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Websites 101 – Nine Rules for Success

Guest post by: John Tomblin

Article Overview: You only have three seconds to get some sticky time with potential visitors landing on your website. With all the distractions all around us, you need to understand nine simple tactics to help visitors landing on your site stick...and hopefully keep them there long enough to make contact with you.

Websites 101 – Nine Rules for Success

1 – Content is King – Too often, companies want to see their design firm create the look and feel of a site before gathering content. This is a big mistake. The first step to any successful web project is gathering the site content. It is only after you have all the content that you should contact a design firm for site development. Putting the design before the content is like putting the cart before the horse.

2 – Less is More – We’ve all heard the saying a thousand times “You only have three seconds to make a first impression.” So how does someone actually do that? You do it by using big striking images and three to five word bullet points to make simple statements that capture the visitor’s attention. If you can hold a visitor for three seconds, you can often hold them another 30-60 seconds with straight to the point content (which coincidentally is the average amount of time most people spend visiting most websites).

3 – Continuity – Your website strategy should match your branding effort. Website content should match other collateral such as brochures, flyers and business cards. Make sure the RBG and Pantone color schemes match. People are bombarded with content from a million different sources every day. Keep your content consistent, clear and short.

4 – Avoid the Clutter – Unless you’re a nightclub, radio station or gaming site, avoid the glitz and and blitz of Flash, Java, animation and sound clips, and focus instead on using straight forward content and matching imagery. When in doubt, use one solid background color, one font size and one font color. The most intriguing site design might keep a visitor’s attention for the first three seconds, but you better have something worth reading during the next three seconds, or they’re gone.

5 – Get Analytical – Do you really know how many people visit your site? In a matter of minutes, you can paste simple code into your website offered by Google analytics and other simple tool sets that net you incredible statistics including geo-maps, how many people (real human beings) visited your site, how long they stayed and how they found you. Google’s tools do a good job of parsing out spiders, bots and human visitors, allowing you to view valid ‘human being’ site traffic and learning more about the people visiting your site.

6 – Short Domain Names – For years, J.C. Penny’s website domain was jcpennys.com. Today, they brand their site as JCP.com. Did you know that entering ‘GO.com’ will land you on Disney's website or that International Business Machines uses IBM.com? It is no accident that these companies brand themselves with short domain names. The reason is simple. The shorter the domain name, the more likely it is that someone will type it into a browser. If you have a business whose name is long, more that 11 characters, consider a shorter domain that visitors will more type into a browser. Some businesses have even renamed their business to keep pace with Internet marketing practices and to remain competitive in the marketplace.

7 - Develop content that is web-ready – People don't consume web site content like they do with offline media. Keep paragraphs short with just a few sentences, include ample white space and include easy navigable site maps so visitors can quickly find what they are looking for. People with iphones and ipads have less space to view a website, so be sure to view your site on different devices (laptops, cell phones, ipads, etc.) to ensure the tone and feel is consistent on different devices.

8 – Contact Information – Go pull up ten random business websites and locate their contact information (phone number, fax, sales email address, etc.). How many pages did you have to look at before you found the information? The point: Unless you simply don’t want people to call you, include you phone number and email contact addresses on every page of your site. You likely spent a lot of money driving them to your website...so make it easy for visitors to contact you. The simple and general rule of thumb is to include your business name and phone number on the top and bottom of every page.

9 – Site Optimization – Site Optimization is just a fancy way of saying that your site is designed (through its source code) so that the major search engines like Google, Ask and Yahoo can properly index your site for display in keyword searches by consumers. Keep in mind however that if you sell any mainstream product or service, all the site optimization in the world will do nothing more than get your site cataloged on major search engines. If you want to be at the top of the search engine search results, that requires Search Engine Optimization or Pay Per Click, two topics beyond the scope of this article. That said, have your design firm use meta data, meta tags and meta words in your source code to ensure that the search engines properly catalog your site.

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Article Tags: anaytics, web design, website, website design



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