So now you’ve made a site, what steps can you take to improve your site? I won’t cover any traffic increase tips in this post, but rather I am going to give a few pointers on how to improve your actual site and site content.
Consider if your site is user friendly. Viewers like it when they see a nice clean site that is easily navigated. Take a look at monkeypeaches.com. This site looks extremely cluttered especially on top and the side navigations. It’s hard to read everything and harder to navigate through their content. This is an example of how not to design your webpage. Instead make sure you have an easy navigation layout. Viewers should not be confused by how to find content on your site.
Make your site more eye appealing. The following is an example of a site that is not eye appealing. You can view the actual site at Hkfilm.net.
First of all, the main banner that is displayed is blurry. A good site should use graphics that are sharp and appealing to the eye. Having a site that has blurry images is a huge turn off to any viewer that might be passing through. Secondly, the colors used are horrendous. The extreme blue and red hurts my eyes, and they make the site hard to look at. Aim to use moderate colors instead of extremely contrasted colors. Third, the font used is Times New Roman, which is a good font for Word documents, but not an appealing font for webpages. Webpages should use sans-serif fonts such as Arial, Tahoma, and Verdana. Times New Roman makes the font slightly harder to read, but more importantly, the font makes the site look too old-school.
Don’t have broken links. I can’t stress this one enough. If you are planning to add a section to your site, don’t link to a filler “coming soon” page. Not only does this put off visitors, but it can prevent your admission into directories such as DMOZ.org. It’s even worse if you have a bunch of 404 pages. It’s a good idea to make sure your site is completely finished before you launch instead of launching first and then adding the content later.
Continually update your site. If you don’t continually add new content, the search engines will visit your site less and less. Viewers will also decide not to come back unless they see that the site is constantly updated. Why do sites such as Google News keep getting visitors each day? It’s because there’s something completely new each and every day that prompts people to come back.
Alert to people that new content has arrived. Make sure that you write somewhere on your main page that you’ve updated such-and-such. It’s even better if you promote new content with an image that represents this content. One of the better sites that does this is IGN.com and gaming sites in general.
Keep the flash to a minimum. Flash is good for some sites, but in general it is better if your content is in text. Search engines can’t read any content that you’ve embedded in flash, so you will be losing a lot of visitors if your whole site is flash based.
Avoid popups. Yes you will probably be tempted to have popups on your site. If so, don’t add them to every single page. Popups are a visitor’s worst nightmare, and for the most part the average visitor will avoid coming back to a site that has popups. You can still generate traffic, but you will be losing a lot of potential customers and/or regular visitors.
Your site better offer something. You MUST offer some sort of service on your site. No one wants to go to your site if you are talking about your dog (unless you are being funny). Your job as a webmaster is to inform, teach, entertain, or otherwise keep a visitor busy with page content. Anything else, such as spamming ads all over the place, is a sure way to lose traffic and regular visitors.
Provide professional content. U dun wan 2 have txt tat reads like dis. You’re not typing in AIM, you are providing content to a visitor. Make sure you have no spelling errors, grammatical errors, or typos in your content. If you have staff, make sure they adhere to the same rules.
Good luck with your web endeavors.
