Total Site Preparation Tips
Before you go off submitting your site or doing some advertising, you'll want to make sure your site is ready to take advantage of the visitors it will receive.
Here are some things to keep in mind before you start promoting your website:
Does your site load quickly enough? Even though more and more people are taking advantage of high speed internet access, the majority of Internet users are still using a dialup connection. You should be sure your website loads in less than 20 seconds for your dialup users, though some research has shown that you typically have about 8 seconds to get the attention of your visitors before they decide to move on. This is called the "8 second rule", because of this, it's a good idea to pay strong attention to how long your site takes to load. Some good ideas to reduce load time include removal of unnecessary images and text, reducing the size of images and graphics, optimizing images and graphics for the web, avoiding excessively large graphics, avoiding use of animated images, making sure all images and tables have height and width tags. You can use a program to optimize your graphics and photos for web use, one good one is called WebGraphics Optimizer, it's a free download.
Is your site loading without errors and does it look correctly in all major browsers? You'll want to test your site in all the most popular web browsers and make sure it looks the same in each one. Often, Netscape or AOL users will see a slight differences in your website than IE users, make sure these differences are not harming their overall experience or keeping them from buying your products.
There are some free tools that can help alert you to serious problems:
You can validate your code at this site:
You can test your browser compatibility at this site:
Whatever you do, test, test, test, then test your site some more. Test everything yourself first. Then you should have your friends or family visit your site and make test purchases, ask them how it went and if they encountered problems. Was it easy to get around the site? Was the site pleasant to the eyes and made them feel safe buying from you? These are just some of the many questions you can ask.
Web Hosting
Your web host is also important. If your site responds slowly, if your site is down a lot, support slow or support responses not satisfactory, you'll want to consider moving to another hosting service. A good host will offer 99% or more uptime guaranteed, a 30 day money back guarantee, a toll-free support number at least during business hours and 24 hour email support. Remember that price does not reflect the quality of service, some cheap hosts may be very reliable and some expensive hosts may be terrible. Common sense will tell you that if a host offers $5 a month service, you're probably not going to be getting very good quality service. With a personal site, any old host will do, even the free ones will probably be fine. For a business, you'll want to check out some of the many host rating and review sites, you can find a good list here:
Keep in mind that these "directories" often get a commission from sending the hosting companies new customers, so check out several sites and remember they may not be all that objective.
Site Monitoring
Once you are on a web host you are comfortable with, it's a great idea to have a 3rd party service check up on them. There are many free services that will do this for you and make sure your site is accessible at all times. They will send you a report via email when your site is down and when it is available again. Here is my favorite service:
Site Design
For a business site, there are some things to keep away from and things to strive for, here are a few basic tips:
Strive for clear, easy navigation. Can your customers browse your site quickly and easily? Fancy navigation systems often confuse people. Consider having a backup text links system at the bottom of all your pages. Like this:
Home | About Us | Catalog | Order | Return Policy | Contact Us
It doesn't take up a lot of room and it will be very helpful should your fancy navigation scheme not load at all!
A site map and/or search engine for your site would help to make navigation easier and provide your visitor with more options for finding what they want on your site.
Colors
Colors can have a big effect on the mindset of your visitors. Some research has shown that people tend to buy less from sites with a dark background than from a light background. Also, the absolute easiest to read text happens to be what you are reading right now, plain old black on white! It gets the job done and it is easier on the eyes. To spice up the black on white text you can use different fonts and sizes plus bold and italic options to put emphasis on your writing. Just don't go overboard!
Colors can also be used to enhance your image. You should use colors that are pleasant to the eyes and give your site a professional feeling. Avoid using very bright colors excessively, they should usually be used as accents.
Graphics/Images/Clipart/Photos
As with colors, graphics should be used where they would be most effective and sparingly as they increase load time. Effective use of graphics and images can break up dull text and provide some color and excitement to a drab website. As with other elements, don't include too many images.
When stocking your web store, photos of your products should be as clear and precise in color as possible. It's a good idea to use thumbnails to keep load time down and help the user browse more easily, then offer the visitor a "click image to enlarge" option to see the full image if they wish.
Clipart can also be used effectively on business sites. For instance, a cute Christmas tree graphic to help illustrate a special Christmas season sale is a good use of clipart. Again, just don't go overboard. Clipart should be used sparingly and only when appropriate. Don't use the terrible clipart that comes with Microsoft FrontPage either! You can get some very good clipart for free or for a very small fee on sites like:
Here's the Google listing of Clipart sites:
http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Graphics/Web/Directories/
Preparing For Yahoo Or Other Human Reviewed Directories
Before submitting to Yahoo or Open Directory, be sure all your links are working and that your site is completely finished. Under construction or coming soon links will mean no listing for you! Don't submit until the site is 100% ready. Yahoo mainly looks for useful and/or unique content and good basic site design when considering your site for inclusion. Though, in my experience, the majority of sites that pay the $299 Express fee will be accepted.
Open Directory is more difficult. You'll usually have to wait for your review but they will not notify you if your site was accepted or rejected. If after a month or so, your listing is still not included in your desired category, try resubmitting. There are many reasons your site may be rejected from the Open Directory. Some reasons include too many banners or ads, not enough content, low quality content, URL re-direction, affiliate or cookie cutter sites, bad design and not being relevant to the category you are submitting to. If you think your site is of quality content and is relevant to the category, but still have not been accepted, then write a polite note to the editor of the category asking why your site was not included and if there is anything more you can do to be accepted. Often you'll find it is something simple, like maybe the editor rarely checks for new submissions!
Open Directory Tip
Once you've found the category you want to be in, scroll to the bottom of the page and see if the category already has an editor. If it doesn't, then apply to be the editor of that category. You must have some real qualifications to be editor of many categories but others have less stringent guidelines. Once you are editor, you can add your own site and make changes to other sites titles and descriptions and even add, remove and modify listings.
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