Essential Website Building Guidelines: Top 10 Do’s and Don’ts
Building a website requires a solid foundation and the use of the right tools and techniques to ensure its longevity. Factors like domain name choice, keyword research, appealing web design, and effective search engine optimization are key elements of a successful website.
Select an Appropriate Domain Name
A domain name is like a storefront sign; it can either attract or repel visitors. Choose a domain name that is inviting, memorable, and easy to spell. Avoid confusing, miss spellable, or embarrassing domains, and steer clear of long, hyphenated, keyword-stuffed names. Your domain should be something you can be proud to promote.
Plan Your Website
Don’t jump into web design without a plan in place. Define your goals, identify your target audience, and determine the purpose and monetization strategy for your site. Conduct keyword research and create a site map that outlines the number of pages and how they will link to one another. Give priority to the most important information. Without a clear plan, it will be difficult to determine the success of your site in the future.
Make the Site User-Friendly
Visitors expect quick navigation on websites. Information that is difficult to find or buried deep within the site will frustrate users and drive them away. Make your site easy to navigate by using a menu bar, readable fonts, uncluttered backgrounds, and presenting key information upfront. Test your site’s usability and make improvements as needed.
Utilize Styles
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has revolutionized web development by separating design and appearance from document structure. By using external style sheets, changes to the site design can be made without editing each page. This not only saves time but also keeps the HTML code clean and concise.
Optimize for Search Engines
Search engine optimization is crucial to the long-term success of any website. Target your keywords in the title, section headers, and links of your web pages. However, keep in mind that human visitors are even more important than search engines. Provide valuable content for your audience and the search engines will follow.
Write Clean Code
For web programmers, writing clean and valid code is a must. If you are a beginner or unfamiliar with HTML, use an HTML editor that generates clean markup, such as Adobe Dreamweaver. After completing your website, validate the code to ensure compatibility with all platforms.
Avoid Large Images
Excessive use of large images can slow down your website and frustrate visitors. Optimize your images for the web by compressing them to a smaller size. This will help ensure a faster loading time.
Avoid Spamming Your Content
Keyword stuffing, or intentionally spamming keywords in web pages, is a tactic used to manipulate search engine results. Avoid this practice and write content with your audience in mind, not just for search engines. Use keywords only as often as it feels natural, and read your content to ensure it sounds right.
Regularly Update Your Site
A successful website is never truly finished; it is always evolving. Keep your site fresh by adding new content, improving design and layout, or adding new features. An outdated site is likely to be outranked by competitors or abandoned by its followers. If your topic is evergreen, many of your articles should remain relevant over time.
Use Legal Content
Illegal content includes using copyrighted images and text without permission or copying content from other sites. Ensure that your content is unique and original. If outsourcing your writing, verify that your writers are submitting original content. Use a plagiarism checker to verify. If using images, take your own, buy stock photos, or use free clip art with a commercial or noncommercial license. If using a copyrighted image.
Conclusion
Website development agency like KloudMax IT Technologies has years of experience in building both static and dynamic website which are SEO friendly as well as budget friendly.
