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09.26.05
Ten Steps To A More User Friendly Website
 By
David Cooper
Building a website that is both functional and user friendly is no easy task. Bigger companies sometimes hire both graphic designers and developers to build their website but most little guys cannot afford that.
So let s take a look at the things you should pay attention to when building and maintaining your website, especially if you cannot afford to have a team of graphic designers, developers and layout consultants working on your website.
Flash
A lot of times your designer will want to get fancy and offer
to design your website in flash. Although it looks great as a
portfolio, in reality there are numerous problems with flash websites.
First of all, flash animations (in essence that s what your website is
going to be) are very large in size. Even though many people nowadays
use broadband for browsing the Web, it would be unwise to dismiss a
prospect who still uses dial-up and for whom it will take forever to
load your website. Second of all, flash websites are not crawlable by
search engine spiders, which means you loose any chance of getting free
traffic from search engines.
Page Loading Time
Even if you decide not to use flash, your pages still can get
very large once you add a lot of text and graphics to them.
If your website takes more then 8-15 seconds to load most visitors
will probably leave before accessing the actual content. Later
in the article we will discuss how to improve loading time by
compressing the images.
Reduce the Size of Your Graphics
As mentioned previously, keeping your website s pages as small
as possible is very important. Reducing the size of your graphics is
one way of getting pages to load faster. Talk to your developer about
the way he is optimizing the images to make them as small as possible.
Broken Links
Broken links can tremendously hurt your business image. Having
broken links on your website makes you look unprofessional.
Imagine your visitor looking for something on your website and
once he finds it and clicks on the link, it doesn t work. There
are plenty of tools out there that help check for broken links.
If you update your website often you should check for broken
links on a regular basis.
Read
the Full Article
About the Author:
David Cooper has been developing websites since early 1999. Currently
he runs http://www.Spaiz.net and working on a new Content Management System at http://www.AzureSites.com |
