Fundamentals for a good website

A website is like having a business card. Only difference is it’s online, with a lot more information than a business card and no expensive printing involved(yay to that).

Websites are very important in todays marketing strategies. Before getting your business card, people ‘google’ for a website (atleast, thats what I know when I am looking up a new restaurant or someone’s choice recommendations). Your online presence (website) is the first impression you make on potential clients. What kind of impression are you making online?

The following text on what makes a good site, is ofcourse, my opinion and is not written in stone (its been tried and true in my experience).

1. When designing a site, first comes the site map. After this, comes the design (GUI). Design the site keeping in mind one day or the next hour you might have to make some changes or additions to it. Your webpage should consist of the header(with logo), content and footer (somewhere in there should be your navigational buttons).

2. Most people are very visual and like to look at images. Have a good balance between text and images (I strongly recommend hiring a photographer for ‘your’ own shots or open up a stock image account online). If thats still not an option, use colour, just don’t be tacky about it.

3. Once you have text and images which is the meat of the site, make sure you have a good enough whitespace. You need whitespace or some of it so the reader or viewer’s eye isn’t jumping all over the screen.

4. Flash is really nice. My first website was done all flash. I am a fan of it. However, lets not have a million moving things on the website, you might think it’s ‘cool’ but it might just be too distracting and take away from the content on your site. Personally, when I see a lot of moving elements on a site, I think to myself, the company must not be confident about their product and need fancy things to keep the viewers interested.

If you MUST have moving elements or music, minimize as much as you can, otherwise just walk away from it.

5. Make your site accessible. Try some ‘meta-tags‘. Can’t hurt to get yourself some google adwords or those facebook ads. Heck couldn’t hurt to start a blog, visit other blogs and make sure to participate in comments and leave a link to your site.