Here are a few quick and easy tips to remember about starting a website, which should make your website more successful.
1. Quality is better than Quantity
This tip can be put in several contexts. Content wise, if you have thousands of pages essentially saying “I’m great” in thousands of ways you have wasted your time creating them. Instead make a single easy to find page, which engages the user quickly and gets to the point.
Traffic wise, it’s better to have a small audience which engages with your content (or will pay for it) then a large audience who do not engage with your content and end up just increasing server costs. A notable example of a Company which has decided to focus on serving the 10% of their audience who will pay for content is News Corp.
2. Start Small
When you start you may want to do everything under the sun. Unfortunately in most cases this leads to websites stalling in development. For example many websites spend years “Under Construction” and when they are finally released their product or service is outdated or uncompetitive.
A few months ago 3 Google employees explored an innovative approach to CAPTCHA (What’s Up CAPTCHA? A CAPTCHA Based On Image Orientation). Essentially they suggested that having a user orientate an image into its upright position is easier for users (typing difficult to read text can be problematic) and harder for computers.
A computer finds it really difficult to know if this is correctly orientated.
Here is a version I wrote which to can use on your website.
Here are ideologies from the Web 1.0 era which moron “webmasters” (I use this term sparingly) seem to still use. In most cases it just makes a website annoying and difficult to use.
1. “If there is automatically playing music and videos, it will get a users attention”
Unfortunately not. All this does is aggravating users who are startled by an unknown (and unwanted) audio source. This will obliviously lead to users closing your web browser just to stop the annoying voice. In a recent piece of research by Full On Design in regard to what people like and dislike about websites, one respondent said when asked about automatically playing sales pitches:
I hate it when some annoying sales crap comes up, as it interrupts my music or podcasts [...] normally I would instantly close the website which is to blame. Anonymous Respondent
Here are 5 things I hate to find when I visit a website.
1. It only works in some browsers
I’m a very keen Firefox fan, and I hate it when a website has been designed for IE and only IE. It’s not hard to make a website work in the main 5 browsers (Chrome, Opera, Firefox, IE7, IE6 and Safari).
Oracle PartnerNetwork’s website uses JavaScript tabs for tabs, unfortunately in IE8 they don’t work.
2. Invalid HTML/CSS/JavaScript
Nothing is worse than a website which just does not work; having invalid code can normally be the cause of most problems (For example, forgetting to close an element).
