There are many things to consider when designing a website. To someone with little or no experience, the task can be a daunting one. Here we have compiled some helpful tips to consider when building a personal or company web site.

Domain Name:
We usually recommend obtaining a ‘.com’ extension as that is what is usually remembered and typed by people, although there are times when other extensions will be appropriate. You should also consider whether you want to include your business name or industry keywords in your domain. It is also good practice to have a shorter domain as longer domains are more easily misspelled. Avoid including anything in the domain that may change over time. Changing your domain inevitably loses you clients and all of your rankings are lost in the search engines. You can read more domain name buying tips here.

Load Time:
Load time is a very crucial aspect of web design that many designers overlook. It doesn't matter how nice your website looks, if it takes more than seven seconds to load, the average web surfer will not wait. In order to maximize your load time, we recommend that pictures be reduced to the minimum size possible while still retaining adequate detail. If you have a large image, slicing it up into smaller pictures will make for faster loading.

Navigation / Menu:
The navigation scheme of a website is critical to the conversion rate of its customers. The navigation menu as well as your internal linking structure should be easy to locate and operate. The linking structure that is used will greatly determine the ease of use (or difficulty) for your customers. A good way to plot this out is by thinking of a web surfer who has little to no web experience. Will the basic web surfer be able to navigate your web site with ease? Can they make it through every page / desired action without confusion? In addition to having a navigation bar at the top and / or left / right of the screen, you should include links to your most important pages at the bottom of the screen and on a site map.

Pictures:
People always like to see clear and detailed images of what they are shopping for or reading about. If you are selling something like jewelry, you should show one picture with a scale of reference (include a penny or ruler in the shot), as well as many detailed close-up pictures of the design and intricacies of the product from all angles. It is always a good idea to have ‘alt text’ for your pictures describing what the image is. ‘Alt text’ is short for alternative text. ‘Alt text’ is displayed instead of the image if the customer has their pc set to ignore images. The alt text should not be used to stuff keywords in an attempt to increase search engine rankings. This is considered spamming the search engines or unethical SEO and can potentially get you banned from the search engines. Read more on SEO and Ethical Search Engine Optimization.

Content / Copy writing:
One of the most important things search engines will ultimately rank your website based on is the quality of the content. All search engines want to return relevant informative results. No matter what you are selling you should compile as much relevant information as possible. By adding unique relevant content you are not only giving the search engines more pages to crawl, but you are also giving your site the opportunity to get inbound links from those who recognize your quality content.

Here are some ideas of things you could gather articles about:

The more content the better. Actually, you can never have enough relevant content. If you want to have a successful long lasting web site, you should always be adding relevant content to your web site. For best results you should consider hiring a qualified search engine optimization company.

Clear Call to Action:
Does your website have a clear call to action? Is it easy for your users to complete the desired course of actions? Whether it be buying a product or signing up on a newsletter; does your site have clear and consistent instructions as to the course to complete the desired transaction and is it easy to do so?

Payment Options:
If you plan on taking online payments, you can greatly increase your conversion rate by including multiple options for people to pay. If possible, offer all of the following options: Master Card, Visa, Discover, American Express, PayPal, Money Order, Personal Check and COD. If the means are available, it is also a good idea to have a telephone number for phone orders or inquiries about products / services.

Hosting:
For most companies a reliable web site hosting company would run $15 - $25 a month depending on the size of the website, and the amount of traffic you anticipate. While most can get away with a cheap website hosting company if your business can support it, you may want to consider getting a dedicated server that only has your website on it and can handle many times the traffic that a cheap hosting company can. Dedicated servers usually start around $400 a month and go up from there.

These are just some of the many things to consider when building a website. In addition to the above tips we will see that your web site is professionally optimized for the search engines so that your website achieves the highest rankings possible.

If it seems like a lot, this is simply a brief overview of what is required to design a professional and successful website. In reality there are very few website design companies that know how to implement strategic internet marketing and search engine optimization effectively. Learn more about our website design packages or contact us for a free quote.