June 26, 2008

Top 10 Tips for Your Site

You don’t always have to tear down you site to improve it. Here’s 10 quick things you can do to improve your existing site. Do one or do them all, you’ll notice a difference.

1 WEB 2.0 STYLE REDESIGN

Make sure your site is fully designed in CSS. If your website hasn’t been redesigned in 12 months, it needs an update! Internet trends have changed, business to business or business to consumer websites are all changing in design. Not sure what the heckWeb 2.0 looks like? Here’s a good summary.

2 ADD A TAG CLOUD TO YOUR SITE’S SEARCH

Sites are now using tagging more and more as a way to label up content. All the resulting articles or products from a search can be tagged by you or your website customers.

3 ADD A FAT FOOTER

Add a fat footer to your website to increase usability, they are simple to build. They’re very en vogue and encourage clickthroughs around your website. Scroll down to the bottom of digg’s site for an example.

4 ADD A PODCAST

They are no longer a gimmick but a valuable business tool. Want customers to listen to you talk about your products or services? Podcasts can be played through your website as well as itunes and emailed to your customers directly to deliver regular updates.

5 GET A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

Ensure your customers can add your content to their social bookmarking sites! Its not only good for your natural search results but also good for syndicating out your content.

6 RSS AND ATOM NEWS FEEDS

Are you making sure your website content is easily available for distribution? This allows you audience to subscribe directly to your site’s content. Best of all it’s really easy to implement, but remember that you must update your content frequently for maximum effectiveness. Wikipedia has a great summary of all the pros and cons of using news feeds.

7 ADD A BLOG TODAY

Google likes websites whose content is updated regularly through news and blogs. It takes about two days for Google to update Wordpress and Blogger.com blog stories. If you aren’t doing this you are missing out on essentially free listings in Google search results!

8 CREATE A SHOWREEL

Moving image has gone from a nice-to-have on the Web to something that people look for. You don’t need to create a Hollywood masterpiece. A quick 15-second video will go a long way.

9 CREATE A FIRST-PHASE MOBILE WEBSITE

Get your content onto a mobile site, regardless of whether or not the iphone and Opera revolution will negate the need to a mobile sites in the future, there is nothing to say. This is now.

10 HTML NEWSLETTERS

If you do are not currently sending your customers at least one nicely designed HTML email a month because you don’t have the time, then let us do it for you.

Posted by jm

Tags: Web best practices