Creating Sites That Work For You
Let me preface this article by saying that I am not an Internet
millionaire, but I have learned enough about the Internet to
make a living doing what I like to do, that is creating and
running successful web sites. There are a few principles that
all successful web sites have in common.
An Effective Interface
There are whole books written on this subject so I won't even
attempt to cover everything in this short article. Suffice to
say every successful web site has an integrated design approach
that works.
Integrated, in that all of the graphics, text, etc. look like
they belong together, that they work together to create a whole.
That being said, the most important aspect of web design may
very well be speed. Pull up Yahoo in you browser, how fast did
it load? By some estimates you only have 30 seconds to grab your
visitors interest. Load time - the speed that a site is
displayed in a browser is critical. The most successful sites
combine graphics optimized for the web with text and ( more and
more often ) nested tables with background colors to create
pleasing interfaces that load quickly.
Back-End Driven Content
All successful web sites have content - articles, free
services, inventory for sale, etc. Most of this content is
managed by some sort of database/CGI type program. These days
there are many alternative ways to implement online programs
such as the classic CGI/Perl solutions to ASP, PHP, and C; and
data base solutions as diverse as MySQL to Oracle. My advice is
to choose the simplest solution available for you project,
however you should make sure that it will be able to scale to
accommodate your site's anticipated success. Further, make sure
that there is not a ready made, free version solution to your
programming problem before you hire a programmer or buy a
commercial version. There are many excellent resources that list
hundreds of quality, free scripts available for download.
One note about the content itself, it needs to not only be of
high quality ( there is a lot of competition out there! ) but it
needs to be constantly updated. If not daily, weekly updates are
a must so that repeat visitors feel as if there is a reason to
return. Repeat visitors are a very big key to continual growth.
This makes a very good argument to use a programmable solution
to manage your content, as the scripts allow you to update
content more effectively than you can manually.
They Get Noticed
Nothing else really matters if nobody ever sees your site.
Thankfully if you have a site with a good interface and good,
timely, content you can build an audience for it.
Unless you are a Big Corporation with thousands to spend on
advertising, the first step is to get your site listed in the
largest search engines and directories. This sounds simple, but
doing it correctly takes quite a bit of info and time. First of
all, you have to know the difference between a search engine and
a directory.
A search engine has a database of web pages - a user visits it,
asks it a question and it returns relative web pages. AltaVista
is an example. A directory is a categorized collection of web
sites - a user visits and chooses a category they are interested
in and "drills down" to find what they are looking for. Yahoo!
is the best known directory.
Many search sites blend the line between search engines and
directories, but when promoting a site, you need to treat them a
little differently. With search engines, you don't stop with
your index page. Make sure every single page of your web site
gets indexed by all the large search engines. With directories
the most important thing is to make sure your site is listed in
the correct category.
We believe that the most important place to be listed is in
Yahoo! Next we suggest getting all your pages listed in the
Inktomi database that handles the spill over search results for
Yahoo! and also powers HotBot, Direct Hit, Canada, Anzwers, and
others. Finally we suggest getting all pages listed in The Open
Directory Project, AltaVista, Infoseek, Lycos, Excite in that
order and then concentrating on the smaller search engines.
While these tips will not by themselves guarantee you a
successful web site, they will point you in the right direction.
Take an hour and surf the web checking out web sites that work -
do they employ these three principals? Does your web site?