Small Business Internet Guide-SBOguide

Website Layout

Whether you have decided to build your own website or have hired a professional to create it for you, the basics of good design need to be considered by the business owner. Even if you are using an authoring tool like Adobe Dreamweaver, or a web building wizard provided by your hosting service, you still need to pay attention to the use of color and graphics in the design you select. Strive for simplicity, readability and clarity in your choice of design and color.

Graphics

Motion graphics such as animated GIF files were quite popular in the early days of the web, but most consider them annoying clutter at this point (not to mention the fact that they may slow your page load times). Avoid these and any other animation, Adobe Flash or otherwise, that serves no useful purpose. Especially avoid anything on the Home page or the landing pages of your site that will either slow the download of your page, or prove distracting or confusing to the visitor. Remember the KISS principle and strive for simplicity and clarity.

This is not to downplay the importance of good graphics on your site – its one of the capabilities that makes the internet so useful for a variety of visual applications. However, it is advised that you use discretion and have a purpose for using each graphic that is in accordance with your business plan and advances your business goals. The selective use of appropriate graphics should not be discouraged since they stimulate the senses and improve the communication pathways of the reader.

Use GIF or PNG files for graphic elements and JPEG files for photographic images. Although PNG files are specified in the web standards promulgated by the W3C, some older browsers either don't know what to do with them, or handle them improperly, so GIF files are actually safer to use if you suspect a large part of your visitors will not be using the latest browsers.

Keep the size of the graphic as small as possible so that it doesn’t adversely effect the time it takes for your page to load when a visitor accesses it from their web browser. Remember, a third of the Internet visitors are still using a relatively slow dial-up service. Large graphics can take what seems like an eternity to load. Suffering through a few pages like that, and most dial-up users will go elsewhere.

Accessibility Concerns

A visually impaired visitor will often use a reader program that turns a site’s text into audible words. These readers cannot process graphics, so to help make your site friendlier to these people (and the search engines), be sure to use the alternate text tag to explain or describe the image. Don't just say something like "image1"; describe the image in detail. This is yet another reason to avoid the use of gratuitous graphics.

Site Errors and Linking

Before putting your site online and submitting it to the major search engines, test the site to make sure everything works as planned. Be sure you have no broken links (the dreaded 404 "page not found" error) that will only serve to frustrate your visitor. When creating links, it’s a good practice to make your link references lower case and to make sure that all of your corresponding file names on the web server are lower case as well. Many of the hosting services use Linux servers and they are case sensitive. An error in case will cause a broken link.

Also do not use spaces in file names. If you need to separate words in file names for your own purposes, use the underscore character (my_file.html for example).

Make sure your text links are color highlighted and used consistently throughout your site. Don’t change how you do things from page to page – it only confuses the visitor. A confused and frustrated visitor will become annoyed and is likely flee your site, regardless of how good the content may be.

Search Engines

Make life easy for the search engines that will index your site. Include a site map that contains the links to your site’s pages.

According to ComScore, approximately 85% of the search traffic on the Internet is handled by the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft (MSN) in that order. Make sure your site is designed to be friendly to these search engines since you are going to rely, at least in part, on these search engines to help send traffic to your site.

Each of these search engines has their own process for submitting the URL (address) of your website (such as - http://your_site.com). You don't need to pay someone to submit your site to the search engines. You can do this yourself for free.

For free search engine submission, see our article "Success With Search Engines".

Once your site has been submitted, the search engine will typically “crawl” your site and index its pages. There is no guarantee how soon this will happen, or if it will happen at all. It’s important to make sure that your site is ready for this visit before you submit it for indexing.