Tag Archives: Business Website

7 Tips for Boo-tiful Web Design [INFOGRAPHIC]

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Listen up, ghouls and boos, we’ve written a lot about web design here at Mashable, but on one day a year, it’s appropriate to call on some more, um, spirited individuals to lay down the laws of basic and proper web design.

We hope you know by now not to use Comic Sans. And while everyone loves an animated GIF, they’re only funny or entertaining when they’re … funny or entertaining. And that blinking text? Get rid of it, unless you’d like to be liable for a few seizures.

Below, you’ll learn from Frankenstein font snobs, mouthy mummies, impatient pumpkins and spiders on the web to help you make your website more of a treat than a scare to browse.

 

 

Creating a successful Business Website

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Successful business websites don’t happen by accident.

Your defined business goals and target audience drive site design. Those factors determine how a site looks on the screen and how visitors navigate through it, which is often called the look and feel of a site.

Use AIDA technique to guide visitors toward specific actions:

• Attention: Get viewers’ attention by using graphics, a headline that grabs, and a benefits-based lead. You have four seconds to convince them they’ll find something of value on the site.

• Interest: Build interest with site design and navigation. Include intriguing options that pull people to additional pages on your Website, giving you time and space to expose visitors to your products, services, and benefits.

• Desire: Create desire and a sense of urgency as visitors move themselves toward taking an action. If you think visitors are almost ready to buy, post a reminder to Buy Now for Free Shipping. If you think they’re doing research, remind them to Bookmark This Page or Tell a Friend. Use whatever content tools that will build desire in your audience, from marketing copy, photography, and special offers, to online activities or onsite entertainment.

• Action: Right from the beginning, make it obvious what you want visitors to do, whether it’s to buy online, make a call, send an e-mail, or sign up for a newsletter. Then ensure visitors that it’s extremely easy for them to take those actions.

You can’t count on a linear experience. Websites aren’t like most books, read from front to back. Visitors might not arrive on your home page, and they might skip all around your site. Not every visitor wants the same thing, so you must juggle appeals to multiple sub-segments of your target audience.

Recommended Website Structure

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One of the things I do before submitting a website to search engines is I make sure it is structured correctly for search engine compliance and human usability.

The list below summarizes the most common mistakes people make when designing their website.

All of these factors can affect your search engine rankings. If you’ve already submitted your website to the search engines and aren’t getting the results you expected, these are some likely reasons why.

The good news is that you can make changes to improve your rankings.

Follow the recommendation below and you will gain better position in search engine.

  • Flash and other Multimedia Objects.
    Flash applications and other multimedia objects CANNOT be indexed by search engines. If a website contains only Flash, for example, we would need to either develop a set of templates that can be read by search engines or analyze the Flash apps in order to encode the HTML templates with text that is readable by the search engines. On the same note, if a website uses Flash for its primary navigation but has no backup plain HTML for links, we would need to develop standard HTML navigation or at least a site map

  • Frames
    Many websites simply do not index framed pages. Of those that do (Google is among them), frequently what people forget is that if a person comes directly to one of your framed pages, they won’t be able to navigate from there to the rest of the website. Frames, in general, are not recommended.

  • Robots.txt Format
    The absence of a robots.txt will generally not deter search engines from indexing website, but an improperly formatted robots.txt will stop the engines at the first page of the website. The robots.txt should be used primarily to limit the content that is indexed by the search engines.

  • URL Format
    The format and length of a URL can have an effect on whether the page is indexed or not. Some engines will not index a URL that contains characters such as question marks, ampersands and other odd characters. The length of the URL should always be limited as much as possible. We should also remember that people may want to bookmark certain URLs in the website or type them in manually.
  • Keywords in URL
    Whenever possible, try to use keywords that are used in the meta tags, title and content of the page in the URL of the page.
  • Internal Linking
    Search engines do not follow JavaScript, Flash, and CSS links. It is imperative that even if these flashy elements are used for primary navigation that a backup set of plain HTML links is written for the search engines.

  • Download Speed
    Download speed is not only important to users, but to search engines as well. Measure the load speed of the pages within the website to find problem pages. If your website takes longer than 5 seconds to load, you are forcing the user to decide whether or not they want to stay or not. Search engines will also have a problem indexing your website because of their built-in time-out tolerance levels.

  • Total Size
    There are two things to consider when deciding what is an appropriate total size of a document on the web: your target demographics and search engines. While it may be perfectly acceptable to your target demographic to include intense graphics, multimedia, flash objects, etc. it is never acceptable to search engines.

    As it pertains to whether or not a web page CAN be thoroughly indexed by a search engine, the general rule of thumb is that the combined total of all HTML, text, graphics, etc. should not exceed 60-100kb.

  • Use External JavaScripts
    Search engines do not understand JavaScript, but they do count the overall page weights against you for having JavaScript. It is important, therefore, to move as much JavaScript out of the main HTML into external JavaScript files as possible.