1. The domain name, title and H1 heading on your site should say it all. These should really cut to the heart of what your website is about. This will help visitors to the site identify the services or products that they are looking for. It will also be a boon for search engines that look at this information to decide how to rank your site.
2. The use of keywords in meta code that refer to important words in your page content can be helpful in directing traffic to your site via search engines. It is useful to note that a variety of long and short key phrases are most helpful in this endeavour. It is not advantageous to stuff your content or meta code with too many keywords, as this can be detected by search engines and can be counter productive.
3. The content of each page of the website should be laid out in a logical and organised way, in fonts and colours that are easy on the eyes. There should also be enough solid content in the text to satisfy both the visitor to the site and also search engines. It is important for users of websites to be able to find exactly what they want in the quickest possible time. If the page layout includes too many graphics at the top, then the only way to access the text would be to scroll down. Users may not have the patience to do so and may click away from a site that does not deliver straight away what they want.
4. A website that is under construction should be just that. Typically they contain broken links and are low on content. This does not sit well with search engines and will tend to put off visitors to the site. Only once it is finished should users be directed there.
5. Load times are critical to keeping a user engaged with your website. If a website was designed on a new high-spec PC then it should be tested on other machines and in different browsers to verify that the loading time for each page is acceptable. If each page loads at a slow rate then the user may very well give up and go to another competing site.
6. It is likely that there will be some variation in the look of your website across different Web Browsers. Therefore it is advisable that a site is checked for Cross Browser uniformity and any variations that detract from the sites usability should be corrected.
There are many ways to ensure the layout of your website does not differ significantly from Browser to Browser or from one PC to the next. Using good practice is essential to the modern day web designer. The standard requirements are to use Css (cascading style sheets) to plot the format of the entire website, so that each page is uniform in font, colour and general layout.
7. Graphics can be a great asset to any website if done in a measured way. A page overloaded with animations, widgets and multiple images will confuse anyone looking at it. This is a definite turn off for any website visitor. Let the rule here be: less is more. Try to limit the use of many graphics on one page, perhaps by spreading your graphical content onto separate pages. This will make your pages less busy and more organised.
8. A big issue in web design is to try to include everyone in being able to use your site. With this in mind designers should be using the latest W3C standards when they produce web pages. This means adding accessibility code to enable disabled users to use the website. For example adding certain XHTML code to links and to images allows screen readers to identify these elements on the page for the blind and those unable to sit at a monitor.
9. The event of the social media on the internet has added a new forum for webmasters to publicise their sites. The huge potential audiences that use such websites as Twitter and Facebook make tempting targets for websites looking to increase their customers and their own visibility on the web.
10. One of the central concepts of SEO is to capitalise on the unique content of a website. The more unique a site is, the more rewards given by the search engines. Inversely, search engines filter out duplicate material from websites, which can badly affect ranking.
James Gordon
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=James_M._N._Gordon
