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This newsletter is intended to provide information, tips and advice to Alaska business owners on how they can more effectively use the web to increase their business. If you would like to be removed from the mailing list click the unsubscribe link at the bottom.
Elements of Good Web Site Design: Part II
Last month we sent out Part I of our discussion of good web design and this is Part II. Effective site design includes more than just graphic design and appearance. It encompasses all aspects of your site from audience analysis to web site marketing. Future newsletters will address some of these topics in greater detail.
6. Create well written, informative page copy
Even a good site can be marred by poorly written copy. If you aren't good at writing marketing copy enlist some help. Web pages that contain poor grammar, misspellings or just plain bad writing will quickly send your potential customers elsewhere.
- Chunk your information. A page should break up visually and conceptually into small chunks of information.
- Use headlines and paragraph headings to identify the content of each section. A visitor to your site should be able to scan a page and know instantly whether they want to dig deeper and read the details.
- Don't try to cover to many topics on the same page.
- Use a medium sized font that is easy to read.
- Don't use center aligned text. This is a very common and annoying mistake that makes text harder to read and looks bad as well. A short caption under a picture or a heading in a text box might work well with center alignment but a paragraph should always be left aligned.
- Use keywords in your copy. If the page is about a bed & breakfast in Kenai then you should use those words throughout your copy to help search engines find your site.
7. Give special attention to your home page
When your home page loads in someone's browser they should know what your site and your company are all about almost immediately. The home page should be a general overview of the products and services that you offer and should make it clear what information can be found on the site.
Don't just rely on your menu system to get people to the information they want. The home page is an excellent place to put teasers and intros to information that exists on other pages. Think of your home page as the front page of a newspaper. It gives you a quick overview of what's inside and how to get to it.
The home page to this Alaskan trekking site is an excellent example of what I mean. You know immediately what the site is all about and have several enticing lead-ins to more detailed information. Sure, if people want to know about trips they could click on Trips in the menubar, but with the teaser boxes they get a preview without leaving the home page.
8. Design your site with an eye towards the future
You should think of your web site as an ongoing project rather than something that you publish and forget. You will probably be making changes and additions sooner than you think.
- Create menus that make it easy to add new items. You shouldn't have to redesign a bunch of pages just to make menubar changes.
- Use stylesheets to format all of your text.
- Use server-side includes and library items for footers, banners and other elements that appear on many different pages.
- The more organized your site structure is the easier it will be to incorporate new information and new pages.
9. Optimize your site for the search engines
There are millions of pages on the web and the search engines have to look at all of them and create an index. A search on the web usually turns up thousands of results for a query. But if your site is number 150 on the list of results then it might as well not be on the web at all.
There are things you can do to help the search engines index your site and show up higher on the list of search results.
- Include a fair amount of copy on your pages. If a page is nothing but graphics and a few sentences of text, then the search engine won't know what the content is about. 300-400 words per page is a good rule of thumb.
- Use keywords in your copy. If the page is about a bed & breakfast in Kenai then you should use those words throughout your copy to help search engines find your site.
- Create a site map page that has links to all of the pages on your site. There should be a link to the site map page in the footer of every page.
- Make sure your page has meta, title and description tags in the code.
There are a lot of companies out there that will offer to "Submit your site to 55,000 search engines for only $39.99!"
Save your money. There are really only four search engines that you need to worry about, listed in order of popularity:
These account for all but a trivial amount of searching done on the web. Don't be conned by companies who say they can get you good results on second tier search engines.
10. Develop and implement an effective site marketing plan
You finally have your beautiful, new, perfectly designed site up and running and can now sit back and watch the traffic pour in. Wrong. "If you build it, they will come" may have worked for Kevin Costner in the movies but it won't work on the web. Once you have a web site up and running you have to drive traffic to the site.
Even if you have optimized your site to help the search engines find you, it will still take several months for your site to get indexed. Also you can't rely on just the search engines to bring people to your site - you need a multi-pronged plan.
- There are directory site on the web for just about any industry. Get links on as many of those as you can. Many of these are free.
- Avoid directories that are nothing but lists of links. There should be plenty of description text and all the entries should be related in content.
- Trade links with other sites but only sites that are related to yours. A link to your site on a site for Thailand Hotels is not going to help you and may even hurt.
- Set up a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign that is highly targeted.
- Include the URL of your site in all of your promotional material and advertising.
- Consider starting a newsletter to send out to your customers and potential customers on a regular basis.
That wraps it up for this month. In the future editions we will go into greater detail on these and other topics. Is there a topic you would like to see covered? Let us know.
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