Six Steps To a Better Website

I gave a present­a­tion to my BBC group last week, giving some tips and guidelines for how to make a web­site more effective. It’s aimed towards the non-technical person, though imple­ment­a­tion of much of the advice would likely require a designer or developer’s help. How­ever, I thought it might be a useful resource, espe­cially if you’re in the pro­cess of cre­ating a new web­site, or revamping an old one.

Do note that I’ve not been fero­ciously good at fol­lowing all of these guidelines myself—but it’s cer­tainly given me some better ideas about where I ought to be taking my website!

1. Provide valu­able content.

You’ve heard it before: con­tent is king. A gor­geous web­site will do you abso­lutely no good if your con­tent is poorly written, irrel­evant, or out­dated. To this end:

• be sure to spellcheck, or have someone proofread your writing
• make sure to update your con­tent reg­u­larly (a blog is good for this)
• use humour judi­ciously; keep your tone casual
• be sure to give some inform­a­tion about who you are in order to engender trust
• remember to KISS (Keep it simple, stupid)

Be aware that writing for the web is a whole dif­ferent ballgame. Users are impa­tient, and nobody wants to skim through a dense chunk of text in order to find what they’re looking for. A few guidelines for writing web-specific content:

• pages should con­tain no more than two screen­fuls of text
• art­icles can be longer, but should con­tain no more than seven screen­fuls of text
• use short sentences
• break con­tent up into small para­graphs, or make use of point form

You should also con­sider writing short art­icles about your area of expertise. This is a great way to provide valu­able, rel­evant con­tent for your web­site. For example, if you’re a tax spe­cialist, write an art­icle about how to use the quick method of accounting to file your GST/HST. If you’re a mech­anic, write an art­icle about how to do your monthly main­ten­ance check. While you may think that you’d lose cus­tomers by providing this “inside inform­a­tion”, what you’re actu­ally doing is estab­lishing your­self as an expert in your field. Vis­itors will begin to see your site as a resource, not just an advert­ise­ment. You can also pub­lish your art­icles else­where on the internet to drum up fur­ther interest in your site.

2. Don’t turn your vis­itor off.

Web surfers are a fickle breed. If a vis­itor arrives at your site to find any­thing he finds irrit­ating, chances are good that he’ll leave imme­di­ately. You don’t want this to happen, so ensure that you don’t use any of the fol­lowing ele­ments on your site (in approx­imate order of Per­ceived Evilness):

• popup win­dows
• auto-loading sound
• frames or invasive Flash (because you want to be able to see the address of the actual page itself in your browser’s address bar)
• illegible text (whether due to blinking, scrolling, lack of con­trast, line length, leading, or inab­ility to resize)
• overuse of animation
• obnox­ious use of advertising
• long load times

3. Make use of a stat­istics program.

A good stat­istics pro­gram is easy to install on your web­site, and will give you valu­able inform­a­tion about your vis­itors. I’ve used dozen of dif­ferent stat­istics pro­grams over the years, and there’s a myriad of options. I use Google Ana­lytics on all of my cli­ents’ sites: it’s easy to install, and gives a wide range of statistics.

Things you’ll find espe­cially useful:

• bounce rate: Given as a per­centage, this tells you the number of vis­itors who leave your site imme­di­ately after vis­iting the homepage. A high bounce rate most likely means that you’re either turning your vis­itors off, or not dir­ecting them to any con­tent that’s of interest to them.
• most accessed pages: This will tell you what con­tent is most inter­esting to your vis­itors, so than you can create more con­tent in a sim­ilar vein.
• refer­ring sites: This tells you what sites are linking to yours, and which ones bring in the most traffic.
• keywords: This tells you the search engine phrases that people have entered to find your site. My top three phrases, for example, are “live­journal tem­plates”, “graphic designer”, and “trig­gers and sparks”. This gives you a better idea of what people are looking for when they visit your site, so that you can provide them more rel­evant con­tent. (As a bonus, you also get some really random-seeming phrases, like “clem­entine boxes”, “some­thing that eats platypus”, “grunt labourer ser­vices”, and “why don’t humans hibernate”.)

4. Organize and follow conventions.

If your vis­itors can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll leave and find it else­where. If you struc­ture your con­tent well and follow the basic con­ven­tions that web users are accus­tomed to, it’ll be easier for you vis­itors to find your content.

• all con­tent should be no more than two clicks away at any time
• provide a search bar if you’re man­aging a content-rich site
• menus should be in an easy-to-reach place (top or left is con­ven­tional), and should be consistent
• text that is not a link (or, in some cases, a header) should not be underlined
• links should be dis­tin­guished from text (using colour and, in some cases, an under­line), and should change somehow (colour, back­ground colour, under­line) when you put your mouse over them
• do not use all caps (excep­tions can be made for short head­ings that are all set this way; for emphasis instead use a bold or italic set­ting, but don’t overuse this!)
• make sure that it is easy for vis­itors to con­tact you at all times

5. Optimize for search engines, but don’t harass them.

This means: build your site so that search engines can index them prop­erly, but don’t go over­board trying to use com­plic­ated Search Engine Optim­iz­a­tion tech­niques. (Focus instead on building your valu­able content!)

Tips:

• ask other sites to link to you (espe­cially if you have linked to them!). Only request this of people you know. Building valu­able con­tent will make people link to you naturally.
• each page should have a dif­ferent title, descrip­tion and set of keywords (usu­ally no more than 15 keywords are required; too many can cause you to be blacklisted)
• keywords should be repeated within the page con­tent (but don’t force it; this should happen naturally)
• all images should have an ALT tag; avoid using images as headers or links
• submit your site to online dir­ect­ories (Yahoo, Open Dir­ectory, any local or business-related dir­ectory that accepts links)
• make sure your web­site has been semantic­ally coded (sep­ar­ating con­tent from present­a­tion) and is standards-compliant

6. Make sure everyone knows about it.

If you’ve built a fant­astic web­site, but nobody knows it’s there, it’s no good to you. Advertise your web­site address every­where you go: use it as an email sig­na­ture appended to all your emails, put it on your busi­ness card, use it as a sig­na­ture if you post to online forums, paint it on your car, add it to your online profiles.

Make use of social net­working sites and tactics:

• linkedin.com, facebook.com, myspace.com (in decreasing order of “professionalism”)
• create a Face­book Page for your business
• start a blog
• provide RSS feeds for your vis­itors, and integ­rate them with Face­book & the like
• use Qassia to pub­lish your art­icles and get quality links back to your site

And above all, remember: if you build it, they will come. Focus on making your web­site a source of valu­able, well-written con­tent that’s access­ible and well-designed, and you’ll be in a better pos­i­tion to benefit from it.

Tags: business, design, how-to, information, process, resources, SEO, websites, zen