How to create a great website.
By
Patrick Tan
The web is a medium designed to communicate with people. As the
written words and graphics will be the main forms of communication
in a website, it is of utmost importance that they convey your
message in the most effective way without any jarring expressions,
omissions and complications.
The ultimate aim is to create a website that will attract millions
of visitors and have them returning to the site again and again.
From my observation, great websites, regardless of their functions,
seem to adopt the following rules:
Good sites are rich in contents
Before you set out to design a website, you must first identify
your purpose and target audience. What do you want to do with
your site? Who is your target audience? Where can you find them?
What are their interests? What products, services and information
will appeal to them? Why should they visit your site? How are
you going to attract and retain your target prospects?
Getting the answers to the above questions would pretty much set
the looks, appeals and contents for your site. Whatever your contents
and resources, they must always share a common theme and focus.
You may consider offering some free information and resources
to attract visitors to your site. It is a fact that most people
use the Internet first and foremost to search for information.
"Content is king" as witnessed by the successes of Yahoo
and America Online. Both started out as an information portal
providing value-added information and resources to millions of
users who flock to their sites every month.
Good sites have great homepages
The homepage is the entry point to your site. If it does not
appeal to your visitors, chances are high that they will leave
your site as soon as they arrive without ever viewing a second
page on your site.
How can we create an effective homepage? There is no straightforward
answer. A directory-styled homepage may serve the purpose well
for web portals like Yahoo. In other cases, a simple homepage
with an enticing slogan and graphic may work equally well. You
may also consider setting up multiple entry points if there are
distinctive sections in your site.
Whatever your preferences, the key to designing an effective homepage
lies in determining the needs and wants of your target audience
and offering them the desired solutions in your site. This concept
should appeal to your visitors and generate enough interests for
them to start exploring your site.
Good sites are easy to read
You are judged by how well you write! I am not exaggerating.
The ability to write simply and clearly in an appropriate format
and style is very important in the world of business communication.
A well-written sales literature is usually what it takes to close
the sales. This is particularly true for a website, as the written
words are the only effective means to convey your messages to
your readers.
Your writing should be free from jarring expressions, spelling
mistakes and grammatical errors. If you do not have the ability
to write clearly and concisely, you should seriously consider
paying several hundred dollars for a freelance editor to proofread
and edit your entire sites. It would be money well spent!
Good sites are easy to navigate
Good contents are useless if visitors could not access the
information easily. Web surfers are very impatient people. They
would simply go elsewhere if they feel lost in your "maze"
of information.
A simple rule of thumb is to present your information in easily
identifiable categories. You may consider color-coding your pages
according to their respective categories or sections, particularly
if you are designing a big and complex site with more than several
hundred pages.
At Aloha-City, we have color-coded our pages in various colors
- gray for Work@Home; violet for Home; gold for Fort Street Mall;
pink for Biz Connection and green for Utrendz. This methodology
let us maintain a consistent layout throughout our website, while
allowing visitors to identify and navigate from one page to another
easily.
Good sites are good communities
Good websites are usually good communities. The notion of
selling a product online must include community building and vice-versa.
The logic is simple. People want to belong to a community, and
commerce will flourish in places where a community settles in,
regardless of whether these places exist in cyberspace or in the
real world.
An online community dedicated to a specific target audience can
play a very important role in arousing its members' awareness
and interest in specific products and services. These highly qualified
prospects will then be more receptive to seek information about
related products and make purchases subsequently.
Studies in the United States have confirmed that relevant content
adjacent to merchant or product links helps to trigger impulse
buying. On average, they reported six times higher than average
click-through rates for these links.
Good sites mimic the real world
You should create virtual community that mimics the real world
community. It must be relevant to the members' lives, works or
hobbies. Your contents and information should be restricted to
those that your community wants.
You must pay constant attention to changing visitor demands and
interests, or your site will die. When you upload your pages to
the web, your job does not end there. On the contrary, it has
just begun. You have to continue to update your contents regularly
to keep them current and relevant to your visitors' need.
Good sites encourage interactivity
People have a natural urge to share ideas and stories. Make
your visitors feel that they have a vital role to play in your
website, and they will be encouraged to share their ideas and
stories with you. If possible, you can provide interactive features
such as chat rooms or bulletin boards that allow online exchanges
of ideas and views.
To adapt a well-known phrase, "A web community that clicks
together sticks together." Studies have shown that good websites
that last for years have operated on the bases of sharing free
information, helping each other and keeping their contents current
and relevant. The idea is to build a community with the intent
of including other like-minded people and then let it grows on
its own.
Good sites do not stand-alone
Good sites also do not stand-alone. You must create outgoing
links that are complementary to what you have to offer. It will
be a win-win situation for two related sites to share contents,
exchange links and cross-reference each other.
The idea is simple. If you do not have what your visitor wants,
then help him find what he wants in another site. And if your
outgoing links are comprehensive enough, you may actually end
up attracting more people to your site as a one-stop, quick reference
source for everything they need.
A good example would be Web Tool Box. It contained hundreds of
links to web resources and tools that are useful to online business
owners, webmasters, designers and programmers.
Final Considerations
The above guidelines are meant for designing third-generation
websites. Conceived by design, these websites focus more on styles,
functionality and contents, and less on technological features.
Unless necessary, you should avoid using Java plug-ins, multimedia,
shockwave, flash, animation and large, useless graphics in your
site. They load slowly and make no significant contribution to
the overall effectiveness of the page.
Ideally, you should keep the file size of your web pages below
60 Kbytes to facilitate fast loading time. Remember that web surfers
are very impatient people. They would be more than happy to "click"
to another site if your site takes more than 10 seconds to download.