Every blog you read about building a great website will tell you that “Content is King,” but have you ever thought about why content is so important? Of course content can get you indexed on Google and you’ll get more traffic that way, but when visitors finally make it to your site, you want to make sure they’ve gotten something from your site. Basically, I’m going to tell you about how to make your website more useful.
1) Create an Easy way for Visitors to Get Around the Site
When you first design your site or if you’re getting around to a redesign, remember to look at it from a visitor’s point of view. Place menu/navigation bars where they are easy to see and use. Go through your site and make sure you don’t have any pages where the menu is not accessible. Also, remember that people might think differently from you, so you want to create as many options as possible to help them navigate through your site. Useful pages would be a Table of Contents Page or a Sitemap page that lists every page you’ve created on your site. Another piece of advice I got from my designer is to place text based links near the top of your page for your slower loading surfers.
2) Don’t use too much Flash or Fancy Banners
I just had a client that asked me to create a simple website for them that lists the kind of services she provides along with the prices. The only problem was she wanted it all in flash including a fancy 15 second flash intro. I had to really explain to her that even though it’s nice eye candy, those fancy animations don’t get indexed by search engines and usually serve no purpose to your visitors.
3) Make sure your site is Compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox.
To be honest, if you still use Internet Explorer, please save yourself some money on advil and go download Firefox - it’s better. Trust me! Even with that helpful hint, we all know that Internet explorer is still used by about 70% of the internet users in the world, so considering that’s a big chunk, just make sure that your site looks the same on both browsers. You don’t want to lose potential customers just because you didn’t want to double check.
4) Once you finalized a layout, stick with it.
The reason you don’t want to change your site too much is to make sure your repeat visitors don’t have to learn a whole new navigation process for your site.
5) Link More than One Word when linking within your content
By linking a phrase as oppose to a word, you are in a sense providing more landing space for your visitor to click on the mouse. I’ve watched my mom work the mouse before and it’s painful to see her aim that thing for one word links. For SEO purposes, if you link the write phrase, it also strengthens those keyword when getting indexed.
These tools are easy steps you should take to ensure a more pleasurable and useful site experience. If you have any other tips, please feel free to share them.
Bookmark at:StumbleUpon | Digg | Del.icio.us | Dzone | Newsvine | Spurl | Reddit | Yahoo! MyWeb
Popularity: 14% [?]
- 10 Steps to Getting Links for Non-Bloggers
- The New Transformer Toys Suck
- How I plan to Get More Visits to My Blog
- Old Site Content will be Back
- TWIB: This Week in Blogs VII
I like the points that you have mentioned, especially the fifth one. Not many people take notice of it much, and it is sometimes easy to miss the link if the word is pretty short.
I do miss links at times as I scan through articles quickly.