Five Tips To Make Sure Your Website Doesn’t Suck

1. Don’t Make Visitors Wait.
Perhaps the cardinal sin of contradicting the ‘content is king’ meme is to force your traffic to wait on accessing the very thing that makes your site unique. Avoid Flash-based intro screens, menus with mandatory loading times or separate document links for any content that could be built directly into your site.

Remember, every second spent staring at a loading screen is a second when someone may decide to close the tab and go somewhere else.

2. Be Friendly to Search Engines.
You don’t have to invest a huge amount of time into search engine optimization, but there are some basic things that should be in place if you don’t want your site to be essentially invisible to your prospective audience.

Basic title tags, meta descriptions and the occasional (not excessive) use of keywords all are obvious, but did you know you can also cram additional search engine-friendly content into the alt text of your image-based web content? Site maps also are highly useful yet underutilized for this purpose.

3. Keep Your Site Accessible.
In valuing looks over substance, it can be easy to forget that looking pretty is secondary to keeping visitors interested in what you have to say – and, very often, aesthetics are directly counteractive to reader engagement levels! Make your font sizes widely adjustable for reader-friendliness, minimize animations except as optional content (such as zoom-ins of product photos) and keep the major navigation menus of your site reasonably large.

You shouldn’t need pixel-perfect precision to find a sub-page!

4. Make Ads Your Friends, Not Your Foes.
Advertising content is almost required for many sites to churn a profit, but it easily can be abused to drive customers away. Bad practices include showing banner ads that overwhelm your site’s own content, launching popups with little to no warning, disguising the nature of advertising/third-party links and forcing visitors to sleep through ads to access your site content (also a violation of rule number one).

5. Clarity Over Everything Else.
If you’re unsure whether or not a web design decision will bite you in the backside later, stop and ask yourself a question: ‘Does my visitor know that this page exists and how to get to it immediately?’

If your traffic has to stop and think about how to go to the content they think is on your site, then you’ve already blundered – although companies like www.solutionstream.com/services can help you avoid this most obvious misstep with no added work on your part. There should be no navel-gazing required when moving from homepages to FAQs to shopping carts – or any other part of your site.