12 magic rules for web sites success   Versione italiana

un articolo di Gianfranco Viasetti

 

How to create a professional web site.

When we design a web site we must follow these 12 rules:

Let's see in detail the mentioned rules:

 

1- To get the first positions you must concentrate on contents.

It is no more a secret that a web site is positioned on Google, MSN and Yahoo first pages if it is composed of pages with textual (not graphic) contents, highly focused on single arguments.

 

You must avoid the abuse of programming techniques making pages less interesting to the most important search engines as they “thin” keywords included into the pages too much.

 

Among the techniques to avoid you can find Flash animations, Java Scripts, PHP programming, ASP (you can use it only if indispensable) and frames.

Pages with frames are pages that have one or more fixed parts, usually the top part or the left one, whereas the window with contents runs in vertical.

Search engines, for a series of reasons, the explication of which lies outside this context, do not like pages with frames.

 

What about animated buttons? We can easily do without them, believe, few people will miss them.

 

The most important thing for a good position of a web site is still the individuation of right keywords to add to the text of each page. In a meta tag keywords are not so useful, moreover in some search engines they can even have the opposite effect.

 

Some tricks loved by many competitors of ours are useless too, like adding hidden words to visitors' eyes.

 

Search engines are going to see them and they can even damage sites using this technique, sometimes excluding them from the index. It would take years to be reinstated.

 

Obviously there are a lot of other things you should do to crate web sites for the engines’ first positions.

Variables are too many to be explained in few words: let’s remember for example the number of competitors using the same keywords and the experience in Search Engine Optimization of professional people who realized their own web sites.

 

In general, considering this subject, we should not have great problems. As far as the most part of web masters and web designers think that if a site is “graphically nice” it will have sure success, we will have high chances to win the challenge.

 

Suggestions given in this articles can help to start with the “right foot”, but to get quickly the best you can , you would better ask a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO). A professional person that has the know-how to give you right and precise information ad hoc, considering the time he has been spending in this activity. Our job is overall this one. If you want to know more about how you can create a web site able to get a good position in search engines you can contact us.

 

Our costs for SEO service (Search Engine Optimizer) and advices are transparent: you can find them in the page prices of our services. For telephone advices you can also pay by credit cards Visa and MasterCard, on PayPal safe site.

 

To understand how to find the most appropriate keywords of the arguments treated in your web site you can read the article dedicated to Keywords and Keyphrase.

 

2- How to create fast-loading pages. Users are in a hurry.

Creating quick loading pages is the easiest thing to do and everybody can do it. It is also one of the rules to create “usable” sites.

It is surprising how many web sites do not respect this simple rule, taking for granted that all the visitors have an ADSL and have time to loose to see our intros in Flash or listen to our favourite soundtrack.

 

Visitors want information and they want it immediately. Do not forget that our web site is not the only one on the WEB. Microsoft or Symantec can afford to let their visitors, who want information or updates, to wait even hours: we can not afford to let them wait even a minute.

 

To create pages quick to load you can follow these simples advices:

The space for images should not be (apart exceptions) over 30% of the space taken by the page containing them, admitted that the page can be printed on a A4 sheet.

 

In case it is longer (as this one) you should reduce in proportion the percentage reserved to images.

Photos must be saved in JPG format compressed at 60%. Almost all the programmes for photo-elaboration give the opportunity to choose the percentage of compression. Images must be saved in 72 dpi. For the monitor you do not need a higher resolution.

 

I personally use Adobe Photoshop CS3, but other programmes definitively cheaper and as professional as this one have this option, for example Photoshop Elements, that you can find included in many scanners or digital cameras.

Avoid the abuse of animated GIF, unless they have few animations. Also avoid videos in FLASH that make a good position in search engines difficult and sometimes ask for long and useless waiting times with the consequence to annoy visitors and get them to go elsewhere.

 

Moving buttons that change their colour when we touch them with the mouse are nice to see but they get the loading time longer and reduce a web site's usability: let's wonder if we really need them, or better, if our users need them. If Google can do without it, maybe we can too.

 

You should easily print pages. If you try to print some pages from web sites freely chosen, you will notice how high is the percentage of sites that don't permit a correct printing of their contents.

Unless you use some devices as the "cut & paste" in Word or something like that (devices that 90% of users do not know), many pages are cut on the right side or at the bottom (pages with superior and inferior frames, for example), getting correct printing impossible.

 

Imagine the owner of a company that ask his secretary to look in Internet for companies selling a certain product and to take him printed pages of what he finds. Do you think he will be happy to have cut texts?

He could address to your competitor only for this reason. If you can not print navigation buttons is a matter, if sentences are cut is another.

 

Creating pages in CSS style get pages next to the first one very quick to be loaded as the layout of all the pages of the site is in common and it is managed by one only style sheet, that, once opened, stay memorized in the cache of the disk of the user.

Fox instance, this site is very quick to surf because uses a style sheet. To know more about creating CSS style sheets, see the articles about CSS style sheets.

 

3- Create an easy and intuitive structure.

An intuitive structure to surf increases the accessibility and usability of a site. Statistics say that a visitor surf on average 2 or 3 pages of a site. This site is composed for example of more than 200 pages, but visitors read on average 3 pages.

Keep in mind this fact when you design the structure of a site, do not waste any opportunity.

 

We have to make visitors individuate immediately, if possible from the home page, the link he is interested in.

If we force him to pass to intermediate pages we will risk him to close the site before he reaches the page he was interested in (or the page we wanted him to see).

 

You would better prefer a horizontal developed structure than a vertical one, even though I understand that it is sometimes difficult, especially with big sizes. Anyway favourite the visitor, let him always find a map of the site on the home page, so that he can quickly reach any page or section he wants.

 

4- Get visitors loyal, one of the rules of web marketing.

I think we all agree that it is important that visitors come back often to our web site. But, how can we get visitors loyal? How to boost, motivate them to often come back to our web site?

 

There are different methods: we could for example write an interesting article and advise visitors they will find the following part the next week. Or we could reserve a page or a section of our site to "suggestions of the month" or "promotions of the month". It is important to keep our promises to visitors, or they will feel joked and they will hardly come back to our site.

 

5- Motivate visitors to act.

We have to do our best to get visitors act immediately. The best way is to offer a discount or a gift if they make their orders or get in touch with us this very day.

If we sell digital cameras we can offer a case or an additional memory disk free of charge, if the order is made before midnight.

 

If the goal is pushing visitors to subscribe a mailing list we can offer an exclusive workbook for free for people who subscribe by 2 days. If we let them a month time they will probably forget us.

 

6- high quality, updated, exclusive contents.

If the pages of the web site have high quality contents, if they contain updated and interesting information difficult to find in other places it is highly possible that other sites will insert a link to our site. Remember that the higher is the number of link we have, the higher will be the value of our site. Almost all the search engines better index sites linked by others.

 

To create pages with contents of quality it is a good idea to ask advice to a Copywriter also knowing how search engines work. These new professional people of the web are in general called "SEO-Copywriter". If you want to know further about this arguments read the article "about the link power".

 

7- Pay attention to compatibility and accessibility.

I do not mean that a web site must be visualized in the same way with any existent browser, there are dozens of browsers, some of them used by less than 1% of users. It is quite impossible to create a site perfectly compatible with all of them. Anyway we must get it compatible with the 3 browsers keeping alone 97% of the market: Internet Explorer, Netscape and Firefox. To get this result you must avoid using HTML instructions, JavaScript or anything these browsers can differently interpret.

 

When possible, the site should respect laws and suggestions issued by international W3C union. A site that observes these rules will be accessible by blind people, on the contrary screen-scanners could go haywire. About accessibility of web sites I remind you that also the Italian Government have issued dispositions to the Public Administration in order to realize sites respecting W3C rules about accessibility and usability.

 

If you want to verify if a page respects these rules of accessibility and usability you can visit the W3C union web site and digit, into the special box, the address of the page you want to check. After few seconds a window will show you whether that pages has passed the validation test.

 

8- Do not make fun of users.

Users do not like to be joked: try to attract them on our web site using attractive titles that do not reflect the real contents of our pages is easy, but it is useless. We will have a lot of users but once they are in our web site they will understand that the treated arguments are not the ones we made them believe, and they will leave immediately.

To know more about tricks used by many SEO to manipulate their results you can read the article "SEO’s Tricks"

 

9- We have to say WHO WE ARE and how to find us.

Buying goods or services on-line often creates suspicion in many users, especially if we ask for money in advance, maybe by using credit cards. Customers have all the rights to exactly know who we are and where we are, to know our address and telephone number, our VAT number (it is compulsory showing it on the web site, as you can read on the page about VAT on the web site.

Would you trust giving money to someone who give you only a phone number and an e-mail address? I would not.

References.

Let’s also ask our customers’ authorisation to mention them into the references page. If we have evidences of satisfied users report them on the web site, obviously always after authorisation . Let’s do our best to make the potential customers be informed the most possible about us.

 

10- Monitor Users' accesses to your web site.

It is quite useless to have a visitors counter on the home page. It counts visits and not visitors and it only counts visits on the web page it is integrated.

To know how a web site is working we need to know something else. We need to know the number of single visitors and visits on every page, we need to know which are the most visited pages and how long visitors stop on them.

 

We need to know from which countries and cities visitors are from, from which pages they entered and which pages they visit before they leave the web site. We need to know how they found us (link on other sites or search engines), thanks to which engines, words or sentences.

 

Only by knowing these dates we will have the opportunity to adjust the aim, creating a fine tuning to keep on adapting our web site to our target and visitors' exigencies.

A page could be visited by many people because well positioned in the search engines, but if visitors stop on the page on average 10 seconds it is clear that there is something wrong.

 

Many people give great importance to single visitors: in my opinion having 10.000 single users only mean that 10.000 people entered our web site and leave it.

There are many programmes for web sites monitoring: statistics are usually placed at disposal, paying, by the provider hosting the site. There are also many free programmes for visitors monitoring, but they are hardly good for a professionals use; free programmes usually allow visitors and competitors to verify our dates.

It is thanks to these free programmes that I discovered that some competitors of mine have only a minimum part of the visits they declare (see the article about webmaster and competitors.

 

11- The site must be constantly updated.

It has surely happened to everybody to look for a piece of information and come on a site that has not been updated for years.

If I'm looking for a Lincoln biography I can accept it, but if I'm looking for information about products with a short shelf life I can not accept it.

When you see a site updated 5 years ago (and you can find many) we often wonder if the company still exists.

 

There are companies' web sites that even show a wrong phone number because, having a site in Flash and having interrupted the relation with its creator, they can not modify the phone number without making a new web site as the original files are lost.

 

About this matter we suggest anybody wants to have a site in Flash ( that I always do not recommend), to ask the designer to give you also .FLS and not only .SWF files. On the contrary for every changes we will be forced to ask the person who realized it, that means we can not afford to quarrel with this supplier, without accepting to create a new web site.

An updated web site is also useful to keep positions it got on the search engines: in fact, conditions being equal, search engines give priority to frequently updated sites.

 

12- Users, not the customer must like the web site.

This rule is the content of the 12th point, but it should have been to the first place. The most part of the web sites are realized in order to like to customers ordering them, ignoring what users prefer.

I do not want to blame customers for this: let's say that 50% of this fault is to web masters or to the person proposing the realisation of the web site. A serious webmaster should have the courage to say his customer making a certain request that it is not compatible with the preferences of the most part of the users. The problem is that he risks to loose his customer and so he prefers to follow him.

 

But how can you know what users like? let's do a simple but meaningful example: how can I know whether the most part of the Internet users like dark or light characters?

Let's ask them! In November 2004 I made a survey: I asked visitors of this site to give me their opinion: I gave them in change a Word model to write invoices. More than 300 visitors answered and about 80% replied they preferred a light background and dark characters.

 

You can find the results of the first 100 answers at this page. You can find the running surveys at the page survey.

In the last 8 years we have made dozens of surveys about different arguments and this site has been realized paying attention to the preferences expressed by the most part of users. Overall thanks to this, in addiction to the interpretation of statistic dates of accesses, this site is now visited by 1.700 users a day that stay tuned over 7 minutes. This is another confirmation of the interest shown for its contents.

 

If someone is persuaded that a site in Flash, with special effects worthy of Star Wars, likes more than a static HTML site and does not have the opportunity to make a surveys can do an alternative thing: he can realize 2 versions of the site, one in Flash, one in HTML and monitor accesses with any statistic programmes. He will have nice surprises.

 

Conclusion: a web site must be visible and usable.

I know that a site in Flash can satisfy it's creator ego and the ego of the paying customer: who do not like to see its company logo dancing on the screen with a sweet music below and, after 5 minutes, stops at the position it should have been since the beginning?

 

But let's set aside our ego for one time and let's think about visitors', who do not really care about our dancing logo. They want information. When they want to see cartoons they go to the cinema, or they watch them on TV.

 

If you want to read more about web sites usability, you can read the opinion of a more reliable person than I am, Jakob Nielsen. Jakob Nielsen has been defined by The New York Times "The Web Pages Usability Guru", He is the owner of the Nielsen Norman Group, a company that deals with Web site usability consulting and has among its customers Google, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Intel, Sony, Visa, Microsoft, American Express, General Motor, Pfizer, Roche, BBC, Reuters, Financial Times, Forbes, US Navy, Credit Suisse Group, etc.

 

"The difference between success and failure is often the will to do one more Km, to work an hour more, to knock on another door, to make another phone call, to make one more effort"

 

Norman Vincent Peale

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©2005-2007 Gianfranco Viasetti - All rights reserved. E' vietato duplicare questo articolo, anche in parte e con qualsiasi mezzo.