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home > top 10 tips
top 10 tips
Ensure your site downloads quickly. Ideally within 10-30
seconds maximum, preferably 8 or less. This includes
users with slower computers and modems. Base the download
speed on 1K per second, therefore the total file
size of a page (including graphics) should not exceed
30K.
To decrease file size and increase download speed
- use as few graphics as possible, optimize the graphics
you do have and create clear, concise HTML. Always
include width and height attributes in the <img>
tag so the browser can download the rest of the page while
waiting for graphics to download. Include alt text
in the <img> tag so that the page makes sense
before the graphics download or if the user has graphics switched
off.
Server side includes
speed up download times as the included file only needs to
be downloaded once to be used on several pages.
This happens "server side" so that download
time to the user is negligable. Style
sheets also only need to be downloaded once. Using one
means you don't have to specify style within the HTML
page, which makes for a smaller html file size.
Check your download speed on http://www.echoecho.com/
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If your web site is not user friendly, visitors will
not be able to use it and they will become frustrated and
will not return to it. It is return users who
will buy your product or service, not a unique user
who merely visits your site the once.
Good usability
is found in easy to follow navigation and simple site
structure.
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Poor navigation is where most unusable sites fall
down. At any one time, the user should be able to reach
any level of the site and clearly see where they
are in the site's hierarchy. A well designed site should have
a logical hierarchy of more detailed information
as the user delves down into the site.
The main home page to a site should have links
to a variety of levels, usually in the form of a navigation
panel. On subsequent pages, the user should be able
to reach other pages of the same level as well as be
able to go up to the previous level.
Use a LID, or "breadcrumbs",
similar to the top of this page (home
> top ten tips) where users can use the links to
go to previous levels of the site. In addition, make sure
the page title, located in the head information
of your HTML, shows the page title and where
the page is in the site. This is the title of the page
that is visible at the very top of the browser window
(on this page "jessett.com | top ten tips"). This is
useful to users who bookmark your site and ensures
its name makes sense in a whole list of bookmarked
sites.
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Never have horizontal scrolling, users find
it annoying - check your site on smaller browsers. Avoid
vertical scrolling, especially on the home page. Only
10% of users* will scroll down further than they can initially
see, so keep the important information and navigation
at the top of a page. This is beneficial to search
engines too, as they often only index the first portion
of a page. What you put at the top of the page can intice
users to scroll down to read further. If your most important
content is hidden "below the fold", many
users will never see it.
* This has now been shown to not always be the case. According
to Jakob Nielsen, users are now more willing to scroll down
- http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9712a.html
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Keep your site simple. Use white space carefully -
don't waste it by having fixed width tables
so much of the screen is blank in a wide browser window. However,
make sure you don't have more than 12 words to a line of
text - it is difficult to read if there are more. Don't
have gratuitous animated graphics, scrolling text
or other moving items all over the place - they draw
attention away from the content. If an animated graphic
is used, only loop it once so it doesn't distract the user
from the rest of the page.
Don't overcrowd a page with too much information and
too many links, the user won't know what to look at first.
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Don't create sites that rely entirely on new technology,
such as Flash. Many users won't spend the time downloading
the plug-in to view the site. You can't guarantee all
users will have, or want, the plug-ins, and may "scare
off" potential customers. If you do use new technologies,
create a mirror site whereby users who don't
have the plug-in, or don't want to view the high bandwidth
version, can view the site without it. It's more
important to have people actually use your site,
rather than simply ooh and ahh at its special effects. Use
your site stats to ascertain how many users have the plug
in, and how many choose to view the html version of your site.
Use new technology sparingly.
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Most use of frames on the web is unnecessary, especially
when it's been used simply to seperate the screen into content
and navigation. This is often confusing for users,
can create unnecessary scroll bars, destroys the
url for people
to email the current page to someone, or bookmark
it for future. The url they save ends up being the top of
the frameset, not the one they wanted. This could
lose you customers/visitors who don't want to trail through
the site finding the particular page.
Frames are also detrimental to search
engine listings. Search engines can't spider a frameset,
directories often look on them as bad practice for
the above reasons. Make sure you have a valid reason for using
them, and always use the <noframes> tag. For further
info, read about frames
in the search engines section.
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Keep the content on your site current. Most
good sites are constantly updated, so if yours is out-of-date,
users won't return. Encourage people to come back with "news"
or "highlights" sections on your home page which have
the most up-to-date content. If your site has static
material, users won't need to return as it appears
they saw all there was to see the first time. This is true
even for large sites.
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Maintain your company's (or site's) branding across
all pages of your site. If there is no branding on a page,
users won't necessarily know they are still in the same site.
this is especially important for users who have entered
the site from an external site and will need to
know which site they are in. This is also relevant for
printer friendly pages where site navigation is less
important. These still require at the very least a company
logo or site name which is a link to the
home page, preferably in the top left hand corner.
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To a user, links are the structure of the world
wide web. A user doesn't care whose site they are on,
just the information they require. Standardise your
links to make user's lives easier. Always use blue for
unvisited links and red/purple for visited ones
and always underline them. Don't underline any
text which isn't a link. Make your company logo
or site name a link on every page. If you're linking
to an external site, display the full url in the link so a
user knows they are being taken to a different site. (e.g.
http://www.jessett.com/)
Users have become accustomed to these attributes,
and while your site may look prettier with different coloured
links etc, it can be confusing in that it's not obvious where
they have been before. Going to a previously visited page
is frustrating and time consuming. Most users
don't have the time to go to every relevant link in your site,
make it easy for them to browse through to the information
they require.
Finally, don't move links! By this I mean don't
change the url of a page. People bookmark pages which
are relevant to them for a long time. If you move pages, you
could lose a valued customer. If a site clean up is necessary,
then activate a re-direct for that url to the new page
location. In addition, for sites with constantly changing
home pages with news stories or press releases, always
produce a permanent location for the whole story at
the same time. Place a link from the abstract to the
full story so people can link to this.
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