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.