We're all looking for one thing on the web: information - content that is useful and valuable to us. The web was born to make information sharing easier, not to sell. Therefore, we ignore anything that we relate to selling: banners, graphics, animation. We focus exclusively on the information we are looking for.
Blatant advertising doesn't work on the web, but content that informs and educates us often makes us buy.
If you plan to make websites then this secret will help you create better, more successful and profitable websites than any web design software will. Give your visitors what they want, not what you want, and they will love you for it. You will earn their trust, they will recommend you to their friends and what's more, they will buy from you. How do you use this secret on your own website?
What People Want From Your Website
People don't want to be sold to on the web. We can't turn off ads on TV and radio but when it comes to the web, we are all part of it, and we can decide on our own whether to accept advertisements or not. And most of the time, we don't.
People look for information above anything else. Few of us are looking or willing to buy right away. Carefully written information, however, can persuade us to buy.
Millions of web pages are competing for our attention. Make your own website stand out and watch it become successful
Build Your Website Following These Steps
Websites that are successful all follow these simple steps. They don't trick or cheat; they simply give their users what they want.
How to pick a memorable website name
How to make sure your visitors will find what they search for
How to build good navigation
Why use HTML and CSS to build web pages
How much screen should your website use
What background colors work best?
What graphics to use?
What should stand out on each page?
How to make the text easier to read
Why serve information in bite sized chunks
How to use links on your website
Why put load speed above anything else
How to make websites popular with search engines
How To Pick A Memorable Website Name
Most good single word and two word website names are taken so, unless you can buy florist.com or loans.com, choose a website name that's nearly just as memorable:
Avoid website names with more than 1 dash (e.g. www.red-california-roses.com)
Get a short website name. Two words maximum, preferably one.
Use real or made up words that are easy to pronounce and remember. Avoid words that are awkward to pronounce.
Use a thesaurus to replace longer words with short and common words. Aim for 1-2 syllable words that even a 10 year old can say and remember.
Find a website name that rolls in your mouth. Test this by asking your friends to pronounce and spell it.
Pick words that also have an emotional charge to match the subject of your website
Buy variations and .org, .net extensions of the perfect website name for your own website. Some people may misspell it while competitors will try to steal it.
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How To Make Sure Visitors Find What They Search For
You must know what your visitors are interested in before you start to create content for your newly built website. The more your content matches what they are searching for, the more happy visitors you will have. Happy visitors buy more easily and gladly recommend your website to their friends.
Most people use search engines to look for stuff so use keyword tools such as Overture's term suggestion tool and Wordtracker's free trial to see what keyword combinations they use to find sites with your subject.
You can also see what people look for by checking out some of these resources:
Discussion lists, message boards, forums related to your subject
Feedback from visitors if you already have a site
Public feedback on other related sites
Guestbooks on your own website or on others
News sites such as Google News
Published interviews
Government statistics or published on other websites
Public surveys
Blogs
Polls
Specialist communities
Online journals
General communities like Orkut, Ezboard and then drill down to specific groups
Groups and clubs such as MSN Groups, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups
Things people ask on Google answers
Chat rooms, IRC networks
There is gold in doing this sort of research. You will get to know your visitors better than anyone else and be able to address their questions more easily and accurately. You will also never run out of ideas what to write about.
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How To Design And Build Good Navigation
Navigation works in the same way aisles in a supermarket do. They take you to the stuff you want to buy. But sometimes the signs above the aisles don't make it clear where the stuff you want could be. This is why it is so important to create good navigation on your web site.
If the information is not organized how people expect it to be, they might never find what they were searching for, however good your content might be. You can't afford to make it difficult for your users to go through your pages.
Put links where people expect to see them. Build a horizontal menu bar with 7 options maximum. Put it at the top of the screen. Create a left hand side menu to list options at deeper levels.
If you have more than three levels, you might consider hiding some of the options from the level above. Listing only local options related to the page people are on.
Always keep the main menu visible. Avoid drop down menus. These don't always work and can confuse people Remember to use breadcrumb navigation to let people know where they are in the structure of your web site and a bottom text menu for easy access.
Also embed links in your content to related pages, products or external sites.
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Why Use CSS To Build Web Pages
The source code can make a website good or bad and it decides: how fast the web site loads, how it looks on other browsers and how search engine robots get to the content.
HTML is the language used to build websites. It is simple to learn how to make your own web site with it. You can do amazing things with so little of it. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can create and control the style of the page (colors, sizes, spacing) but also the layout (the position of text, navigation, graphics).
Use these tips to make your own website source code as effective as possible:
Don't use tables to control placement and layout on your web site. Use CSS instead.
Don't use font tags in the HTML document. Create a CSS file that controls font color, text size, weight etc.
Use CSS to control the way your website looks as much as you can. This makes it very flexible to manage and change
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How Much Screen Should Your Website Use
Some websites that don't use up all of the available space. Building liquid designs fixes this problem of by making the layout fit the screen. Whatever the resolution, the content fills the entire screen and avoids waste. It also avoids parts of the website being invisible to users because it cannot be resized fit on their screen.
There are many advantages of liquid design and also various techniques of building it.
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What Background Colors Work Best?
Years of testing have shown that black text on white background works best on websites. We're used to read black text on white paper and the screen is simply a different kind of paper. Avoid to create your own custom graphics to use as background. Your visitors will find text on a background with patterns difficult to read.
Images have many colors and it's likely that the text color will blend in with the background. This makes part of the text impossible to see and read. Frustrated, your users will leave and they will not give your website a second chance. There are many more websites offering what you do.
If an image must be used as background it should not disrupt reading. Make sure the text color contrasts well enough to be easily read. If your text is white, for example, make your background image dark.
Often, the best choice for a background has proved to be a single color. When choosing the background color remember that users will not see it the same way you do. Screens of different quality have different settings and colors don't appear the same from person to person.
The rule of thumb is to build a website with dark text on light colored background. Some argue that the background should not be completely white, but just slightly darker. On some screens the black and white contrast is far too strong and tires the eyes. You don't want to give your users a headache.
Test your web site in black and white before making any final changes. If text, navigation and other features are clearly readable, then it will work for all your visitors. Convert a snapshot of the website to gray scale and try to work where everything is. Can you read text easily? Is navigation obvious?
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What Graphics To Use
"How do I make my own website successful?". The secret to a successful website lies with words. The power of the written word is astonishing: it can make us laugh, it can make us cry or it can make us buy. The web is based on words and we look for our content every day, most of the time just because we want information.
Accept the fact that words are the core reason people visit your website. Graphics don't sell products, words do. Carefully crafted marketing talk can help persuade more than the nice graphics produced by any web design software.
Graphics should be used only when they are essential to communicate something that is not possible to with words alone. If you want to sell products then show pictures of the product in use. Use pictures to help visitors imagine themselves using that product.
People tend to ignore graphics that are used especially at the top of the screen because they associate them with ads. If you want to make people look at your graphics then create a web page with pictures embedded in text.
Avoid using graphics that have no relation to the surrounding text. This will make people lose confidence in your website.
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What Should Stand Out On Each Page
A common mistake is to try to attract visitors' attention with everything you've got: graphics, animations, banners and advertisements. You're trying to keep them at your web site by confusing them and making it difficult for them to decide where to go next.
Make it simple for them to find what you came for. This is the realistic and effective approach to building a website.
Create a list of important features to go on every page. Decide which is the most important element. On some pages it might be the marketing copy, the special offer link or the buy button. Make it singular, keep it down to a single important element per page.
If you want visitors to look at the special offer, don't distract their attention with other banners and graphics. Their attention span is very limited. Unrelated graphics often distract from making the sale if your website is commercial in nature.
Have someone glance over your web site and pay attention to where they look or click first. If it's the "Buy now" or "Special offer" link, or anything else that takes priority on that page, then you've created a successful page. If they first glance at the flashy graphics at the top then you've probably lost their attention.
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How To Make The Text Easier To Read
The fonts that work best in print are serif fonts (e.g. Times New Roman). Serif fonts are extremely detailed fonts that don't read well on screen because of low resolution. Most printed material, however, is using mostly serif fonts because it's very readable on paper.
The type of fonts that work best on websites are sans serif. These are simplified type letters created to be very readable at small sizes and on most screens. You too have probably found it more difficult to read a web page written in Times New Roman than in Verdana or Arial (sans serif fonts).
Using the same font size throughout your text proves not only monotonous but discourages users from reading the entire page. How to make your text attractive to read? Make sure to use different sizes and colors for headings, subheadings and paragraphs proves and give plenty of space in between.
People who wear glasses should be allowed to increase font size for easier reading. Nearly all browsers have an option to increase text size but only if the web page is designed to allow it. This is one of the most common mistakes made.
Putting the font size in pixels instead of points or ems disables this feature. It makes the font size fixed and that can be too small to read for partially sighted people or for those wearing glasses. If they can't read the information they came for, they will go to a website where they can. No one is willing to strain their eyes to read information that they could probably find somewhere else.
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Why Serve Information In Bite Sized Chunks?
Breaking up the information in smaller paragraphs can greatly cut the time people need to scan the content. People scan first to see whether what they search for is on that page. Long blocks of text can put people off from reading through.
No matter how good the screen or the conditions for reading are (e.g. colors, light), it is still much more difficult to read on screen than on paper. Writing for print (such as books or brochures) is very different from writing for the web.
Emphasis and briefness make content on the web attractive to read. A web page should have a primary heading describing very briefly what the page is about. It should also have secondary headings for each important section.
Break the text in short paragraphs (3-5 lines), use short phrases that read quickly and use as few stop words as possible (e.g. and, to, when, etc). Try to use words with few syllables that even 10 year olds can understand. Use a thesaurus to find alternatives to long and pompous words or both.
Dashes and bullets are excellent tools to increasing readability while bold and italics can make key points stand out. One and a half or double paragraph line height can be used but never use single line height or the text will look too crammed.
Your visitors can figure out what the page is about instantly and take in key points at first glance if you help them. Not only do you have to get your point across quickly but also make your writing concise. The more you say in less words, the more you keep your visitors focused on your website. Try to cut out all the fluff and, as Strunk and White say in "Elements of Style", make "every word tell".
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How To Use Links On Your Website?
People learned early on that links were the blue, underlined phrases you can click on. Visited links were purple. All other text was black. Designers, however, started using other colors for links and text to blend in better.
Nowadays we see links that are not underlined, have the same color as the rest of the text. The use of visited link color has dropped too. Links should stand out and cry "I'm a link, you can click on me!"
Don't take up the example of people who don't pay enough attention to links. Build your own website with these tips in mind:
Users expect links to be blue and underlined and text to be black. Keep these colors if possible.
Links should always stand out and be easily distinguished from regular text.
A color other than regular text should be used for visited links.
Text color should contrast well with the background.
Create a special effect on mouse over to emphasize that they're looking at a link
If possible use web safe colors.
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Why Put Load Speed Above Everything Else
Your own web site should be all about load speed. Building your website for the widest possible reach means your website has to be blazing fast. Pages have to load nearly instantaneous even on slow modems.
Cut load times to a minimum by doing the following:
Take out any graphic that doesn't add to the user experience. A useful graphic is one that present the information in a way that is not possible using words alone. Anything else is just one extra delay between your website and your visitors.
Source code weight is another source of extra load time. Thanks to many website software packages you might pay little or no attention to it. With a little do-it-yourself work, you can reduce source code bloat and keep your design as visually appealing as before.
One way to put your website on a diet is to remove font tags and use CSS instead to style your text. You can also learn to convert your layout from tables to CSS. This can reduce file size by up to 50%. The resulting files are much easier to update and manage.
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How To Make Websites Popular With Search Engines
Most people use search engines to find the information they want on the web. If you can get top rankings for keywords that match the content of your website you are guaranteed to see a spike in visitor numbers. Some people use less than legit methods to rank high but their success can only last a couple of months.
One way to make sure you can dominate the top of the search engines in the long term is to:
Learn how to make your website easy to use by visitors
Focus on giving out useful information
Make sure your navigation works well
Try, as much as you can, to follow the guidelines the W3C gives to make websites accessible and usable.
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Conclusion
Users don't notice when a website works well for them because they're too busy taking in the information they came for. They do notice, however, when the pages take too long to load, the text is hard to read, that top right image is blinking all the time and they have no idea where to go next.
This is not a step by step 'how to' to making a great website. Following this advice, however, will help you make your own websites as well as those of others easier to use. If your websites are commercial in nature, then the advice will make you bring more money. And if you use a web site builder you can concentrate on improving and adding content to your site rather than getting stuck learning all the tech behind it.
No extreme or unreasonable measures are required, just common sense.
By StartNewWeb.com
