Website Design Guidelines
The Purpose of your Website is to Make you Money.
A well designed website will pay for itself and is very cheap advertising. Poor websites direct potential clients to your competition, only because he may have a better website - not necessarily a better business.
Do not 'Nickel and Dime' your Website.
The inevitable result will lose far more than you saved. Consider what a website is worth to your business when you consider your budget. If you have a substandard website, rather remove it from the Internet.
Your website makes you money by generating trust between you and your unknown visitor. How does it do this?.
Good content is the key to a website's success - easy to read withshort paragraphs and short bulleted lists. The text edited down to the minimum whilst still getting your message across. The tone should be informal to engage the visitor and make him welcome to your website. Testimonials, pictures of the workplace and employees help to create this link.- Your content must be topical. New products/services should always be on the home page either as full articles or as links to the articles. There should be an option to subscribe to a newsletter.
- The navigation should be easy to use, well labeled and logical. Your visitor should get where he wants to go within three mouse clicks.
- Your website has to download quickly - more than 20 seconds and it has already lost half it's customers. Every element of every web page must earn its place.
- Its appearance must be neat and uncluttered - cluttered pages confuse - further, there has to be consistency across the website. At no time must your visitor feel lost.
- Search words and phrases must be integrated into the page content to enhance search engine indexing.
Your web server will generate a log file each day of all the pages and pictures it has served and to whom. These should be checked periodically.
Keep your eye on the competition's websites, particularly if they rank above you in Google. Find out why.
Finally, do not forget about your website. Always be thinking of ways to improve it. It is a tool and as such should be kept in top operating condition.
