Although every website varies in substance and objective, effective websites use a common strategy of design and functionality to get the best results on the Internet. In order to attract the widest Internet audience and establish trusted relationships with your customers, every business should know what it takes to create an effective website.
Logical, Intuitive Navigation
No matter where your are within your site, it should be easy to tell where you came from, where you are, and where you're going.
The home page should always be a click away
From any page of the site you should be able to get to the homepage in one click, preferably by clicking the company logo or business name. Navigation of the site should be oriented to your customers, not your company, or the whimsy of the designer. It's up to you to determine what your customers will be looking for, what they will want to know, what they will want to do, and what actions you wish them to perform. It's up to you to communicate this information to your design team so they can deliver a website that meets your customers demands.
Contact information should be available from any page
At all times and places your customer should be able to contact you to ask questions, provide comments and concerns, and to interact with your organization in general. As soon as you catch your visitors' attention through your page content and language, you should provide your visitors the opportunity to interact with you, whether through an email, a live web chat, a product order form, an application, etc.
Table of Contents, Site Map & Search
Consider using special tools such as a table of contents (aka: site map), services index, or a search feature to help people quickly get to where they want. Site maps are also highly effective "bait" for search engine "spiders" that will routinely scan your website, following each link to i eventually index your entire website for the world to see, rather than only the pages you originally submitted to the search engines. In addition, your customers should always have an alternative method to navigate your site if their original attempt fails.
Design
Design is everything. In many cases your website will be the first impression someone has regarding your organization or business. When searching on the Internet most consumers' attention spans are greatly limited. It thus becomes very important to create a compelling website design to distinguish yourself from the competition and attract visitors to explore deeper into your site.
Clean & Simple
Graphics should be clean with smooth edges. They should appear the same regardless if you are viewing the site on a top-of-the-line monitor, or a lower-end model. Image backgrounds should match the background of the web page. Graphics should be subtle enhancements to the content you are trying to communicate. They should never distract your customer (aside from marketing purposes). Your pages should not look cluttered or over-designed. Customers should be able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily, without sifting through pages and pages of irrelevant graphics and unrelated "bells & whistles." Most first-generation websites have a tendency to throw in the kitchen sink when it comes to "bells & whistles." Annoying pop-up ads, blinking and flashing graphics, beeps and buzzes, bloated banner ads, illogically arranged content and navigation ... all of these things may look impressive at first glance, however, your website will ultimately be judged by what your customers can do over what they see.
Proper use of text
Don't make the mistake of designing your entire website using graphics only or using Flash multimedia only. Some of the most impressive designs out there by the world's leading designers are done using Flash only, however, as good as they may look they're not going to get the results they deserve on the Internet. Here's why. Unlike an HTML file, Flash files are single movie files; they are static, flat files which can't be "crawled" by internet search engines. If your entire website is a single flash file, there is not text to index, no links for search spiders to follow. As a result your website's exposure in search engines will be greatly limited. Instead, use a combination of HTML pages and Flash. Try using at least 400 words of text per page and within that text include 4 key words or phrases that are linked to related pages on your website. Search engines love text and they love links. Search engines ignore Flash; and they ignore graphics for the most part (the do scan "alt" text tags which can be embedded inside images).
Fast Loading Pages
The more complicated your pages are, the bigger and bloated your graphics are, the longer they'll take to load in an Internet Browser - and the more likely your customer is to become frustrated and leave your site. All images used on your website should be optimized for the web browser. This means that image color pallettes must be reduced to the smallest number of colors possible while still retaining the original image quality. The code beneath your pages should be clean and concise with no excess scripting that causes browser delays. Consider using Cascading Style Sheets to separate your website style from the page content. This ensures that all pages look the same and that pages are not clogged with superfluous font and body tags that could otherwise be accomplished by a single external style sheet. By removing style tags from the code of your pages and putting them into a style sheet, your website will load faster.
Accessibility & Compatibility
Optimizing your website so everyone can access it equally takes considerable effort. Choose a web design company who has a proven history of producing websites that are 100% accessible by all popular internet browsers and at various internet connection speeds.
Optimize for compatibility with popular Internet Browsers
Make sure the site's appearance is benchmarked and tested on all popular browsers as well as some older versions of each browser. Some older browsers may not support the latest programming technologies and may cause your site to malfunction or display incorrectly. For example, if someone is using a Macintosh computer with the latest Safari browser, and you're website wasn't designed to be compatible with Safari, the visitor may have problems seeing the same website everybody else sees, and he/she will probably exit immediatly without further investigation.
Test for different monitor resolutions
Your site should also be tested under different monitor resolutions, as your pages may look totally different at different monitor resolutions (page dimensions). For some your pages may not even fit on the screen; for others the pages may not take up the full width of screen space. Your website should be designed using a lowest common denominator standard for compatibility with all monitor resolutions.
Test for different internet connection speeds
Your site should be tested under different internet connection speeds, and until high-speed or broadband Internet is widely used, your site should be benchmarked for speed with a slower 56k modem. For example, if you're selling farming equipment to farmers in rural Idaho, designing a full-blown multimedia website that requires a high connection speed is probably not the best idea.
Use of browsers, plug-ins & special software
Don't force your customers to upgrade or download a new browser just to view your website. Aside from the Flash and Adobe Reader plug-ins, don't force them to download special software and plug-ins just to view your page content. Don't force them to change the resolution of their monitor just to see your pages. Make sure your designer uses "style sheets" to create universal styles so all your pages will look the same no matter what computer environment they are seen in. Does your designer routinely test your site on all popular combinations of browsers, computer platforms, monitor resolutions, and internet connection speeds?
Popular Browsers
While most sites are built to work with Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator (the most common browsers used on the Internet) other browsers exist that your designer may not accomodate for, including Firefox, AOL, Opera, Web TV, and Safari (Macintosh). Each browser acts differently depending on its version and the type of computer it resides on. Make sure your designer has the testing environment to build and test your website for all these variables.
Compelling Content
The visible content of your website should attract and welcome your customers. Content should be developed to have a "sticky" appeal, meaning your customers will return later if they like what they see and benefit from your content. By refreshing your content on a weekly or monthly basis you will attract recurring visitors who will routinely check your site to see what's new. Consider adding supplemental content, even if it's not directly related to your business. The more pages you have on your webite the more exposure you have on the Internet and the more potential you have for attracting visitors to each new page you create. On an individual page basis, this does not mean more is better. Keep each page short, with trimmed paragraphs and easy-to-read visual design. Provide supplemental links to other related pages and sections so your user can pass between topics intuitively.
E-Commerce
If you're selling products online, customers should be able to place an order within two clicks. Placing an order should be simple and straightforward. Customers should be told exactly what they can expect after their order is placed, such as how to print a receipt or track shipping. They should always be reminded that their transaction is secure, that you will not sell or share their information, and that you appreciate their business. Consider creating a privacy policy and make it available from all pages. If you are selling products online you should always provide a physical address as well as a phone number. If you don't tell customers who and where you are, why should they trust you to complete an order?
Marketing
The most common mistake most companies make in designing a website is that they hire one firm to do the design and another to do the Internet marketing. Many design firms out there claim that they will optimize your website for search engines, but they don't tell you exactly what they've done and there's no way to measure the results. At Eye in the Sky our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialists work side-by-side with our designers and programmers so you get a website that is truly optimized for high ranking in search engines.
Internet marketing, i.e., search engine optimization, should be planned and integrated into the design of the website. For example, the domain name, page file names, directory names, page titles, page headers and page text should all be uniformly constructed and planned for specific results in search engines. If you don't do this up front, you'll end up paying someone to do it later, which means your website will have to be totally restructured. Any current ranking in search engines will be lost as your site is re-submitted to search engines to gain the benefits of the new optimization strategy.
Meta-tags
Your "meta-tags" (HTML code that directs search engines how and when to index your website) should contain page descriptions, key words and other elements used to direct users to your site. All of these aspects of internet marketing should be planned out in advance of creating your website and should be integrated directly into your design. You can always try to optimize your website for search engines after your site is created, but why not do it in one comprehensive, unified strategy?
Submitting your site to search engines
Many firms will complete your design and then use an automatic submission agent to list your site in search engines. However, automatic submission agents routinely fail because search engines change their indexing rules and requirements constantly therefore most automatic submission agents cannot keep up with changes and they routinely fail. In addition, every time your site is submitted with an auto-agent an email address is required (yours) which typically results in thousands of unsolicited "spam" emails. To successfully submit your site to search engines, you should always use a manual process. Your site should be manually submitted (by a real human) to each of the major indexes. Your results in the search engines should be routinely monitored to maintain consistency, and your competition should be analyzed in order to prevent competitor sites from one-upping you in the search engines.