2) Useful, Current, Concise Information
The way text information is presented (content) is important
since it encourages or discourages visitor interactions, &
effects the way a website is found & ranked in search
engines. In short content is the critical component of a business
website.
If you have a simple message present it simply. If your message
is more complex, then break it into organized manageable messages.
Tell the broad picture then use links to give more specifics
for interested visitors to follow – like this –
read more about website
content do’s & don’ts.
3) Easy to Find
The beauty of the web is the bane of the web. Namely, tons
of information reside at our fingertips – both useful
& irrelevant. If a user does not get your web address
directly then your site must be easy to find in search engines.
The ability to find a website on the Internet is related to
the interplay of content, design, meta tags (the title &
description tags) & reciprocal linking.
• Content - When writing content make sure you are
using language that the visitor will use to search for your
site. Organize the content into page or paragraph groupings
using key word phrases as page titles or as paragraph headers.
• Meta Tags - Use the title & paragraph headers
on the page to construct the title meta tag & description
meata tag of the page that the headers appear on. Also, try
to stick to a single theme or product on each page.
• Design - Technically sound pages that meet WC3 website
design standards incorporate all of the elements that are
required to promote page crawling & indexing by the search
engines. Tip: All graphics elements should have alt tags even
if they are empty.
• Linking - Getting inbound links to the home page
is a crucial element in how your site will perform in the
search engines. Theses links can be from directories or from
other websites. Links from similarly themed sources (content
similar or loosely related to yours) is better that from unrelated
websites.
4) Easy to Use & Navigate.
When your site opens the user should know the theme &
be able to get to information that interests them in a coupe
of clicks or in 5 seconds – which ever comes 1st. To
accomplish this the primary site navigation must be easy to
see, organized logically & it must give the visitor command
over the site.
The primary navigation must be located in the same location
on all internal pages. Since there is no cyber GPS navigation
available for websites, the internal pages should be labeled
such that the user knows where they are in the site at all
times. There should be no internal dead end pages or orphans.
In short, the visitor should be able to get anywhere in the
site from any page.
Since all of our brains work differently, large sites with
complex content should have secondary & in some cases,
tertiary routes to key information. This is easier said than
done because a site can seem redundant if you do not use different
methods to get to the same places. For instance you could
use a rollover linking system as the primary navigation, a
drop down box labeled “jump to topic” as the secondary
route & finally a site map as the tertiary route.
5) Optimized for Performance - the major operating systems
& software configurations
A site should load quickly & the graphics should be compressed
& optimized to facilitate this end. All internal links
should be developed according to the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) conventions since they will operate more efficiently
& render more quickly in browsers.
A site should work in all the major browsers & operating
platforms – Internet Explorer, Netscape, & Firefox
browsers. And PC & MAC operating systems. Granted there
will be some differences in text & graphic sizes since
the 6 combinations yield different renderings of the same
content. But, there should be no errors displaying content,
graphics, and interactive media or running code.
High volume, multimedia files such as video clips should
be compressed & offered to viewers with a link for visitors
with a high-speed connection (dsl, broadband) & for visitors
using a dial-up connection.
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