What about social bookmarking sites?

While websites like Digg and StumbleUpon do have a social factor, I don’t think we can classify them on the same level as MySpace or Friendster. Mainly because they have different scopes: the first two aim to let people share and discover new websites and online stories; the second two aim to let people with similar interests connect online.

You could consider Digg and StumbleUpon a sub-category of social networking sites, for example. Social bookmarking sites is what I would call them, but you have many other definitions floating around, including community bookmarking sites and social news aggregators.

Centralized vs. Decentralized Social Networks

Now that we have a clear understanding of social networks and social bookmarking sites, let’s get back to the central question. What are the unspoken rules of these websites? When someone can promote his own content directly, and when one should refrain from doing so?

In order to draw the line that divides the accepted and unaccepted behaviors, I think that we need to classify those social networking sites under two different groups: centralized social networks and decentralized social networks.

Note: That is a classification that I came up with, so I am not sure if it has being used in the past or not, and if with the same meaning. Feel free to suggest other interpretations or to disagree with my theory in the comments below.

Centralized social networks are those where the actions of the single elements will inevitably affect the whole community. That is, all the actions flow to the center.

Digg is an example of a centralized social network. Every time you submit a story, digg or bury a story submitted from another user, ask for votes or try to manipulate the system in your favor, your actions are inevitably affecting the whole community.

That is because all members of Digg use the front page of the different sections to stay updated with the hot stories around the website.

The same principle applies to StumbleUpon. The central part of their system is the “Stumble!” button on the toolbar. Virtually all the members use that button to discover new and interesting websites. As a consequence, whenever you give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to a particular story, and whenever you share the stories you liked with friends, you are affecting the experience of all the other members of the community.

Twitter, on the other, is a decentralized social network. There is no central or core location where the actions of the single elements flow to. The system allows you to create you own micro communities, and your actions inside those communities will not affect people outside of them.

That is, you can decide who you follow, and other people in turn will decide if they want to follow you back or not. Suppose someone starts using Twitter solely to promote his own website. Users that are not following that person will not even notice what he is doing, and the ones that are following him can simply remove the follow to stop receiving his messages if they find them annoying. Finally, if someone likes to receive the promotional messages about the website of this person, he can keep following him.

Now you might ask me: so are all social bookmarking sites like Digg or Reddit centralized, and all standard social networks like MySpace and Facebook decentralized?

That is a good rule of thumb, but it is not always the case. Most social bookmarking sites are centralized, including Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Mixx and Propeller. Some, however, are not. Del.icio.us is an example of a decentralized social bookmarking site. Provided you use the service to save your own bookmarks or to share them with friends, the actions of other users will not affect your experience.

As for standard social networking sites, I would say that most of them are indeed decentralized. Of course you have people trying to spam and manipulate those websites nonetheless, so the action of abusive users can end up affecting the whole community. But that is the exception and not the rule.

Conclusion

By now you should already know the answer to the original question. Whenever we talk about decentralized social networks, you can use them in whatever way you desire (well, excerpt for spamming). You can promote your website, yourself, express your opinions and what not. You will create your own micro community on those sites, and your actions there should not affect the other members, so they will hardly care.

Consider Twitter again. There are people who use it as a micro blogging tool. Others use it as an instant messaging utility. Others yet use the tool to promote their websites, and some people are even trying to sell their Twitter accounts on eBay! It is all good though, because each user has the autonomy to decide who he will follow, who will be able to follow him, and what micro communities he will join.

As for centralized networks like Digg or StumbleUpon, you will need to play under the rules of the community. Usually these rules will encourage you to be active in the community and to actually help it grow. Self promotion and system manipulation are frowned upon.

Practically speaking, can you get away with the occasional submission of your own stories? Yes. Can you use it over and over again solely to promote your own stuff? No.

Over to you

Do you agree that some social networks are centralized, while others are not? Do you think people should avoid completely promoting their own content, or there are exceptions?

You, as the content builder, have the responsibility to give people the reason to be interested in your website through the things that you write.

Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media shares that “great content DOES not market itself”. Since you have the whole world to compete for, you also need to PROMOTE YOUR CONTENT.

Here are the four step process she gave for promoting good content:

1. Identify and Chart “Your People”

This is actually a bit more complicated than it sounds and goes far deeper than the trite “find your influencers” pitch you’re probably used to receiving. There’s a difference between “knowing” who you’re supposed to be feeding content and actually creating a strategy that incorporates it. This step is about mapping out that strategy, putting names on faces, and creating points of contact.

• Who are your people?

They are the people on the Web capable of and pre-disposed to linking to and passing around content they like. This include those on Twitter and social media already submitting and talking about your content, the high authority bloggers/reporters in your niche who haven’t yet found you, the familiar names commenting on your blog, and even the loud folks who sit a layer or two outside of the community you’re trying to target. They are everyone in, around, and just outside your bubble.

• How do you find your people?

You go to them. Search Digg, Reddit, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Mixx for articles from your domain and find out who is responsible for submitting them. You set up a listening station to track where your mentions are already coming from and who’s doing the mentioning. You search Technorati to locate the most authoritative blogs in your niche and the bloggers you want to be talking about. You repeat that process using Google News. You study your blog activity to understand which posts get the highest success rate and who comments on those types of posts most often.

• How do you chart them?

You turn usernames into real people. Take those users/bloggers/reporters you just found and map them out. Some traits you’ll want to note:

o The name of the blogger responsible for the blog or your category
o Their direct email address
o Their Twitter handle
o The angle they take on stories
o The topics they like to write about

Create an informal database to keep track of when you’ve last contacted them, the piece that you sent them, and whether the response was positive (a mention) or negative (no mention). Rank bloggers and categorize them into A, B and C importance groups so that you’re prioritizing your list of people (sorry. Some people are prettier than others).

It seems like a lot of work, and really, it is, but it’s the best way to keep tabs on who’ve reached out to, who likes what and what’s already been pitched. I know most SEOs have no respect for bloggers and reports, but pissing them off is typically not in your best interest. Paying them some respect and not pitching them pieces they have no interest in or have already turned down is not going to be good for your online reputation management strategy. Trust me, blogger relations is important.

2. Get On Their Radar

Once you’ve successfully stalked your new 200 or so friends, start forming relationships by reaching out to them on a personal level and getting on their radar.

People who already know you: When you notice someone is spending a lot of time submitting your pieces to social media or bookmarking them, drop a note to say thank you. Do NOT give tips on how they can optimize their titles, descriptions or get more votes. Just email to let them know that, hey, you noticed their support and you really appreciate it. Do the same thing for blog commenters who are also powerful social media members. Chances are that person is going to email you back to say thank you and further build out the relationship.

• People you want to know:

The best way to get on someone’s radar? Promote them. Not in a stalker way, but in a genuine way. When they publish something especially kickass, tweet it. Submit it to social media for them. Drop them an email to say kudos and a virtual high five. Participate in the same communities that they do. The same way you semi-stalk people IRL that you want to get close to and make notice you, do it online. Just say hi, be helpful and make them feel good about themselves. Do not promote yourself. Just get on their radar. People love people who tell them they’re pretty.

3. Create Your Content

Not all of your content will be designed to get you massive amounts of traffic and attention. But when you do create a piece that you want to see take off, craft it around an identified audience. Not a vague audience, but one where you’ve already matched the piece to a selection of the names, faces and emails collected on your press list. Know what they’re inclined to want to read. Some groups will like big resource or directory-type posts, others will like sexier pieces or media-filled content. Make sure you know where it’s going and build it accordingly.

I like to group my press list into different angle categories so I know who I’m going to go to for the different kinds of content pieces. I’m a bit OCD so this helps me ensure that I’m hitting people at appropriate intervals and covering all interests. It also gives me an idea of who I want to link out to in the post, which blogs I’ll want to mention, and how much vanity bait I can apply to the piece to maximize attention.

4. Know When to Publish & Promote the Content

Know when it’s the right time to publish and promote your content so it doesn’t suck. Because most of the world works on an East Coast publishing schedule, do NOT start promoting your awesome link magnet at 7pm on a Thursday evening. Even if you’re on the West Coast, no one cares. You’re going to miss your audience. You want to publish when your community is most active and when you’ll get the most attention. That may mean sitting on a post for a day or, you know, actually planning ahead.

If it’s possible for you to seed your content before alerting the masses that it’s live, do it. If not, don’t worry too much about it and start the promotion process. Go through your press list and start contacting people who you think would be interested in what you’ve just created. Do NOT ask them to submit it to social media, to link to it, to comment on it, etc. Just drop a quick email or tweet in their direction to let them know that you wrote something their audience may be interested in. If you mentioned someone in your article or used a photo with permission, let them know. The more targeted you’ve made your press list, the better you’ll be able to match content to bloggers.

If you feel slimy about alerting someone to the content piece you created, STOP. It means the piece isn’t very good. If it was good, you’d be excited to share. People like hearing about content that is unique/interesting/informative. They like getting the scoop and being among the first to tweet it out. As long as you’ve written something that is worth the interest, you’re not wasting their time. If you DON’T feel good about emailing people about what you just created, then you haven’t created something worth their time. People won’t share content that doesn’t excite them. If you’re not excited by it, then you need to go back to the drawing board and fix your article.

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The important thing about content promotion is being successful in making your content reach its target. This way, you are able to find home for your good content.

Here is an excerpt from an article I read on this site. Read below:

The first and most obvious potential benefit is to gain new customers by exposing your business in another online venue. But to do this you need to be creative and interesting in a social setting. Think of it like going to a party with the aim of picking up business vs. picking up business at a business conference – you will need to act differently in the “social media” arena than on your business’ website. You need to stand out and say something of interest to the people in your arena.

Blogging about the benefits of your products/services is not going to attract viral marketing (i.e. friends telling friends about a web page) – you can leave your product/service information to your standard web site. To attract interest and any sort of following you need to offer opinions, advice and stories of interest or humor.

The second and less obvious benefit from blogging and “tweeting” can come from links you place on these social websites back to your company website. While there are a number of aspects that go into increasing traffic to your website, links remain one very important aspect. This is because every link to your site that exists on the web counts as a vote towards your Google page rank.

The more links that you have on the web, the higher your ranking will be in the search engines – which means more people will discover your website. You can place links in the body of your messages and you can leave them in your message “signature” as well. In time, the search engines will deep scan the web and find those forum links.

Content is (still) King

Read our previous article on why content is important.

Whatever social medium you choose to utilize – DO NOT SPAM! Have something to say and do not just attempt to blatantly ask people to click on your link. This will of course not work with any legitimate potential customers – but possibly more damaging could be blacklisting by the social website. When posting to forums and blogs stick to areas which are relevant to your business – this is obvious for a few reasons but not least in that it will keep you interested and provoke ideas from you.

If you contribute to online social networks with quality and interesting posts (and tweets!) then your presence will be appreciated and your efforts should go rewarded with new inquiries for your business.

Links to Popular Social Websites:

Twitter – www.twitter.com
Facebook – www.facebook.com
Linked In – www.linkedin.com
Orkut – www.orkut.com
Digg- www.digg.com