Danaville

I like to develop and enable good websites.  I do it simply, cost effective, but with a sense of solid quality, using the tools and capabilities that are making the web so exciting, but sensibly so….

I urge you to think about what constitutes a good website and use those thoughts to help you in your purchasing decision or next steps.

What makes a good website?

It is easy to find:

• a good, obvious, memorable domain name, not confused with competitors or unrelated sites
• the content uses the terms and keywords that you would be expecting to search on, and the content is presented in a search engine friendly way so one can find it via searching appropriately. For example: location dependent services should ensure that the location is described in pages with the service descriptions for meaningful appearance in search engines.

It is there!

• it is up! – a reliable host is necessary, and one that assists in providing tools and statistics to understand your visitors behavior.

It is easy to read

• the website is viewable in the user’s browser. The website must be tested on a range of browser and ideally consider users who may be using aural browser.
• the style is easy on the eye and pleasant to read. It should not distract you from the content.
  the navigation is obvious, what the user expects and it is easy to find your way around.
• there is a site map and/or search facilities for large sites

One can find what one is looking for, it has meaningful, helpful content:

• provide as much information as possible to your users. This will also reduce time required to respond to phone calls and may also retain a potential client, as they may feel more comfortable about your product or service.
• the content should enhance the appearance of the organisation. It should appear professional and should present a human, approachable front.

It is easy to maintain and update

• It is a simple effective editing system.
• It is flexible – bulletproof . The style used should cope well with any content changes you may make and with specifications or limitations of the user’s browser (eg: large text, no images, dial up connection etc). Therefore unless absolutely necessary I avoid embellishments like flash, javascript – there is much that one can do with good HTML markup and CSS.

A good book to help with this approach is Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 2:38 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.