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Let Your Little Website Shine (Part 1)
Archive
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Let Your Little Website Shine (Part 1)
One of the great things about the World Wide Web is that even the
"little guy" can be big.
Your website can give the appearance of a large organization, even
when it's just you and the family dog, sitting in your kitchen in
your underwear (not the dog, you in your underwear!). It's all
about presence and appearance. This article discusses how to make
your website look large, even when what is behind it is just
getting started. The World Wide Web is making more millionaires
faster than any other phenomenon in history.
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SWISS ARMY APP - AN ESSENTIAL WEBMASTER TOOL
"10+ Time-saving Web Promotion 'Killer Apps' in One'
A powerful, all inclusive tool for site promotion. Light years ahead
of the competition. Submits to the top search engines, FFA and award
sites. Numerous built-in time-saving features, including MetaTag
Analysis, Keyword Density analysis and a Link Popularity checker.
Click below for additional detail:
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ELEMENTS OF A WINNING SITE
The elements that make a website a "winner" are the following:
1. Loads Fast
2. Looks Great
3. The links actually work
4. Quick response when people request information, report trouble
5. Is Useful
6. Is Interesting
7. Serves a great need
8. Is Fun
9. Offers lots of free stuff
10. Presents an appearance in keeping with whatever you are selling
11. Sells in a very subtle way
12. Is not like everyone else's
13. Does not use email addresses retrieved from its contents to
"Spam" people
14. Has some kind of newsletter that allows visitors to keep in
touch on an ongoing basis
15. Has clear navigation
Now we'll discuss these elements, one at a time. Miss any of
these crucial elements, and your website traffic will suffer.
Ignore none of them, if you want people to "show up". Just
like a boring preacher has a hard time getting people to come
to church, just providing good choir music is not going to make
up for it. Your website may look good, but if it serves no
purpose whatsoever or is not clear in its message, it'll flop
like one of those movies that doesn't make it in the box office
because the first group of people to see it keep the rest of
them from showing up.
The first thing you have to make sure of is that going to your
website is not frustrating:
1. Loads Fast: If your website loads so slow that people get
bored waiting for it, your business will never get out of the
starting gate. Large graphics, lots of those great java scripts,
lots of background bitmaps, and a slow server to run on are some
of the causes of this. No one will ever stay long enough to find
out what you're selling if your pages are slow. The best way to
test your site is to get on an average connection and time it
with a stopwatch. You may be operating on a DSL or cable modem
connection, so it's best if you can visit a friend who has a
dialup and see how your website loads for him/her.
Make sure your web hosting provider gives you enough bandwidth
and a fast connection. We experienced this problem (among others)
while stuck in a 2 year contract with a hosting provider. We've
since switched to another provider and don't have this problem
anymore. See Web Hosting to find out where we went for better
bandwidth. No matter what we did to make our Website load fast,
our foundation was not good enough to make people want to come
back. More than a few seconds to get to your website, and your
site goes down in history as not being seen, along with all the
websites hosted at places where websites are free. (You probably
know who they are) If you have huge graphics and all kinds of
whirlygigs and java scripts that would make a grown man cry, your
site is in trouble again. Try to make all your graphics small and
in a .jpg (jpeg) format.
If you must use moving gifs or other animated stuff, make it
something useful that replaces text information. It must have
some use on your page - not just to look good. And try to make
it only one per page, if you can. If you love java, be aware of
a couple of issues with fancy java scripts: Not everyone can see
them if they don't have the right browser or the latest version
of some browsers, not everyone is going to appreciate that their
mouse leaves "trails" across the screen, or that everything on
your site is what they call a mouseover (where an image changes
into something else when you run your mouse over it). Leave this
stuff to your "other" site - you know, the one you wrote for fun.
Try to keep this stuff to a minimum on a business website.
A plain white background is always better than some fancy,
bandwidth-eating background bitmap image. If you must have a
background image, make it a very small watermark-style image.
Better to leave it plain. Makes it easier to read for many people
who don't have the greatest video card or the best pair of eyes.
One side note: It's always good to test your website's pages in
another screen resolution. If you like to keep your resolution
(right-click on the desktop in Windows, go to settings, change
the slide bar) at 1024x768, test your site using 800x600 and
possibly 640x480. You can also put some javascripts that test
the user's screen resolution and adjust accordingly, or you can
put a disclaimer on your main page that says: "Best when viewed
in 800x600 resolution". You decide how easy to make it for your
visitors. Remember that things that may look great on your machine
might look like crap to someone with their screen resolution set
differently.
The next thing to make sure of after they actually get to your
site is whether or not it looks good.
When I return, I'll discuss how to make your website credible
with a great look.
Lynne Schlumpf is the CEO of Route 66 Cyber Cafe, Inc.,
www.r66cci.com, a Web hosting and design company
specializing in promoting websites for new owners, building
affordable e-commerce sites, and providing reliable web hosting
solutions as an affiliate of Virtualis Incorporated. She is the
author of the forthcoming book "Let Your Little Website Shine",
due out in publication approximately May 30, 2000.
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