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1. Get your own domain name.
Trying to do business with an internet address like http://users.hugelake.com.au/~fredsbrakes/index.html
is unacceptable these days.
Names like this are nearly impossible to remember.
Even worse, your email and website addresses will
stop
working if your ISP goes broke. All your advertising,
promotion and business stationery becomes instantly
useless.
Just ask anyone who was with Dingo Blue, or OneNet.
Having your own
domain name solves these problems and more. It's
cheap to register your own domain name - around $A33
per year for a .com, and $121 for 2 years for a .com.au
name.
Become more professional - get a domain name for your
business.
2. Don't use free service providers.
These are OK for a personal site, but do you REALLY
want annoying pop up advertisements and banners appearing
when you are trying to make a good impression on your
prospective clients?
3. Make sure that usable information appears within
10 seconds.
It has been proven that people will start leaving if
it doesn't.
4. Get rid of hit counters.
They make a site look unprofessional, and nobody really
cares how many "hits" you've had.
Of course, it's smart to track visitor statistics.
An analysis package which gives you lots of useful
information should be part of any good
hosting account.
5. Optimise your Graphics.
A slow loading website can be totally transformed by
making sure that the graphics are the correct type,
size, resolution, and compression. A page we recently
worked on had its load time reduced from over 4 minutes
to around 15 seconds just by optimising the graphics.
6. Don't Be A Flasher.
It's a bad idea to force people to wait for Flash animations
to load before they can enter your website. (see #3
above)
If you do use Flash animation on your home page, ALWAYS
provide a button for people to bypass it.
7. Get Rid of your Splash Page.
This is a entry page containing just a graphic and
a link that says something like "Click here to
Enter".
When someone gets to your site, don't waste their time.
Give them something useful to look at immediately.
8. Provide clear, simple navigation.
Don't confuse your visitors with unconventional, complex
or hidden navigation schemes.
Give them what they expect to see. Don't make them
learn new rules to navigate your site.
9. Make sure your spelling and grammar is correct.
People will judge your business by your website. Errers
wo'nt enspier confedense.
10. Be careful with music.
It suits some sites, but is totally inappropriate on
others. If you must use music, always provide an option
to turn it off.
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