Jon Rognerud has written a book called The Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your Website that shows some basics of good web design. Jon is an SEO and online marketing expert who talks about the characteristics of a top-ranking, high-performing website.
This paraphrased excerpt outlines website features to include and avoid in order to drive traffic to your website.
Navigation
When traveling anywhere, humans will always tend to take the easiest or shortest route.
Same thing on your website.
Make navigation easy by having a clear menu bar at the top of every page.
Keep the basic appearance of each page consistent. Change only the content.
Don’t make it messy and hard to read.
Most pages require some scrolling, so use a sidebar and footer area at the bottom of the page to put additional information within reach of your readers.
Make your text large enough and easy to read
I have written about this many times.
Make your text big enough to read. Pretty basic, but many sites use small fonts that are hard to read.
Keep your target market in mind: Baby boomers will have a harder time reading websites with small fonts.
Make sure the color of your text has a high contrast to the background color.
Keep your text well spaced and use lots of new paragraphs. You may notice that I rarely use more than 2 sentences in 1 paragraph.
Use paragraph styles on your website to highlight important headings and points.
Don’t be afraid to use other editing features in your website editor, like viewing quotes, and even good old BOLD, ITALICS, and ALL CAPS to make your point.
But don’t overdo it!
Save text underlining for hyperlinks, so as not to confuse or irritate your visitors.
Netizens expect all links in the content copy to be underlined and blue. Always follow this standard.
welcome page
Wiki defines a home page as “a comic page that is occupied mostly or entirely by a single image or panel.”
And a splash screen as “an image that appears while a game or program is loading. The term can also be used to describe an intro page on a website. Splash screens cover the entire screen…”
In the context of the website, it will often be set up to force the reader to enter an email address before proceeding to the actual content of the website.
This has its uses if you are targeting a very unique niche, or if people go directly to the site from your personal recommendation.
But otherwise, why would you work so hard to drive traffic to your website, then have visitors choose to enter when they get there?
Don’t put unnecessary obstacles on your website.
click and scroll
Having a visitor click, scroll, or move their mouse to navigate your website increases the risk of losing that visitor.
Therefore, make it easy for people to find the key information that you want to convey to them and/or that they are looking for.
Limit scrolling to long articles and detailed pages, like sales pitches, and always keep it to less than 8 screens.
Sound
Have you ever been on a website where the sound suddenly starts blaring?
More embarrassing if you are at work at the time! LOL
So if your customers are browsing your website during business hours and have to shut it down in panic because of the sound…how does that help you?
You want to keep people on your site for as long as possible, so don’t do anything to make them want to close it quickly.
The auto start sound is annoying and deadly.
And if you really must have sound on your website, make sure you have a very large and clear “unmute” button near the top.
background images
Background images have their place, but most are amateurish and not added to the website.
If you take a look at the major sites like Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon and Monster… none of them are background images.
Also, if you’re not careful, background images can slow down your website’s loading time.
uncompressed photos
Just like we said for background images, large image files can slow down the loading of your website.
Before adding images to your website, use graphics software to reduce the file size of your images. This will use less disk space and will download faster.
Even photos taken with your iPhone are often 3000 or more pixels wide, while your average website is only 900 – 1000 pixels wide. So it doesn’t make much sense at this stage to keep the original image size.
People don’t like to wait for your page to load, so they will leave if it takes too long.
Remember the last time you went to the bank or a store and saw a queue. Did you even stop?
Compress your files. Open external links in a new window
Providing external links (outside of your website) is an important part of providing information online.
But make sure you don’t drive people away from your website by opening the new page above your page.
Always open external pages (and even some internal pages where applicable) in a new window so your website is still there when they’re done with the other page. Important information on every page
Make sure that the most important information is on every page of your website and that it is easy to find.
This could include your contact details, your special offers, your newsletter subscription offer, etc.
Links to your home page
Your visitors will often want to return to your home page, so make sure that button appears on every page of your site. Don’t make them use the back button on their browser.
Include your menu bar on every page.
unique and original
Never copy and paste content from other websites.
It may seem like an easy fix for creating content, but copyright infringement is serious.
However, more important than copyright is the search engines that can hit you hard for copying and pasting content from other sites.
Content is always the “king” for SEO and content that is original and valuable is the ultimate in your SEO strategy.
test your site
Once your site is built, whether you build it or have someone else build it for you, always test it thoroughly.
Anything not working, not showing, not loading will annoy your viewers and make your business less professional than it is.
Broken links can also have a negative effect on your search engine ranking.
To be really thorough, check it out with different types of browsers and also on mobile and tablet devices.
And since you’ve been working on your site for a while, it’s easy to miss details…so have some family friends review it for you and give you feedback on ease of use and successful operation. .
You can use XENU’s broken link checker tool at (contact us for link), including finding duplicate content titles, types, page sizes and more.
do it for you
Or, you can take the easy way out and do it all for yourself.
Well, that’s quite simple actually!
What are you going to do now?
Check your website for these features.
Make the necessary changes to get better results with your website.