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