One of the great things about the World Wide Web is that even the "little guy" can be big.
Your website can give the appearance of a large organization, even when it's just you and the family dog, sitting in your kitchen in your underwear (not the dog, you in your underwear!). It's all about presence and appearance. This article discusses how to make your website look large, even when what is behind it is just getting started. The World Wide Web is making more millionaires faster than any other phenomenon in history.
Elements of a Winning Site
The elements that make a website a "winner" are the following: 1. Loads Fast
2. Looks Great
3. It's links actually work
4. Quick response when people request information, report trouble 5. Is Useful
6. Is Interesting
7. Serves a great need
8. Is Fun
9. Offers lots of free stuff
10. Presents an appearance in keeping with whatever you are selling 11. Sells in a very subtle way 12. Is not like everyone else's 13. Does not use email addresses retrieved from its contents to "Spam" people
14. Has some kind of newsletter that allows visitors to keep in touch on an ongoing basis
15. Has clear navigation
Now we'll discuss these elements, one at a time. Miss any of these crucial elements, and your website traffic will suffer. Ignore none of them, if you want people to "show up". Just like a boring preacher has a hard time getting people to come to church, just providing good choir music is not going to make up for it. Your website may look good, but if it serves no purpose whatsoever or is not clear in its message, it'll flop like one of those movies that doesn't make it in the box office because the first group of people to see it keep the rest of them from showing up.
The first thing you have to make sure of is that going to your website is not frustrating:
1. Loads Fast: If your website loads so slow that people get bored waiting for it, your business will never get out of the starting gate. Large graphics, lots of those great java scripts, lots of background bitmaps, and a slow server to run on are some of the causes of this. No one will ever stay long enough to find out what you're selling if your pages are slow. The best way to test your site is to get on an average connection and time it with a stopwatch. You may be operating on a DSL or cable modem connection, so it's best if you can visit a friend who has a dialup and see how your website loads for him/her.
Make sure your web hosting provider gives you enough bandwidth and a fast connection. We experienced this problem (among others) while stuck in a 2 year contract with a hosting provider. We've since switched to another provider and don't have this problem anymore. See Web Hosting to find out where we went for better bandwidth. No matter what we did to make our Website load fast, our foundation was not good enough to make people want to come back. More than a few seconds to get to your website, and your site goes down in history as not being seen, along with all the websites hosted at places where websites are free. (You probably know who they are) If you have huge graphics and all kinds of whirlygigs and java scripts that would make a grown man cry, your site is in trouble again. Try to make all your graphics small and in a .jpg (jpeg) format. If you must use moving gifs or other animated stuff, make it something useful that replaces text information. It must have some use on your page - not just to look good. And try to make it only one per page, if you can. If you love java, be aware of a couple of issues with fancy java scripts: Not everyone can see them if they don't have the right browser or the latest version of some browsers, not everyone is going to appreciate that their mouse leaves "trails" across the screen, or that everything on your site is what they call a mouseover (where an image changes into something else when you run your mouse over it). Leave this stuff to your "other" site - you know, the one you wrote for fun. Try to keep this stuff to a minimum on a business website.
A plain white background is always better than some fancy, bandwidth-eating background bitmap image. If you must have a background image, make it a very small watermark-style image. Better to leave it plain. Makes it easier to read for many people who don't have the greatest video card or the best pair of eyes.
One side note: It's always good to test your website's pages in another screen resolution. If you like to keep your resolution (right-click on the desktop in Windows, go to settings, change the slide bar) at 1024x768, test your site using 800x600 and possibly 640x480. You can also put some java scripts that test the user's screen resolution and adjust accordingly, or you can put a disclaimer on your main page that says: "Best when viewed in 800x600 resolution". You decide how easy to make it for your visitors. Remember that things that may look great on your machine might look like crap to someone with their screen resolution set differently. The next thing to make sure of after they actually get to your site is whether or not it looks good.
When I return, I'll discuss how to make your website credible with a great look.
Lynne Schlumpf is the CEO of Route 66 Cyber Cafe, Inc., http://www.r66cci.com, a Web hosting and design company specializing in promoting websites for new owners, building affordable e-commerce sites, and providing reliable web hosting solutions as an affiliate of Virtualis Incorporated.