A well planned and designed Website will contain the following features:

  • Meets your specific goals
  • Contains focused content that appeals to the target audience
  • Presents content that encourages visitor contact
  • Contains content that improves search engine visibility
  • Easy to read, use, navigate, locate information, and print
  • Integrates visual design theme appropriate for the target audience
  • Designed with download speed in mind
  • Allows for future expansions and additions to the Website
  • Permits easy implementation of new Internet technologies

Ease of Use and Navigation

The organization and layout of the Website should be apparent to the visitor. Its navigation system should be simple, easy to follow, and consistent.

All Website navigation must answer:

  • Where am I?
  • Where have I been?
  • Where can I go next
  • Where's the Home Page

Content is the Key to a Good Website

Some businesses make the mistake of placing the entire text of existing product brochures and related material into their Website. A Website is not a book; it's a communication tool that should provide sufficient information to encourage the visitor to contact you. Your Website should generate leads for your sales force.

Your Website is the carrot on the stick. It should entice the visitor to request additional information. Don't risk losing the opportunity to close a sale by providing excessive information.

The content should be written with key phrases which are indexed by search engines and used by visitors to locate Websites. Since most search engines use spiders or crawlers to index text from Websites, the text content of a Website is important to its ranking by these search engines. This topic is discussed in more detail on the Internet marketing pages of our Website.

If your Website objective is to accept orders online, then specific product information should be presented in sufficient detail to encourage the visitor to place an order.

Here are some thoughts about Web content.

  • Does your content solve your customers' problems or does it create problems?
  • Does your content match your audience's expectations?
  • Have you determined the purpose of your site?
  • Do you know your target audience?
  • Is the content technically correct?
  • Does your customer need to know the content you're presenting?
  • Is the content current and updated frequently?
  • Can people find the content they're looking for?

Ask yourself: "What content do I have that would cause anybody in their right mind to visit my site a second, third, or fourth time?" This is extremely important. You might get someone to visit your site once, but, if you can't answer this question, you really shouldn't have a Website.

The best content is the content people want to see over and over and over again.

Visual Design Theme

The Visual Design Theme should be used on each page of the Website to attain unity. The visual theme should be appropriate for your target audience.

Download Speed

You must constantly keep download speed in mind when developing formatting, layout, and images. Standards should be based on a 28.8 Kbps modem speed for download time. Ideally a page should download in 30 seconds or less using a 28.8 Kbps modem. Pages should not exceed 60 seconds in download time using a 28.8 Kbps modem.

Website Features to Avoid

Review our page on Website Features to Avoid before you design your Website.