1. Text that isn’t text.

Restaurant websites, I’m looking at you in particular. Scanning your paper menu and throwing it up on your website as an image file or a PDF is the equivalent of creating a door by drawing it in chalk on the side of your house. Never mind the fact that your SEO is going to hell, that it’s a pain to update anything, and it probably looks terrible. This is just a nightmare from a usability standpoint. This is pretty vital information, and locking it up in as an image means that the information becomes infinitely less accessible. Your users can’t copy-and-paste bits. It’s harder to see on a smartphone. They can’t resize the fonts if they can’t read something. It won’t conform to the available space, so they’ll probably be stuck scrolling back and forth, or they’ll miss your great deal on Kung Pao chicken.

It’s 2011. You can use almost any font you want in a website now. You can do amazing things with fine-tuned typography you couldn’t do three years ago. There’s no excuse for lazy-designer tricks like these. Text should be text.

2. Flash.

I’ve said it before, and lots of other people have said it before me, but it bears repeating. Don’t use Flash. Flash is slow-loading, doesn’t work on an iAnything, and generally is built quite badly. It generally crashes my browser these days (poor LazarusBook). Also, see above, and also below.

3. Stuff that sings, jumps, dances, or otherwise behaves like an over-excited puppy.

I’m the first to admit I’m a bit of a control freak, but most people don’t like it when you hijack their machines without asking first. I was visiting a website the other day that had the most obnoxious ad I’ve ever seen—five seconds after loading, this huge man appeared in the browser window and started talking at me. It was terrifying.

Most people know better than to load up their websites with giant-obnoxious-talking-man-ads, but there are many subtler examples of this. Links that open in new windows automatically (I’ll do this on my own if I want, thank you). Music and video that starts automatically (typically embarrassing people with speakers connected, and leaving me hunting around to find the offending site). 99.98% of animated gifs, banners, and ads. Let your users control how they interact with your website, or they’ll just leave.

You can repent all you want, but if your website sings at me, you’re damned to an eternity of animated fiery gifs. (Photo from a street corner somewhere in Rome.)

4. Ugly design.

My sister’s in library studies, and one of her prerequisites is a “web design” course. I told her she could save the $500 that credit probably cost her, and I could teach her the whole thing in ten seconds. Hire a web designer. This isn’t a self-serving statement. I don’t care (much) if you hire me, or if you hire some other competent designer. You can’t learn design from a three-month course. There’s all sorts of crazy complicated stuff, both technical and aesthetic, that goes into design. The reason most people don’t understand this is because good design is like a great push-up bra: it supports and enhancing its content without overpowering it. In theory, you’re not supposed to notice it. But it makes a huge difference.

5. Bad code.

Your website should be standards-compliant, semantically coded, and easy to update. If your web designer/developer doesn’t understand what these things mean, hire someone else. Surprisingly enough, there are still websites using tables. And frames. And inline boxes. Remember that internet years are like dog years, except longer, and that developers need to be constantly learning new stuff in order to make great websites. Make sure you hire someone who knows what they’re doing from a technical point of view, and you’ll end up with a website that performs far better—in terms of page speed, browser compatibility, and search engine rankings—than you would otherwise.

6. Business-speak.

A website is not a brochure. Most people reading online have the attention spans of drunk goldfish. Keep things short and scannable and people are more likely to read what you’ve written (says the woman who regularly writes 1000+ word blog posts). Stop using business-newspeak to make yourself sound more important. People no longer care about that sort of thing (unless they’re in government, in which case, aim for as dry and nap-inducing as possible). The internet is a scary place, full of fraud and Nigerian princes. Speak with a voice that’s genuinely yours and people will be more inclined to trust you.

7. It’s broken.

About three years ago, I bought a box of something from a certain unnamed food company with initials in their name. I’ve never bought anything from them since, but they gave me a card and a number at the time and signed me up for their mailing list. When I tried to unsubscribe, their website demanded that I submit both my email address and the number on the card that I’d never used and had lost. I put up with their irrelevant weekly mailings for some time until I finally found my card and unsubscribed.

When I did, their website told me it would take ten days to remove my address. Really? Ten days? Is your database maintained in a notebook or something? That’s utterly ridiculous. The best part was that after two weeks, they were still emailing me, and I had to send a long, cranky email explaining how broken their system was and that I really should be able to unsubscribe without putting as much effort into it as one typically does when getting a divorce. (They never responded, but I haven’t received any more emails—yet.)

This is a more minor example, but I’ve seen lots of websites that are broken in more major ways. Contact forms fail and there’s no fallback email address. Shopping carts that don’t check out. Validation routines that maintain “Buenos Aires” is not a city in Argentina (I lived there. Trust me, it is.) Test your websites, make sure they work, and fix them if they’re broken.

Jesus died for your sins, not so that you can throw the word “synergy” around like it’s going out of style. (Photo from Tierra Santa, the religious theme park in Buenos Aires. Don’t worry, Jesus later rises, in giant animatronic style, from the hilltop.)

So hire a designer already, and save yourself for the sins you can really take pleasure in.

1. WP-Typography

This plugin does magical stuff that’s previously been kind of hard to do on the internet: hyphenation (now I can justify my text!), making true small caps, smarter punctuation, turning ampersands into prettier ampersands. It performs well straight out of the box to improve your typography, and is also full of fine-tuned controls. I haven’t had an opportunity to play around with them yet, but when I’ve got some time to spare (this will happen eventually, I’m certain), I’d like to go over this website’s design with a fine-tooth comb. This plugin (and quite probably Lettering.js) will be a big part of that.

2. WordPress.com Stats

This is the statistics engine used on wordpress.com sites, and I’m considering using it over Google Analytics, mostly because its stats are all readily available from your WP Dashboard. There’s sometimes just too much clicking involved for my liking in checking out my stats via Google. (Seriously, can someone just skip over that big blue “Access Analytics” button for me already?) There’s the Google Analytics Dashboard, but it’s just so unsightly I can’t quite bear to look at it.

What the widget looks like on my dashboard. See, this one is pretty! It doesn’t tell me my bounce rate, but it doesn’t make me feel like someone’s offended my Poor Design Sensibilities, either.

3. eMob Email Obfuscator

This gem (in spite of its terrible name) of a plugin finds email addresses in your content and protects them from spambots. My previous solution was a plugin that made use of a shortcode to obfuscate email addresses, but I rather like this one for being automatic. This means that my clients don’t need to learn what a shortcode is, and I don’t need to search through their content to make sure they aren’t vulnerable to unnecessary spam. That’s important to me, and, though many of them may not realize it, to my clients as well.

4. Quotes Collection

While this one isn’t a must-have for every website, I’ve used it on a great variety of websites. It’s a highly flexible plugin that allows you to collect and display quotes of any kind on your site. I use it for testimonials, ideas, or random snippets of information, all of which can be tagged and displayed in different places and manners.

5. Contact Form 7

I think I tried out every contact form plugin available before settling on this one. I like that it’s super-simple to use but quite flexible, uses elegant Javascript, and will send an autoresponse to everyone who’s submitted a form. It will allow you to make everything from the simplest contact form to a complex series of form elements, including file uploads. You can then customize how the information is sent to you, and the whole thing generally works like a charm.

6. Disqus

Comments on steroids! They’re prettier straight out of the box, they integrate with social media in ways I’ve yet to fully understand. It’s starting to be used on quite a number of websites, which means that, since it makes use of a universal profile, users who’ve already registered with Disqus (or another site that uses Disqus) won’t need to re-register to comment on yours. Ideally, it should facilitate conversation among your users.

7. Back Up WordPress

Backs up your WP data on a regular basis and emails you a zip file of database contents. I’ve never had a WordPress site that suddenly lost all its data, but I suppose it’s not impossible, and there’s certainly no harm in keeping a backup!

8. After The Deadline

I just came across this plugin, and it seems like a super-smart little proofreader. Not only will it find your misspelled words (and allow you to perma-ignore the non-dictionary words of your favour) it will also catch double negatives, clichés, jargon, the passive voice, and all sorts of other stuff (if you want it to). I’m thinking I’ll even start using it myself, although I haven’t used a spellcheck in years.

9. Validated

My clients are unlikely to ever use this one, or care what it does, but I install it nevertheless. It runs through every page on your site and spits out a report about what validates and what doesn’t (and how many errors exist on each page). Way easier, and faster, than doing every page at once, and it allows you to be extremely detail-conscious in your adherence to standards.

10. WP-IE6Update

Remember how I hate IE6 and am officially rejecting the concept of developing for it? This helps by putting the IE6Update code on your site. If anyone dares visit using IE6, they see a friendly message prompting them to update their browser to one that’s been released in the last ten years and isn’t the spawn of Satan.

11. One-click Plugin Updater

When you have this many plugins, this is a godsend! What I’m doing is keeping a folder of all these plugins on my local computer, then uploading them to every fresh WordPress install. I’ll undoubtably have four or five at any given time that need updating. With this plugin, it’s just a matter of hitting one (very obvious) button at the top of the screen. Generally speaking, this makes it easier for my clients to keep their plugins updated too, since there’s a notice at the top of every screen to advise them.

Admittedly, not everyone will click the “Upgrade all” button, but it’s STILL easier than clicking on each plugin individually, especially if you maintain lots of plugins. I find most WordPress sites that I built make use of at least twenty plugins, which can be an awful lot to maintain.

12. AWS Easy Page Link

It’s long bothered me that there’s no simple way of linking to an internal page from the add/edit link popup, other than actually entering the URL. This can be on the complicated side for less tech-savvy clients, and I’m always trying to find ways to make WordPress simpler still for them to use. I have searched for a plugin with this functionality for ages, and I still can’t believe it isn’t built into WordPress. Essentially, it adds an element to the add/edit link popup that allows you to select, from a simple drop-down, a page on your site to link to.

I’m working on three new WordPress websites these days, so I expect this list will be refined considerably as I find better plugins or drop ones I’m not using. There’s such a huge number of plugins out there, too, that I’m quite certain there are brilliant finds I just have yet to chance across.

What’s on your list?

I love you, WordPress! Thanks for (almost always) making my life a little bit easier.

1. More whitespace!

Every time I give someone feedback on designed pieces, I find myself repeating this over and over and over. (Programmers are notoriously bad about this, for some reason.) Consider the look and feel of a store layout—generally speaking, those with higher-quality merchandise tend to have more space between displays. The same is true for design; more whitespace will give an impression of higher quality. Move related elements together; decrease the spacing between lines of text, don’t butt text against a solid shape, and don’t be afraid to leave empty space. This gives the eye a chance to rest and prevents your design from looking like an ad for a car sales lot.

2. All hail the 66-character line!

The ideal line length, in terms of legibility, is widely believed to be around 66 characters long. Of course, this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but generally speaking, your text will be far more readable if the lines measure somewhere between 50 and 70 characters. I’m pretty good at eyeballing this now, but I still always check my line lengths with a simple character count tool to make sure they’re good.

3. Go left of centre.

Unless you’re designing a wedding invitation, avoid a centred alignment, which generally gives a highly classical look to any design piece. It can work nicely for old-styled invitations, frontispieces, or labels, but generally it just looks overly formal. A left-hand alignment of elements makes for a more readable text (unless you’re working with a right-to-left language, that is.)

4. Keep it in the (font) family.

Typically, two fonts is all you need for a well-balanced design. Too often people try to use too many “fun” fonts and end up with a chaotic mess. Select two fonts—one serif, one sans—and stick with them. (If you pick fonts with a variety of weights and styles—bolds and italics and such—you’ll have more options in terms of formatting.) A serif font has little sticks and stems on the ends of the lines, which help guide the eye from one letter to the next. Accordingly, they tend to be better suited for long passages of text.

A serif font (Mrs. Eaves) compared to a sans-serif (Gotham).

Stay away from the following fonts: Comic Sans, Papyrus, Trajan, Arial, Times New Roman, unless you have a really great reason for using them. FontSquirrel has a great selection of free and well-crafted fonts you can download and use for anything you’d like.

5. Get up in your own grid.

Using a grid will magically help your design look cohesively and professionally-designed, even if it isn’t. A grid will also lend the whole thing an overall sense of order and structure, particularly useful when working on a design that contains lots of information. While there’s quite a lot to grids (and they’re something I plan to touch on in more detail in another post), basically this involves aligning your elements to an “invisible” grid pattern. 960.gs has excellent templates available for most design programs as well as a number of great tools for websites.

This website makes use of an underlying grid structure!

6. Become a feedback monster.

My roommates and the people around me are probably more than a little tired of this habit of mine, but I ask everyone who’ll listen to me for opinions of my work. It’s easy to miss things when you’re working on something, and other people will often perceive your work in unexpected ways. You don’t need to use every crackpot suggestion, but taking them into consideration will improve your work.

7. Microsoft Word = The Devil.

Above and beyond any of its varied other failings, it is very difficult to make anything look nice in Word. Use OpenOffice if you really like word processors, or the range of (also variably flawed) Adobe products created for professionals, or their equally powerful freeware alternatives.

These are just some very basic suggestions and tips; if you’re serious about making things look better, pick up a copy of The Non-Designer’s Design Book. Or, hire a designer.

Of course, after spending forever (I stopped counting somewhere along the line) spent making it work precisely (and pixel-perfectly) to my liking, it’s now broken. Every single image in my portfolio is now displaying with jagged images. Cue panic! It was fine last time I checked! What on earth happened? I still have no idea, and I hate to think how long it may have been broken before I noticed. (Note to self: keep an eye on these things, alright? Sheesh. My contact form plugin had also deactivated itself without my noticing somewhere along the line. Not good.)

So I’m ditching the SimpleViewer. (I am guessing that much of my weekend will be spent tweaking and implementing the change, so things are going to look terrible between now and then.) I found an alternative that I think will be better, and simpler in the long run, although of course it does mean that I need to go through every portfolio post and upload new galleries: Gallifrey, based on Galleriffic. (If you’re nerd-chic and/or British enough, you’ll recognize this as The Doctor‘s home planet, which rather delights me as I’ve just started falling in love with all things Tardis-related.) It works with WordPress’ built-in gallery functions, is super-customizable, and will even finally allow me to implement my triple-bordered image display that I wanted initially for this site. Simpleviewer, you were fantastic, but it’s time for us to part ways.

When I originally designed this gallery display, most people didn’t notice the difference between the triple-border here and the single thick border unless I explicitly pointed it out. Turns out I’m a touch anal-retentive.

Can Flash go into the ground already? There was a time when it was useful for websites, but with jQuery and a myriad of other frameworks as well-developed as they are, there really is very little excuse for it anymore. There are all sorts of reasons why Flash is bad: it’s horrible for search engine optimization, it mucks with usability, it’s often slow to load, it refuses to display on an iPhone, and it won’t print or display itself in a feed reader (at least, best I can tell). While the number of websites relying on Flash has decreased dramatically in the past few years, it’s still a little too prevalent. No more Flash, okay? There’s always an alternative.

Sometimes you just need to screw up enough to find it.

It’s amazing. News stories break on Twitter before the newspapers even have an idea what’s going on. You can see real-time photos of Stephen Fry stuck in an elevator. If you complain about a product, its manufacturers will help you out. But most fascinating are the conversations: it’s like what I imagine The Crysalids was like. Someone makes a comment about the colour of the sky, and people respond; threads of conversation begin spidering off in different tangents. Anyone can jump in at any point and drop out just as easily, and nobody dominates because every response is limited to 140 characters. It’s the digital representation of the collective unconsciousness. And it’s searchable!

Social media, I’m sure you’ve heard, is changing our world. If you’re late to the party, like me, it’s time to get involved! Rather than give you a bunch of information that may or may not be true, I’m going to point the way to some resources from more credible experts than I.

Please note that I’m only addressing here the aspects of social networking that I use myself or find most useful… there are a great many other tools that people are using, and there are a great many tools that will rise to the forefront as the internet changes & progresses.

General Information

• a long, but excellent overview of the merits & business implications of social media
• another great overview in pdf/eBook format

Write a blog

Everyone and their goldfish has one. Why don’t you? Blogging will generate more hits to your website, will provide your users with valuable content, and will allow you to interact with your visitors.

• why have one
• getting started
• RSS feeds

I can help you set up a blog and develop a custom template for it (you don’t want to look like everyone else now, do you?), along with a whole range of customization options! I like WordPress myself, but I’ve also used Moveable Type, Livejournal, Blogger, and other platforms.

Twitter: not just for twits

Twitter is the most-used “microblogging” platform; ie, blogging for the lazy. It takes 20 seconds to post a microblog post, and that’s only if you’re really thinking about it.

• beginner’s guide
  
• sign up
• follow me!
• etiquette

Facebook: the workplace productivity vampire

In a business context, you probably want to avoid posting photos of yourself doing jello shots, but otherwise I’d advocate being as open as possible. Any time I receive an email from a prospective client, I look them up on Facebook to get a feel of who they are.

• reasons to use it
• ways to use it
• sign up
• add me!
• become my fan!

LinkedIn: Facebook without the poking

LinkedIn is sort of like the professional version of Facebook.

• video overview
• sign up
• add me!

Monitoring Tools

Find out what people are saying about you. If they’re not saying anything, find people who are talking about the things you can help them with, or the companies with whom you compete.

• technorati
• twitter search
• & more

Remember!

• Keep trying! You will see an ROI, but it may not be immediately measurable. Social media is about forming relationships, first and foremost.
• Help out other people as much as you can to be seen as an expert and a valuable asset to the community.
• Be authentic and open.
• Upload your photograph to your profile if you do nothing else… people will trust you about 100x more if they see a face. We react personally to a face in a way that we don’t react to words. (Same goes for your website.)
• Interact with others–if you’re communicating in a void, you aren’t communicating.
• Respond to negative feedback instead of suppressing it.
• Find your audience & join them.

If you’ve any resources to suggest, or comments, please feel free to leave them!

Anyway. Two things I’ve learned:

• Gmail doesn’t care about your CSS text-formatting. That’s right, that means you’ll need to use <FONT> tags. Gross. I haven’t used those in at least five years!
• Outlook 2007 will make things look ugliest. Apparently, this is because it uses the MS Word rendering engine. Now, seriously? Why? If you’ve ever tried to design anything in Word, well, you know how impossible it is. They do, however, provide this handy little “validator” to check to see how/if your code is going to work, which is nice for those of us who get the shakes just opening Outlook. And it’ll plug into Dreamweaver!

On a vaguely related, but mostly unrelated, note: remember to vote, kids! This is the first year in a while I haven’t been directly involved in doing design work for a campaign, and as a result I’m less jazzed about the election than I usually am, but it’s starting to get to me as the day goes on. Go! Vote! (Or at least spoil your ballot (though it’s illegal to do so). Or vote Libertarian, if you can! Efficiency 2008! Down with Busy-Work! Alright, now I’m excited.)

Anyway, back to my jQuery-induced headache: this very helpful thing to the rescue! If I can stop being distracted by the gorgeous site design, I might be able to figure this stuff out, after all, without having to spend all day teaching my brain new methods of programming. I do so love programming tutorials written for designers. Thank you, pretty colourful website!

and a “new” website (that was completed months ago). I really don’t like updating my own website!

But I’m determined that it’s about time to do it, especially given that I’m about to move again, and that means that my address as listed on the website will be even more wrong than it is currently. (Sure, in theory it only takes two minutes to change it, but that’s not how I work…if I’m going to spend two minutes, I’m going to be there three hours trying to fix all the little things.) At any rate, all the little things have really added up, and it’s time for some major-ish rearranging.

Actually, the most dramatic upgrade has already happened, and that was my finally giving in to the whole “blog” phenomenon. It took years, but I finally buckled, and I’m sort of enjoying it. What sold me on WordPress is how monstrously simple it is—I actually started using it the place of a word processor, and I find it much smarter: it auto-saves constantly (good for those of us prone to data loss), it’s totally un-bloaty, it’s faster than typing out my own html, and it auto-formats my smart quotes. God, I love smart quotes. I actually spent an hour or so today formatting a client’s novel to get rid of all the dumb quotes, hyphens, and “period” ellipses. I don’t know why these tiny details are so important to me–but I suspect that there’s a place where the grammar-fascist in me meets the typophile, and proper typography is born. Or maybe it’s just that I, embarassingly enough, didn’t know about smart quotes and such for so long that I now consider them to be something of a litmus test for “quality” design?

Smart quotes aside, the news/blog section has all been redone, and I like it a lot, and may even get into the habit of using it more frequently. WordPress is really great and easy to develop themes for (once you figure out what you’re doing), which I’ve been doing of late for Lilith Saintcrow, who writes novels about girls who kick ass and take names (all told, the best kind of lady). I’ve got a couple more weblog-based websites in the works, so I’m learning a lot these days.

On a side note, why is there always an elephant (in the room) on my to-do list? I’m a notorious list-maker, and I’ll sometimes prioritize my lists in order of importance, not that I follow my own order religiously. For example, today I’m at #12, but #3 is still sitting there patiently, un-crossed, with three exclamation marks following it. It’s the most vital thing on my list, but I’m betting it’ll be the one thing that’ll end up being neglected. Is this some kind of subconscious self-mutilation wherein I’ll always sabotage myself for the work that is most important? How do I trick myself into thinking “eat three tubs of chocolate fudge icing” is the Elephant Task, instead? I’ve read a few productivity-type tips that recommend things like offering to wash a friend’s car, or pay them $50, if you don’t complete the Elephant by the end of the day (the theory being that we’re all inherently lazy, and the only way to make us do something is by threatening us with something more unpleasant), but I feel like that’s somehow compounding the pressure of the situation, thereby inflating the psychic block.

Anyone know how to take down an Elephant (or a run-on sentence)?

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.

An excellent way of supplementing this information is by sending along a screenshot. I’ll often request this of clients when I can’t replicate a reported bug—if you’ve sent one to begin with, I can be that much more effective.

Here’s how you do it.

On a PC:

• Make sure your screen is showing what you’d like it to.
• Find the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard. It should be to the right, above the arrow keys and the “Page Up” and “Page Down” keys, and will probably be marked “Prnt Scrn” or somesuch. If you use a laptop, it will probably be up along the top, sharing key space with a function key.
• Once located, press the button! (If it’s on a function key, you’ll probably need to hold down your function key while you’re doing it.)
• Open up a graphics editing program. Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, and Paint will all work equally effectively for this. Open a new document the size of your screen.
• Select “Edit » Paste” from your menu, or press Control-V. Your screenshot will appear in your new document.
• Save this document (“File » Save” or Control-S) to your computer.
• Open up your email program, attach the file you just saved, and send away!

On a Mac:

• Open a Finder Window.
• Browse to “Applications » Utilities”. Launch Grab.app.
• Select “Capture” from Grab’s menu. Select one of the options according to your preferences (“Screen” will do quite nicely!) or just hit Command+Z.
• Follow the on-screen instructions. Your Mac will make a clickity-camera noise when it takes the screenshot.
• Back to Grab. It will contain a new document that is a picture of your screen. Save it to your computer (“File » Save” or Command-S).
• Open up your mail program of choice, attach your saved file (it will be saved as a .tiff file, which is perfect), and send to your happy web-person!