7 Practical tips on webdesign

Sep 14

7 Practical tips on webdesign

Here is another practical post. I am going to list some do’s and dont’s in webdesign. I started working on some new projects recently, and those things I mention here are always in the back of my mind, so I might as well write them down.

Screw flash. No, really, screw it. I don’t care if it gets crawled now. Its annoying unless it is used minimally, and it sucks for SEO. Screw it.

This is what your contact or order form should look like:

cforms contact form by delicious:days

No more. Get that email, its worth gold. No “how did you hear about us”, no nothing. My hosting company has the “how did you hear about us” field a prerequisite! And if you forget to fill it, the order form resets. Don’t do that, never. Let those guys at the statistics department bitch all they want, they are useless anyway.

JUST GET THAT EMAIL

Ask whatever you need after the order or the signup. Check out tnx.net registration, it sticks to the basics. Or namedrive registration, they ask their guest to paste in their domains. Those are good examples for different business plans, do the same to yours.

If you run an online business, you can send them offers a year later, new products, whatever. Those guys actually showed interest in your product, and, I will say this once more, they are priceless. No, you dont need his website, nor his age, nor his boxer size, no nothing. Get the email address, and then you can poke into his life all you want.

Use a CMS. Unless you are creating the new, never seen before website/service that does it all and makes you coffee at the same time, you can find a related cms to work on. But even if your idea is revolutionary, you can still use a cms as a base.

This website I made for my designer is made in Wordpress. I am sure most of you can’t tell, neither can I at first glance. All it has is the cforms plugin, a modified theme, and the NextGen gallery for the portfolio. It really does not need anything more, and its devilishly beautiful.

Put an RSS button. What? Your CMS does not support RSS? Modify it, drop it for something else or fire your programmer.

RSS is a marketer’s wet dream. Its permission marketing to the maximum. Especially given the added step the visitor needs to do to add your feed to his reader, makes him even more valuable. Every crap is weeded out, you are left with people actually willing to listen to you, so make sure you have something worthwile to say. Makes you wish real life worked like that…

Also, put your full post in the feed. Now hit my big bad RSS button.

Integrate social media. How? For starters, there are those digg, twitter, fark etc buttons you see everywhere. Let your visitors vote your article, and remind them to do so, there are plugins for that.

Keep in mind that different social sites have very different crowds, you need to find which one appeals to your niche. Digg for example is for mac freaks and primarily computer geeks, stumble is for short attention span people who love anything that comes in under 20 sec chunks and is flashy enough to blind them, and sphinn is for webmasters and SEO’s. Twitter is for… Ehm, twitters. Nevermind.

Totally different crowds. Find yours.

Also, most social sites offer you widgets for your website, to show your bookmarks on delicious, twitter or digg. DoshDosh is a very good implementation of that, to the sidebar, on the bottom right. If you actually get to a point where your opinion matters to your readers like doshdosh, sharing handpicked bookmarks can work well, like the editorial pick of the week etc.

Upcoming is Google’s new unreleased feature that wraps all social sites together on a single widget for your website. Its called Friendconnect, still beta, and I believe it will be a cool feature.

Make it load fast. Page loading time can really affect your traffic. Every second the page takes to load, means a percentage of your visitors is gone.

Those new Ebay flash banners take like 6 secs to load by themselves. Drop them.

Graphics are pretty much useless except for the first impression. If it adds information, keep it. If not, drop the picture, or compress it till it squeals.

Caching. Not only does it reduce load times, it saves bandwidth as well. Dynamically generated sites can take a beating from a traffic spike coming from a social site. Cache them, its that simple. What? your CMS does not support caching? Read the rss comment above.

Javascript breaks. Unless there is no other way to do what you want that piece of code to do, drop javascript. Javascript crashes more often than windows, and it takes down non Chrome browsers with it.

Its ok for a video embed or a google map, or a particular script to load slowly, but only as long as it is on a separate page. Don’t do what so many others do, embedding 32 youtube’s on the homepage. It’s simply dumb. A visitor will be ok waiting to see the video you suggested, and which he clicked to see. But he will not be ok waiting 50 seconds for your homepage to load. And if you have to include a heavy script somewhere, make sure to cut off everything else to lighten the load.

And, last but most important is:

Focus on your site’s main concept. It’s very easy to get carried away adding features and widgets and thingies to your site. But you need to make it actually deliver the service that the site is about.

If you give free stuff, then give free stuff. If you sell a product, then sell a product. All else comes later.

Write down the concept of your website in about 10 words .

“Glowleaf.net is an affiliate marketing blog for publishing marketing and seo techniques.“

That is it, that is the core idea, and that is my focus. I will not try to create a forum here (the Greek affiliate forum was a different project), or sell products, or create my mailing list, or show which flash game I am addicted with today.

If you want to sell, sell. If you want to give information, give information. If you want to sell links, sell links. Leave the other crap out of the picture until you’ve got a solid focused project.