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Good Design Practices
Your website is where your business resides -- it's like the headquarter
of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design
principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of
visitors and sells to as many people as possible.
Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The
navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know
how to navigate around your website without confusion.
Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very
slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any
image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image
editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.
Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too
long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks
will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too
large will deter visitors from reading your content.
Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make
sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in
Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose
out on a lot of prospective visitors.
Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely
necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to
create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the
loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are
not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important
information because of that.
Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by
styling all elements on your website in one go.
====== The Importance of a
Sitemap
A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a
website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of
having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed
sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own
needs.
1) Navigation purposes
A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses
your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they
can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate
through your pages with the utmost ease.
2) Conveying your site's theme
When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your
site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the "big
picture" of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you
will be saving your visitors' time.
3) Site optimization purposes
When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which
contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens
when search engine robots hit this page -- they will follow the links on
the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by
search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has
to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.
4) Organization and relevance
A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird's eye view of your site
structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you
will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by
glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized
site with everything sorted according to their relevance.
From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for
website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be
able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for
everyone.
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