However, even when your website is set up and fully-functional, there are still other ‘rules’ to follow to ensure that yours is a success.
Back to basics
So you have built your site and gathered together everything that is going to appear on it. But the questions is; ‘where do you start?’
The trick here is to carefully plan the ‘look’ of your pages, because if you just jump straight in and start putting things places you will lose track of things and your website will end up being difficult for your users to navigate.
This will also make your life easier when you add material to your website in the future.
The main point to remember with any website is that it must provide a service as well as present your product or service that you are selling.
Your website must also be easy to use. The design of the site must make it easy for the user to navigate and not get lost. A confused user will simply leave.
Website designer, Paul Simonds, said: “Website users want information at their fingertips, so a website that causes them to get confused will cause them to leave.
“The best tip here is to make sure that there is always an obvious way to return to the homepage, whether this is through a link at the bottom of your text or image, or featured at the top of your left hand navigation bar.”
Website design tips
It is important to remember that users will not wait. You have, on average, 10-seconds to catch and keep a visitor.
With this in mind, your homepage should load quickly. To do this the graphic files should be kept small, backgrounds simple and you should take full advantage of height and width tags with every graphic.
The height and width tags will force the text to load first, giving the user something to read while the graphics load.
Once on your homepage, the user should be immediately faced with a description of your site, what it is for and what is included in it.
So what happens when you have done all this and people are viewing your site? As a business, the aim for your online presence is to increase awareness and custom.
Ensure that visitors will return to your site by updating its content. According to Simonds, ‘a static website never grows’.
He added: “The most useful item on any website for any user is the ability to email comments. It also helps the company understand what users are doing on their site and often sparks ideas of ways to improve the website.”
Attracting visitors
The first thing to do in order to make sure your website is found and used by people and not just left to float around in cyber space, is to get listed with the major search engines. This is very time consuming, but will pay off in the end.
The other thing to do is to engage in mutual link development.
Simonds explained: “This is important to any new website. The internet is saturated with websites, some of which never get seen because it is hard to find them.
“The use of mutual links can increase traffic by up to 25 per cent, so the time spent doing this is well worth it in the long run.”
Many businesses that have developed a website have now taken the use of the internet one step further and developed an e-mail based newsletter.
This is a really good way of building up a database of users and informing them of new products and services, giving them that extra push needed to return to your site on a regular basis.
