101 Website Tips

1. It is essential to know your audience, and then give them what they want. Do not simply restrict visitors to your existing systems and legacy databases. Provide features appropriate to needs of your customers. For instance, a music/dance website can forgo images and graphics and provide a tight, highly categorised and targeted shopping procedure. It may however include features like referrals and reviews.

2. Promote the website by enhancing the visibility in search result pages by the use of paid inclusion, paid placement, contextual advertising.

3. While using paid advertising, route your prospective purchasers to the relevant page that is tied to the keyword being advertised! Don’t show them your home page instead.

4. Send e-mails to current or previous customers to improve relationship, loyalty and repeat business. E-mails can also help acquire new customers or convince current customers to purchase something immediately. You can add your advertisements to e-mails sent by other companies to their customers.

5. Use 'Display Advertising' with web banners consisting of static and animated content.

6. Divert considerable traffic to your site by publishing reviews of your website/products and services in popular websites.

7. Set up your website on Facebook, Orkut, Twitter and other social networking or blog sites. Take part in discussions and queries.

8. The website should have search engine friendly structure to achieve best results. Build search engine optimisation into the site from the ground up rather than adding as an afterthought.

9. There are various work around and tricks to get better search engine rankings. It is advisable not to use them. The search engines eventually find the tricks and penalise sites using them. Follow right procedure and constant tweaking as per search engine recommendations, such as relevant and constantly updated content, and lots of links from other genuine sites.

10. Analyse the outcome of search engine optimisation. Observe search terms and corresponding entry page, and see if it is the right page.

11. "Make sure the titles tags on each page are unique and include keywords people would type into a search engine to find your site. Every page on your site should have a title tag with the content specific to that page. For instance if you own a bakery in Miami, Florida your homepage title tag could be: “Oven fresh Bakery in <street/city> –<Company name>” (without quotes).

12. The Meta description tag on each page may include a sentence that serves as an advertisement. This often appears under the title of your website in search results. The description may not be promotional, but make sure it is adequately informational.

13. Discourage use of use flash (for the entire website) or JavaScript links to navigate your site. Such inclusions are often not search engine friendly.

14. Add some links to your website that are useful to people looking for information about your services. I.e. if you belong to an association (like an attorney would to the bar), if you have a partnership with a related business (you build pools, so you list a few recommended pool maintenance companies), if you can refer people to sources of additional information (such as an accountant pointing to various documents on the IRS website that may be helpful to consumers) – these are all great links to add to your site. You can work these links into your regular pages or create an additional page for resource links.

15. "Get listed on multiple free or paid web directories such as Google maps, SuperPages.com, Yahoo Local, Dmoz.org ,MSN local via localeze.com, citysearch.com, local.com, yellowpages.com, RegisterLocal.com, etc. In addition talk with friends, family, businesses you have partnerships with that have websites, and any associations you may belong to (such as a chamber of commerce) to see if they would be willing to link to your website to help promote your business.

16. Promote your site offline as well by mentioning it on all your marketing materials and to existing customers.  Website must be updated for visits by local people following your offline marketing efforts and well tuned to kind of information they are looking for on your website. Also, the website should be positioned well in the upcoming weeks on search terms specific to local market and service.

17. Lower visitor drop outs or page abandonment by optimising for relevancy. Find which relevant terms are bringing visitors to wrong page.

18. Don’t build your site for the search engines. Build them for the end user. For instance, abstain from over usage of a particular text on certain pages.

19. Don't try to outsmart the Search Engines. Eventually you'll loose. Many design firms promise success through the use of tricks, backdoors, and special tactics designed to sneak a web site into a top position rapidly. Something, of course, that the search engines are constantly battling to overcome. Rather, follow the recommendations of the search engines

20. Host your website on a server and ip located in the country of your target audience.  This helps load pages fast, enhances search engines rankings in ‘country specific’ searches, and prevents your site from being filtered out if visitors use the search filter for sites only from their country.

21. Stay away from dynamic URLs when possible. Your site stands the risk of losing search engine positioning due to dynamic URLs.

22. Get listed on Business advertising firms that use telephone, snail mails, magazines, news papers etc as their medium. This will help attract customers new to internet world and not yet exposed to your competitors.

23. People like the look of clean URL's (current page address in address bar). Visitors often snip them to mail to friends in order to refer them to a particular page. So keep them short, clean and simple. Do not append sessions to them.

24. Consult usability experts. Implement a highly user-friendly and easy-to-understand interface for visitors of diverse age groups, global locations etc.

25. Spot bad links that lead to 404. Bad links can be serious, so fix it as soon as possible. It's better to find it out before you run your monthly log file analysis, or worse when you notice a drop in the order volumes. Preferably reconfigure your Web server to use a special 404 page. Then make that page run a script to send you an email.

26. Remove complexity. Keep pruning any such ‘feature’ that reduces simplicity or eats into visitors' browsing time. For instance, rethink registration.

27. Make form filling easier, should your website have one. Make fields more obvious and smartly reformat. In case of some incorrect/incomplete information, let the user know this without them having to type in all the details again.

28. To aid toolbars that have an ‘Auto fill’ Function, take care that forms use familiar and commonly used names for fields.

29. Don't pre-select a list box. For instance should your website have a country list box, do not list a country at the top if you’ve got a country drop-down box. Always list it in alphabetical order.

30. The home page may include time saving "fly-out" menus and customer service links. User should easily and quickly reach the intended page.

31. Navigation should be as simple and pleasant as possible.  Structured and unambiguous paths through your website can charm the customers and boost the visitor’s rate.

32. The user should get to what they seek in two to three clicks. Ensure there are multiple methods of getting around. No two pages on your site should be more than two to three clicks away from each other.

33. Should your website have Search functionality, make sure it works better than expected. For instance it should look for items even by misspellings. Allow sorting in as many ways as possible to help user rapidly decide on short listed items.

34. Invest in a differentiating experience- with high quality photos shot at multiple angles if required. Maximise user interaction by adding zoom, rotate, expandable interactive images, flash, interactive tours, videos and presentations with ample technical details. Preferably put in a 360 degree product view. Consider hiring a web designer –for a small site spanning only a few pages, the cost should be quite nominal. Remember, the website will be the first impression of your business to online users.

35. When a picture is displayed with a link that says 'enlarge', essentially enlarge the photo rather than have it open in a new window with exactly the same size. Many popular sites do the same and it irritates the buyers.

36. Find your best competitors and research which of their latest features has pulled most of the traffic. If they have, for instance, put up high quality videos that people love spend their time on, make sure you have better ones.

37. Research which of your competitors have been loosing buyers. Learn from others mistakes- It could be a lengthy sign up procedure or site performance issues.

38. A Poor site performance can considerably impact your revenues. Keep a track of slow pages and unplanned outages. Capture the true visitor experience and beware of the false sense of security synthetic approaches provide.

39. Adopt tools and techniques that allow you to measure the experience of real users across all web pages to value the true business impact of poor performance. Watch out for availability measures and your ecommerce-website speed, and tune your system accordingly.

40. Reply to any email queries promptly. If you answer the emails within 10 to 30 minutes, buyers will always thank you for a quick response. Never leave an email unanswered for over 8 hours. If emails are left unanswered for over 48 hours, you risk losing your visitors count.

41. Newsletters can go a long way in building customer relationship and keeping them well informed. Have a newsletter sign up and send out newsletters.

42. Always have a person answer the phone if you feature a help-line, not a recording. And have them answered promptly.

43. The internet is a cold, anonymous place. Do everything to bring a sense of personality and assurance to your website, e.g. live chat, comments, discussions. Have a "Help" link notably displayed. Visitors should have a place to go if there is a concern.

44. If "About Us" page is included without specific details, it can prove a sure shot exit page for most visitors. Provide all necessary details, together with phone, fax number, a real 800#(not 886 or 875), a reachable and clear-cut address and possibly a picture of your office.

45. Every inch of your site and every moment a buyers spends reading them is precious. Spend them judiciously. Unnecessary details like “Mission Statements”, “Company objectives” etc need not be displayed. Display only what a visitor wants to see.

46. Ensure that you switch the website to the SSL URLs specially while collecting customer data such as registration forms, editing account details and credit card details. Make your site secure with a 128-bit secure server certificate installed.

47. Sign up for Hacker safe, Verisign and Add as many credibility seals as you can.  Display their logos to improve credibility.

48. Rewrite your content in case you cannot exceed the expectations created by your site. Remember- under promise and over-deliver.

49. Get the most web un-savvy person you know to test your site. You will have an insight into what needs to be done on usability front. Also, Spelling and grammar must be perfect. Have employees proof read old pages on slow days.

50. To cut down on testing expenditure, consider using products (such as Connectix Virtual PC or VMware Workstation) to test compatibility with different browsers and OS versions on a single PC. Conventional site-testing labs are very expensive to equip and run,

51. If your site address is difficult to spell register a few misspelled versions as well. Set up abc.ur-domain.com and xyz.ur-domain.com which could actually be common typing errors.

52. Prudent choice of URLs will impact your web site's performance you are using a content management system to build your web site. Search engines try to extract key-words from the content of the URL. For instance, a page about "Toolbars" on web site called "somesite.com" creating the page with a filename of Toolbars.html will give a better keyword rank then page55.html.  Similarly sub-directories on the site “somesite.com/Toolbars/” being better then “somewhere.com/files/”.

53. A brand-able domain name is the first essential step to build your brand. People will take your website more seriously. And they are more likely to link to your site. Give your site a point of distinction and your users an identity that is memorable.

54. Refrain from using highly keyword-rich domain names - these may be very generic and add little value to branding.

55. Register your own domain name for several years. With a successful business, spending few dollars to register your domain for the next five years is justified.

56. Get a host appropriate to your business needs– for a local small business website without much traffic or a complicated website setup, you can find considerably affordable and reliable hosting options.

57. Set up an email address using your domain. Usually hosting plans come with minimum of one free email address. Instructions on how to setup and configure your mail client to check that email will be provided by the host. ‘ This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ’ looks much more professional than ‘ This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ’.

58. Make a website that is accessible to a larger audience. For example keep in mind that a considerable number of people in general and males in particular may be colour blind. Making a site that they can use not difficult. Examine a screenshot in Photoshop- just check that the text and navigation is visible in greyscale mode, and recheck in each of the red, green and blue channels.

59. Relevant content and lots of it is a key for a successful web site. Provide additional content like writing articles about aspects of your industry is a great way to generate content. Set aside few hours a week for adding new content to your web site.

60. Trim down visual clutter. Eliminate any design element (imagery, buttons, flash, flare) that doesn’t add value to your visitor. For instance, ensure that the flash content in your website displaying the “slides” is valuable to your customers or improves usability.

61. Keep the content recent and up-to-date. Having good amount of three year old content will not get your website priority. The search engines track this too. They monitor how frequently your site changes as they visit it for indexing. The more often it changes the better your rank in the ‘freshness’ category. Consider keeping a BLOG or adding frequent news articles to your web site. Alternatively a rotating content and the current date on every page is also effective.

62. Maintain a well organised and well structured web site. Both the search engines and your web visitors prefer such a web site that is well structured. The search engines break down all web sites into elements based on the structure of the pages. People, so frequently rushing for a specific piece of information, rarely read through web pages but rather scan headings and bold/highlighted text to find the detailed sections of interest. Make headings, use the correct coding tags, organize content into sections or groups, and use appropriate formatting to present key points.

63. All that functionality amounts to little unless it comes in a visually appealing package. These days it’s tough to get by with a wallflower of a website. Consider investing a little extra for a unique, appealing and clean site that fits your company and brand identity.

64. Strike right balance between aesthetics and consequent heavy content. Place detailed, text-heavy content deeper in the site’s architecture. Keep it short on the home page with initial splash pages and product or service descriptions. If there is complexity to what you are selling be sure to provide visitors a chance to drill down for more details.

65. Do not overlook the power of video. The increasing popularity of online video content websites such as YouTube one can anticipate where internet is heading. A well-done video not only can save visitors a lot of reading but that also can improve conversion rates and boost your sales.

66. In case you are selling a product make sure it looks good. If you are selling something that has a visual representation - then professional looking photography is a must. A costly piece of jewellery may not look good if the photographs are substandard. If you care about what you have to sell, it may be worth investing in some professional photographs to show people what you have. Remember, on-line people can't get a hold of your product - so you need to give them some really good photographs so that they can feel confident that it meets their needs. Also consider using online photo management services to manage & share your photos, and tag them appropriately especially if you have a business portfolio of your past work. Tagging allows you to further organize your photos into categories and integrates them in your website, blog or other social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter.

67. Design eye-catching graphics to make your site be noticeable. Use pleasing graphic effects - collages, feathering, bevels etc. Design attractive and innovative headers.

68. A nicely designed Logo rarely increases sales- spend your budget judiciously.  It is more important to include a logo on every piece of communication. Place it on yellow page ads, business cards, letterhead, invoices, envelopes, building signage, and newsletters.

69. Use appropriate text format. Choose fonts, style, colour size etc that look professional and be consistent across the entire website.

70. It may be a good idea to make an interesting Flash introduction or welcome page, or insert small Flash animations in important pages of your site. Take care to optimize size of the flash animations. Also, know that it is not recommended to design an entire site in Flash.

71. Ensure the style of your site makes it easy to read. Avoid black backgrounds with white text, or ‘ALL CAPS’. Ensure that visitors with the various types of colour-blindness can still actually read your navigation. Looks do matter - but perhaps not the way you think. Remember that "looks" of a web site do matter, but they are temporary- once people have looked at a web site for a few minutes they quickly discard their first impression based on looks.

72. On the homepage place the business name, what you do, where you do it, who you do it for and why you’re the best at it, all in text. Be short and simple, with links to other pages for in depth information.

73. Preferably display address, phone number and email address on every page, in text. Be sure to list this information in full, including street address, city, state and zip code. List the phone number with area code. Also, add a map or get one online via major mapping sites, with directions from one or two major roads in the vicinity.

74. Be sure you list a privacy policy on the site if you have any forms for users to fill out telling them what you will and won’t do with their information.

75. It is a good idea to provide operational hours on your website. Also don’t miss on providing cities you serve in your local area.

76. Go in depth on your company on the ‘About us’ page. Provide a reasonably detailed explanation on what you do, how long you have been doing it, what makes you the best at it and why customers should choose you over your competitors.

77. Tell the visitors what you do and what you can provide clearly on the services or products page(s). Add pricing information if appropriately. Adding recent snaps of finished product or service, if the work involves one. Also add descriptions of what the pictures show in text.

78. Blogs help your business on multiple levels. First they provide valuable content on a consistent basis. This makes you look like an expert. Secondly blogs enable conversation. Such a two-way dialog is more valuable than merely providing detailed information. Also this makes search engine optimization easy.

79. Make use of software that powers blogs. This has multiple advantages. It makes it very easy to publish. It enables a database driven environment where style is separate from content so there is no need to revert back to one’s web design agency for every change. Additionally use of tags and sitemaps make basic search engine optimization easy.

80. Prepare a one page corporate overview. This one pager will be vital as a leave behind when you meet a prospect. Visitors like to read quickly. So use short sentences in short paragraphs. Make the content conversational.

81. Make sure the ‘one page overview’ includes the value proposition, target audience benefits, previous audience experience, a mini-case study, and most importantly the contact information.

82. Using tables in different ways can help design simple but smart web sites. Tables are plain html and therefore don't take much time to load.

83. Rollovers are another visitor’s favourite. Text Rollovers for instance apply formatting changes to text objects when a mouse passes over them Try to use rollovers whenever possible - they are simple and add a bit of class to a web site

84. Visitors find swap images interactive and interesting- the images are swapped when a mouse passes over specific content on the webpage. So use them if possible.

85. Opt for a database driven web page if

    - Website stores or distributes large amount of information (ex: library, information distribution centres, news articles)

    -Website content changes frequently

    -Website involves add, update, maintenance and display of historical data (ex: transactional data entry systems, surveys, polls, customer information).

    -Website is an online store, essentially with multiple product & service offerings.

    -Website offers customized content sections e.g. customer order history, membership, and related product recommendations (based on a customer’s past order history).

86. In case a brief load time is necessary, be sure to provide some valuable information to the visitor while they wait. Discard splash pages and loading pages. Visitors are unlikely to watch a progress bar increment from 0 to 100.

87. Eliminate various time wasters or distractions. This may include pop-ups, fancy navigation bell and whistles that that are displayed when visitor clicks a menu item. This not only distracts the visitors away from the content on the website but also slows down the speed of your pages.

88. Internal site structure (or ‘Site architecture’) is about incorporating the correct internal link planning with URL structure. A consistent page naming convention, for instance, allows your site the solid foundation for future expansion.

89. A primary driver of brand loyalty is a consistent experience. Be sure the product is ready on a set day if you have promised it so. Missed expectations spread faster and are difficult and costly to compensate.

90. Brand image is determined by your audience. Ensure that your website together with your actions and marketing efforts put out the right image. Understand that you are not in control of your brand- you can only set its direction. Ensure alignment between your targeted brand image and actual brand image in the minds of your customers by means of marketing, research and conversation.

91. Answer the question- What is the main purpose of the website? Outline a clear idea of the purpose of the website before beginning any work on it. It may be bringing in new customers, advertising current promotions or probably building trust potential clients before even meeting them. All might seem valid reasons for having a website, but unless you have a clear idea of the main outcome of your site, it's unlikely that it will be achieved.

92. Keep your site manageable and tightly focused. Once a strategy is set for the site, review all new developments against it. Reject those that don't conform. This will help saving on budget.

93. Reuse the same graphics on different pages, so that they're served from the browser's cache. This is one of the easiest ways to speed up your site. Use absolute rather than relative paths to those images for this to work.

94. Optimise images for small file sizes and fast downloads; remove extraneous HTML and unnecessary graphics. Ideally, a page should load in less than 8 seconds.

95. Do not reuse pictures from advertisements or brochures since they may have restricted usage rights. Always have a prior check made. It could cost money if someone were to sue you.

96. Technical features must be chosen wisely. For instance one that provides his salespeople with alerts for each action a prospect takes during a site visit. That lets them communicate directly with visitors in real time, if necessary.

97. "Well coded web sites perform better, are easier for the search engines to assimilate and are more widely visible across varied platforms and in different browsers. Although many small business owners don't have enough control over the code used to create their web site yet it is important to know how significant it may be. Ensure your web designer is writing standard compliant code well validated for errors. Alternatively you may check your own web site using free on-line tools, like ‘The World Wide Web Consortium - the standards body that administers Internet technologies.

98. Measure how visitors are using the site or to track the ROI using free web analytics tool such as Google Analytics.

99. Scripts used should be appropriate, look neat and very simple to use. In case of sub menus or complex navigation systems, for instance, use DHTML. Many sites provide free scripts for menus, navigation systems and tip boxes.

100. Do not forget to answer Frequently Asked Questions– Most business websites can benefit from creating a frequently asked questions page. A 'F.A.Q.' page can reduce customer service effort and save time.  Start a 'Frequently Asked Questions' page by listing the questions most frequently received from customers, prospects and visitors.

101. "Technology--including tools online visitors can use and others an e-business deploys behind-the-scenes--can dramatically affect lead-conversion, Bower says. It may be recommended to use versatile CRM systems that can segment visitors, manage prospect and customer data, score leads and serve up content to visitors based on their profiles. Such a system do not cost a lot of money & can invariably have a direct and immediate impact on ROI.