What every website owner should know

How to make your web site more professional

We all know that a high Search Engine Ranking is a must if a website is to be successful. The more relevant the content is to your site visitors the more your site will appeal to prospective customers and your site will receive more targeted visitors which in time will make a difference to your sales. High ranking alone is not enough to persuade site visitors to buy your products.

We are going to explain in our article how you can improve your Web site.
Make a good first impression, or your visitors will leave immediately Every time a site visitor comes to your website he or she needs to get a good first impression. If not they wont even stop to read a single sentence of your site’s text.

1. Your Web page must load quickly
People will not wait for web pages which are loading slowly. You will loose your site visitor at once to other sites which are loading quicker than yours. As from now (2010) Google will penalize sites for slow loading.

2. Many Web surfers still use a 28K/56K modem.
If a Web has a size of 120 KB (including the images), it will takes 17 seconds to load the page. Would you hang around for that length of time to see what the site offers? Most likely the answer is NO.

3. Your Web site must look attractive.
Customers will not buy anything if it looks shady or if the website presenting it looks shabby. If your website looks like a shady backyard business take it off line. You do more harm to your business than you may think. Hire a professional Design Company. It will prove the best investment you have ever made for your site.
The same must be said for the pages you are linking to. Make sure that the websites you are linking your site with are also professional. If not stay away from them.

4. Don’t use automatically generated doorway pages
Doorway pages which are automatically generated look bad to the human eye, as they have been build for the Search Engine Spiders only in order to entice high rankings, They are seldom good for normal site visitors, and will do more harm to your site than good

5. How to keep Web surfers on your site
Don’t go around the houses, go straight to the point
The home page is page on your site you should give the highest priority to. It is the page everyone sees first. You must make that page interesting to your site visitors. If they don’t think that your site will give them what they are after they leave. Your site must convey the following messages:
what you do
why people should stay on your site
what’s in for your visitors
If your visitors do not find the answers to their questions in a blink of an eye it’s god by and you will never have a chance to see them again. Of course, every home page owner is convinced that they have the best product on earth and that everybody should buy it. Unfortunately, visitors don’t know that.
People are impatient. Your job must be to tell your site visitors why your products are the best money can buy, why they should stay on your site, and why they should take the time to read a few more pages of your site, or look at some more products. If you can’t convince them to do that your website will be loosing potential customers.

6. Don’t make your visitors angry visitors with animations they cannot see
Some websites show absolutely useless Flash animations which the web designer thought was wonderful, or the site is using big pictures with a stupid text such as “Welcome to the world of tomorrow” as their main page which redirects to the actual home page. What kind of a web designer would use such techniques?
Flash intros take a long time to load on a slow connection so most site visitors will go away before they even had a chance to see the actual home page of your website.
Web pages containing Flash animation cannot be indexed by most search engines. If you use a Flash intro as your index page, chances are that your site will never show up on search engines.

7. Show your site visitors some respect.
It will take time until everyone has a high speed internet connection. Until than stay away from stuff which requires a huge bandwidth and time to open. Show your visitors some respect and make your site as fast as you can for people with slower modems. Don’t use huge graphics.

No graphic should be larger than 30 KB to 50 KB, and no page should features more than 200 KB of graphics.
Not all people on the net use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which is probably the worst web browser ever invented. Some people are still using the version 6 which is worse still, but they too have a right to see your website in the correct manner. It is not their fault that this version of the IE is particularly bad. It’s important to test your Web site with different Web browsers. Test your Web site with different Internet Explorer versions, Mozilla/Netscape and Opera. Please avoid coloured or textured backgrounds at all costs. They make text difficult to read. Dancing buttons and blinking text are something which no professional Web site should ever display.