- A Wide Site– The days of a skinny site are over. You want something wide and appealing. Wide computer screens are in and skinny sites look cheap and terrible on them, so if you are going to invest in a web site tell your web designer that you want it wide from the beginning. If you already have a site you love talk with your web designer and see if it can be expanded. Remember, the appearance of your site is crucial! You want your traffic to stay and they won’t stay if your site is visually unappealing.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)- I don’t care who you are and I don’t care what your web site is for. You need optimization for several reasons:– You need traffic to be successful and you can’t bring people in without SEO.
– You want to show up on the search engines under words that relate to your site
– You need SEO to compete with businesses in your local area and nationwide
. - SEO Copywriting- If you want to have a site that is effectively optimized you need SEO copywriting. SEO Copywriting integrates your SEO strategy into the copy. The beauty of great SEO copywriting is that your web visitors have no clue that the copy they are reading has any other purpose than pleasing them, but in reality the copy was designed to please the search engines and the reader.
- Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)- Cascading Style Sheets is a stylesheet language that separates the content of an HTML, XHTML, XML, SVG or XUL document from the presentation of the site. CSS saves web designers a lot of time because it allows them to create styles for all of appearance properties and keeps them in one place. CSS is also W3C compliant (this is very important). W3C stands for World Wide Web Consortium and they create web standards internationally for the World Wide Web (W3). CSS allows web designers to structure a site according to HTML standards without ruining the look of the web site and Google wants sites that are properly structured and W3C compliant…CSS sites are.
- Idiot-Proof Navigation- I am not using this term to be rude or imply people are idiots. I am just saying that ALL web sites need navigation that is so simple that any idiot, caveman or 1st-time Internet user can use. Do not make navigation difficult to steer through and PLEASE do not have drop down menus that are difficult to use/navigate through it. I have said this several times and I will say it again- People will not work hard to look through a site. If the navigation is difficult they will get frustrated and leave and unfortunately your competitor may have easy navigation so the client invests in them. I like pretty sites and attractive sites and even fancy sites, but there are many who could care less and just want to find what they were looking for quickly and easily.
When creating a site you want to try and please as many people as you can. This means they need to be able to find your site on the search engines (SEO + SEO Copywriting + CSS), your site needs to appeal to them visually (wide site), they need to believe in you and trust in you (SEO Copywriting) and they need to be able to find what they are looking for (Idiot-Proof Navigation-© Melissa Fach).
