Website Design Tips

Linking/Files

  • When creating a new design for an old site, it’s essential to keep every file extension the same as before… eg: (old) http://www. domain.com.au/sitemap.html (new). Alternatively, you can place a 301 Redirect on the server.
  • Try not to use dynamic pages (the URL contains a “?” character) as not all search engines will be able to spider your site. Html is still the best format for a website.
  • Do not use “&id=” as a parameter in your URLs are these are not indexed by search engines
  • Make sure that every page of your site can be reached from at least one text link within your site. You may wish to add a sitemap for this reason.
  • Do not have more than 100 links on a page

Text

  • Keep text as text. Do not add it as an image
  • Do not make every page a Photo Gallery. Content is King and search engines rely on the text place on a page. Have the information on each page be relevant to that page. An information-rich site that reads easily and is useful to the user is best.
  • Text content should out weight the html content.
  • Each page should contain H tags where appropriate (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 etc)

Navigation

  • Do not have navigation in flash unless you will add a text navigation to the page also.
  • If a drop down menu is required, use css for your navigation and not JavaScript.

Design

  • Stay away from heavy: flash, java, javascript. (Leave flash to a minimal and call all script from the header of your HTML document if required.)
  • Do not design a site so that every page opens in a new window
  • Design a home page that allows text to be freely added for optimization. This is the most important page of your website
  • Do not use font tags, use a cascading style sheet (CSS) for all formatting
  • Do NOT use frames
  • Keep all file sizes to a minimum. Speed is the most important thing with a website. If it takes longer than 3-4seconds per page, it’s too heavy. You’ll lose 10% of your audience for every second a page takes to download
  • Keep your pages size under 15k if you can. The smaller the better.