Let Your Little Website Shine, Part 1Written by Lynne Schlumpf
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year contract with a hosting provider. We've since switched to another provider and don't have this problem anymore. See Web Hosting to find out where we went for better bandwidth. No matter what we did to make our Website load fast, our foundation was not good enough to make people want to come back. More than a few seconds to get to your website, and your site goes down in history as not being seen, along with all websites hosted at places where websites are free. (You probably know who they are) If you have huge graphics and all kinds of whirlygigs and java scripts that would make a grown man cry, your site is in trouble again. Try to make all your graphics small and in a .jpg (jpeg) format. If you must use moving gifs or other animated stuff, make it something useful that replaces text information. It must have some use on your page - not just to look good. And try to make it only one per page, if you can. If you love java, be aware of a couple of issues with fancy java scripts: Not everyone can see them if they don't have right browser or latest version of some browsers, not everyone is going to appreciate that their mouse leaves "trails" across screen, or that everything on your site is what they call a mouseover (where an image changes into something else when you run your mouse over it). Leave this stuff to your "other" site - you know, one you wrote for fun. Try to keep this stuff to a minimum on a business website. A plain white background is always better than some fancy, bandwidth-eating background bitmap image. If you must have a background image, make it a very small watermark-style image. Better to leave it plain. Makes it easier to read for many people who don't have greatest video card or best pair of eyes. One side note: It's always good to test your website's pages in another screen resolution. If you like to keep your resolution (right-click on desktop in Windows, go to settings, change slide bar) at 1024x768, test your site using 800x600 and possibly 640x480. You can also put some java scripts that test user's screen resolution and adjust accordingly, or you can put a disclaimer on your main page that says: "Best when viewed in 800x600 resolution". You decide how easy to make it for your visitors. Remember that things that may look great on your machine might look like crap to someone with their screen resolution set differently. The next thing to make sure of after they actually get to your site is whether or not it looks good. When I return, I'll discuss how to make your website credible with a great look.
Lynne Schlumpf is the CEO of Route 66 Cyber Cafe, Inc., http://www.r66cci.com, a Web hosting and design company specializing in promoting websites for new owners, building affordable e-commerce sites, and providing reliable web hosting solutions as an affiliate of Virtualis Incorporated.
| | Let Your Little Website Shine, Part 2Written by Lynne Schlumpf
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You'll notice that almost every really good page has some of following links: Contact Us About Us Help Feedback to Webmaster General Feedback Links to other sites related Home (on all pages except home, of course) Back Buttons, Next Buttons, Paging for pages that go together Search this site for.... These are just a few of common links that you'll see on really successful pages. Step back and look at your page from a marketing and artistic viewpoint. Would you stay long? If you need help with "Looks Great" part of your website and you insist on doing design yourself, here are some pretty good sites to give you help: http://www.webmonkey.com http://www.flashkit.com http://www.macromedia.comSo 3. It's links actually work: I've mentioned this in another article, but it is worth mentioning again. Test and test and test your site for broken links. Put it through some very exhaustive checks to make sure all links people click actually go somewhere and to make sure places they go when they click are where they were supposed to end up in first place. Have friends or coworkers test links for you to get a second, fresh eye to look. It helps to put an email link at bottom of each page that says something like: Problems with our site? Email Webmaster. This will correct more mistakes than you'll ever correct on your own. People love to gripe about how your website doesn't work as advertised. It's good criticism for you. When responding to them, respond politely and thank them for pointing out this problem. When I return in Part 3, I’ll talk about quick response to requests by your prospective customers. Thanks for joining me!
Lynne Schlumpf is the CEO of Route 66 Cyber Cafe, Inc., http://www.r66cci.com, a Web hosting and design company specializing in promoting websites for new owners, building affordable e-commerce sites, and providing reliable web hosting solutions as an affiliate of Virtualis Incorporated.
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