A Few Basic Prinicples of a Successful Website
October 3rd, 2004
Your online presence if your first impression. If your website seems cluttered and disorganized, that is the impression you are giving to your visitors. Make sure that you utilize plenty of whitespace and the most important content is within the first few pages.
KISS (Keep It Simple Silly)
Your website is not truly done until you can no longer take anything else away. Remember that the web is much different than the offline world. You do not have the luxury of voice intonation, inflection, body language, or simply beating around the bush - website surfers have a lot less patience. Internet users are looking for valid and useful content, quickly. Anything that stands in their way or slows them down simply agrrevates them and may very well cause you to loose a website visitors.
Market your website to the right audience
If you’re selling widgets, it’s not going to do you very much good to advertise in the sprockets forum. Find websites and other avenues of advertisement that compliments your website’s products and services. Ask yourself who your target audience will be and begin a bit of user testing to find out where they would expect to find your website, how easy your site was to navigate, and what they think you can do to improve your site. Remind your visitors that what they say matters to you and that you do listen and no matter who your audience is, try to keep a certain level of personalization.
Don’t plagerize
Yes, this should be an obvious one, but doing a few quick searches on various sites dedicated to revealing plagerizers will show you that plagerizing is not as uncommon as you might think. Yes the internet is a big place. Yes there are billions of website, but no, plagerism isn’t good for your site and it’s certainly not the message you want to send to your visitors once they find out your site was featured on pirated-sites.com or a comparable alternate. Not only is plagerism “not cool”, it’s also illegal. Make sure you read copyright information and when in doubt - ask the webmaster or author. When you do use someone else’s work on your website, make sure that you give full credit to the copyright owner (and a link would be nice also). If you do not know who deserves credit, place a small note to let everyone know that it is not your original work and a link to where you originally found it.
Think of building a website as a roadtrip. There are steps you need to take in order to make it fun, enlightening, and safe all around. If you’re not organized or planning for a success, it will reflect itself in your website. It’s best to map out on paper what you intend to do, the goals of your website, how you hope to achieve those goals, your timelines and develop your content before you even order your domain name. If website planning doesn’t seem like an easy task for you or you really don’t know where to begin, try picking up a copy of Web Design on a Shoestring by Carrie Bickner at amazon.com or overstock.com. This book contains some helpful hints and tips for organizing and setting up your website project as well as resources to help you get the most out of your website project.