Guideline


1. Ask yourself these questions and note down the answers to from part of your website plan:


  • Who is the end user, and what will they expect from the site?
  • How often do you expect them to use the site?
  • Will you offer a facility to enable customers to browse products?
  • Is the website intended to act as an online company brochure or do you intend to trade from the site?
  • How many online orders or requests do you expect to get per week or month? How do you intend to update information?

2. In the majority of cases visitors want information and they want it now. How gorgeous your site is will not be as relevant to them as long as it loads fast, looks reasonably attractive and makes it easy to the user to evaluate it usefulness to them. A general guideline is that you will lose about one third of your potential visitors if your site takes any more than 10 seconds to load.


3. Bringing in fresh, new content will keep them interested and keep them coming back.


4. Simplicity - A consistent design and look makes it easier for visitors to locate the specific information they seek. For example, a feature presented on every page, such as a standard navigation menu or logo for the site should always appear in the same place. A clear, consistent presentation will especially assist people with visual impairments or learning disabilities who have difficulty using disorganized navigation schemes.


5. Put up your site for reviews! This is so important because other peoples reviews will reflect exactly what your visitors will think. Opening up to some reviews will create more sales.

6. Good spelling is encouraged. The visitors are interested first in content. Substance is more important than style.


7. The use of graphics should be minimized, so pages load fast over slow links. The Web is for everyone, even those with slow Internet access and/or text-only WWW browsers. Often a page will start off with some links, then have the text. The goal is to get each user quickly to what they want to find out, having most of the info on the first screen.