Help Your Website Succeed

The aspects of domain names to consider

Choosing a domain name is one of the first aspects to take into consideration when planning to design and implement a website for you or your company.

Branding
Brands are greatly affected by the ability of the company to obtain the matching domain name. If a company builds a brand around a name to which it does not own the domain name, it can end up directing traffic to another domain owner's site. If it is a competitor, this would be a problem. In today's advertising development of a great brand is strictly confined to the availability to synchronize the brand with a domain name. Any confusion might result in a competitor gaining valuable internet traffic and possible customers.

Identity
Your domain name is how you / your company will be recognised and found online. Your domain name is you website address and your email address will contain your domain name i.e. myname@mywebaddress.com

Designing a good website

Here are a few good website design features to take into consideration:

General

• Your website should conform to the latest standards to make sure it is compatible with the latest operating systems, browsers, and mobile devises.
• Use trial and tested technologies such as HTML, CSS, XHTML, PHP
• Websites should be accessible to users with disabilities
• Pages download quickly
• All pages should look like the belong to the same website.

Text

• Background does not interrupt the text
• Text is big enough to read, and scalable
• Information is perfectly clear and easy to find
• Columns of text text should be narrow enough to read as a book

Navigation

• Navigation buttons and bars should be self explanatory
• Navigation is consistent throughout web site
• Large sites should an index or site map

Links

• Link colours coordinate with page colours
• Links should be underlined or a different colour

Graphics

• Should enhance the site, not distract the user from information
• Every graphic has an alt label
• Every graphic link has a matching text link
• Graphics and backgrounds use browser-safe colours
• Animated graphics turn off by themselves

Optimise your website for search engines

There are various ways and "tricks" designers can try to optimise their websites for search engines. At the end it is down to just a few, but important techniques:

• Use HTML and CSS code as specified by W3C
• Use good strong keywords in the meta tags and content
• The content must be relevant to the website
• Use good reciprocal links from good websites
• Links must be explanatory