Having A User Friendly WebsiteWritten by Jean Sutherland
Having A User Friendly Website Let's look at what your user wants to see at your website.1. No Flash For many who visit your website time is money for you and for them. The last thing people need to see is a slow loading flash front page. Unless your flash page is very unique and interesting enough that it will hold their attention I suggest you loose it. For people on dialup, and yes there are many around world, a flash page is a download nightmare for them. 2. Page Load Time There is nothing worse than going to a website and waiting more than 15 seconds for that page to load. Many of your visitors don't have time to wait for a web page to load and nor should they. Timewise, many people will go on to something else if your page is slow to load. Ten years ago 15 seconds and more might have been acceptable but in this day and age of high speed internet this is highly unacceptable. Check this free site for help with load time for your website. Dcotor HTML http://www.doctor-html.com 3. Graphics Do you hate it when your gonto a site for information and finding missing graphics. Worse than missing graphics are graphics that do not at least have an ALT tag which would at least give your visitor some idea of what graphic was about. When you have ALT tags it also allows search engines to recognize all content on your site. Make sure to use good keywords and use them often on your page, as it will help you rank higher in search engines. Use free link verification program at XENU http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html to ensure that all your graphics are loading. 4. Links Not Working One of my major pet peeves is visiting a site and clicking on a link and finding it does not work. This is one of fastest ways to loose a potential customer. Broken links are something you should be checking on a daily basis. This is your bread and butter and you can not afford to loose even one potential customer. Again, XENU at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html is an excellent free program to help you keep your website in tip top shape. Also note, search engines do not like missing links and you risk your ranking with them if your site is not up to snuff. Xenu will give you a comprehensive report that shows all broken links and their corresponding pages. 5. Making Your Index Page As Small As Possible The old saying that time is money is never more true than when someone visits your first page. Getting it to load quickly is one of your main objectives. This mean you need to run your page through an HTML optimizer. Doctor HTML http://www.doctor-html.com, a free website, can be invaluable to you when it comes to shrinking your page. Your site will still look same but will take less time to load.
| | The Webmaster's AssistantWritten by Martin Day
There are many tools available to a webmaster to analyse website traffic allowing them to monitor number of visitors, see what pages have been accessed and even length of time each visitors spends accessing website.However, despite considerable data available what is missing is anything to tell webmaster what visitor was thinking. Did they like or dislike site? Was layout easy to understand or just plain confusing? Did they find it easy to navigate and maybe most important thing, did they find information they wanted? A website may be generating sales but why are some people that visit website not buying anything? Was it because they didn’t like what was being offered or they couldn’t find what they wanted? Website surveys provide webmasters with an excellent and accurate method of answering these types of questions. Direct feedback from website visitors cuts to chase, no need to guess, just ask visitors themselves how they found site and if they found what they were looking for. With an online survey webmasters can find out:- How often do people visit website? How did they arrive at website? Are they accessing website for business or pleasure?
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