Website tips

How to improve your website and influence people

Below are a set of tips to help you to present your website in a better light and to make it more accessible. Driving traffic to your site is a combination of offering something of value, such as a “How to” guide and letting clients know about it and creating the right content, so that search engines pick it up. Adding and changing good content is key to keeping your website in the foreground of website rankings.

Check out your pages with this nifty tool;

http://www.the-escape.co.uk/tools/pageanalyzer/

1. Intelligent content
   

   Keep it up to date, relevant and above all interesting. Visitors who come to your site will want to know whether the subject matter is what they’re looking for or if they are simply surfing, whether it attracts their interest sufficiently to read it.
   
   

2. Accessible design

   Content on a web page should degrade well to text equivalents. It should be understandable and navigable so that users with disabilities can still use the site. For example using captions for audio and video content or contrasting content to enable better sight or hearing.
   
   All content should be keyboard accessible and be predictable in the way it manifests itself on the page. It should be clear and easily readable so that search engines can make sense of it when it is degraded to a text only page.
   
   For more information see the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/
   
   

3. Use Cascading Style sheets (CSS)

   CSS separates document structure from visual presentation and therefore allows precise control of page style. This ensures that the layout doesn’t affect the flow of the structure and that the most important information is presented first. This way, when a text based browser is used, the content is readable and understandable.
   
   

4. Images

   Use alternative tags for pictures so that a text description can be read even if the picture cannot be seen.
   
   

5. Links

   Provide links to outside documents and content that are relevant. Encourage hyperlinks to your site using a meaningful description e.g. Rendili Cosmos – Web based content management systems. This provides weight to the link and helps search engine rankings.
   
   

6. Meta keywords
   

   Use meta keywords to accurately describe the content you are providing. These words must appear in your content to be of any use for search engines. Keywords are editable using Cosmos.
   
   Check your meta data; http://www.the-escape.co.uk/tools/better-meta/
   
   

7. Consider new technologies where appropriate

   For example, judicious use of flash or video clips for part of your content or active content as in scrolling menus or news items. Remember not everyone can view this so make sure it can degrade properly to a proper text page or list.
   
   See below for a free accessibility tester
   http://www.contentquality.com/
   
   

8. Home page and landing pages

   Make your home page as good as it can be by providing succinct and clear information about your site. Page content should be concise and relevant to the topic it is describing so that search engines will easily find the landing page. (Visitors may come to any page)
   
   

9. Size matters

   Resize all images to the size you actually need. Apart from the fact that large images can cause substantial wait time when loading, resizing them yourself rather than relying on a browser resize process ensures a better and smoother image.
   
   

10. Browsers

    Remember to test your site with different browsers, such as
    
    

    • Firefox
    • Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8
    • Safari (Mac)
      
      
    Why, because what might perfectly well on Internet Explorer 7 may be completely broken on Internet Explorer 6 due to the way that the browser renders the website.
    
    You can download a Virtual PC image containing IE6, IE7 or IE8 from Microsoft for free here.
    Firefox is available for Windows, Mac and Unix here

You can also download these tips in a PDF here