Saturday, May 31, 2008

Good Website Content

by: Gally Reznor

Reading a website is not similar to reading a book or a newspaper, therefore before you start spilling money on campaigns be sure your site is built in accordance with internet writing standards. Lets talk about few simple rules you don't want to break when building a website:

Don't waste your visitors time

Time is money. Most people decide whether they are interested in what the website has to offer in just to seconds. Therefore make sure your landing page provides the most crucial and appealing information about your business.

Number one time waster is a heavy loading pages with lot's of flash animations and pictures. Make sure your web pages are not too heavy otherwise you might loose your visitors before they entered your website.

Most of the visitors need to find what they are looking for fast, otherwise they look for it elsewhere. As a webmaster you must make sure your data is well categorizes and divided to relevant pages , categories, headlines and sub-titles. A visitor must be able to navigate your website easily and successfully.

Avoid too much "Special affects"

By this I mean don't include too much flash movies and avoid using music if you don't have to. As we mentioned earlier, Flash has a large loading time which damages viewer experience, besides too much flash may be annoying and search engines can't read it.

Music is a great thing, but somehow music and websites do not fit too well. If you want to put some background tune anyway, make sure a user can silence it quickly and easily. Or in contrary , let the user click "Play" and begin the music when he decides.

Pop-ups and new pages

If you have links in your site , I strongly advise you not to use the pop-up option and not to open these links in new window. Seemingly pop-ups and new windows are a very good idea if we don't want the visitor to navigate from our website but many years of experience shows that users prefer to click "Back" buttons. As to pop-ups , most of browsers tend to block them , and you don't want to waste your viewer time on enabling pop-ups.

Text

Use standard fonts which are supported by all browsers, like Arial and Times New Roman. You don't want your viewers to get gibberish and go away from your website. Don't use very small or very large fonts . You don't want your pages to smear for miles and you don't want to scare away people with poor vision.

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