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How
to design a website - some suggestions
Would you
like to have 1000 visitors a day?
Would you like to hear my opinion about how to design a website?
When it comes to your site, attention should be paid
to every detail to make sure it performs optimally to help your
visitors. Here are some relevant rules of thumb to follow in order to
make your website perform well. This site has been online
since April 2009. Currently (Feb. 2015), it averages 1000+ visitors a day
(uniques), and 2000+ daily pageviews. My Alexa Rank is below 500,000 (out
of 200+ millions of sites WW, so it belongs to the top 1%!!).
I recommend this course. It's what I've been doing:
This is what I've learned so far.
- Create lots of useful content. More content
means more visitors.
- Have a simple and clear navigation
You have to
provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even
a child know how to use. Stay away from complicated
Flash-based menus or tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors
don't know how
to navigate, they will leave your site.
- Have a clear indication of where the user is
When
visitors are browsing your site, you'll want to
make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment.
That way, they'll be able to browse relevant information or navigate
to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors:
confusion means 'abandon site'!
- Do not use excessive banner advertisements
People have trained themselves to ignore advertisements so you
will be wasting valuable virtual real estate (VRE). Instead, provide
more content and add only relevant links into your
content.
- Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable
length.
If a
paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so
that the
text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of
text that
is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.
- Make
sure your website complies to web standards
Make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website
looks great in Internet Explorer but looks awful in Firefox, Safari or
Opera, you'll lose a lot of prospective visitors.
Would
you like to know how I learned to build sites? How I learned
to
promote this website? Click
on the pictures to learn more...
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