PROFESSIONAL SITE DESIGN TIPS
 Before you start designing your website take the time to sit down and make a plan and consider the following tips when creating your site.
Getting Started
- Purchase a good domain name, one that has your main keywords in it.
- Make a list of keywords you want to target.
- Create page names that incorporate you keyword phrases.
Layout & Design
- Minimize clicking
- Include a way to get back to the home page, on every page
- Include a menu on every page
- Avoid using images in the navigation when you can use text links instead.
- Don't use frames
- Put your contact info very visible on every page
- Make sure your site is browser compatible
- Check out your site on different browsers
- Your layout should be consistent throughout the site
- Use UTF-8 single universal character set
- Use Flash and JavaScript sparingly
- Don't let flashy multimedia ruin your site
- Don't use pop-up windows
- Don't use auto-loading sound
Photo Tips
 Make sure the photos you select are appropriate for each page.- Optimize and or compress all of your images when saving them.
- Include your keyword phrase in the alt tag on every image.
- Use your targeted keywords when naming your images.
- Use keywords in close proximity to the image.
- Your images should download quickly
- Don't use large image backgrounds
- Don't use animated GIFs
Content
- Make sure each page in your website has something valuable to offer
- Use professional looking fonts
- Text area should be 450 t0 600 characters wide
Use contrasting colors to make your text easy to read
- Make the text large enough to read
- Increase the line spacing to improve readability
- Spell check every page
- Don't make your page too wide
- Don't type more than a few words in ALL CAPS
- Don't use blinking or scrolling text
Links
- Make links stand out
- Explain what you're linking to
- Link to other sites that are relevant to yours
- Open External links in a new window
- Use descriptive link text
- Test your links
- Periodically test and remove dead external links
- Don't hotlink to other sites' images
- Don't underline words if they're not links
- Don't open internal links in a new window
- Don't use Click Here
Extras
- make sure your pages validate through the W3C
- Create a custom 404 error page
- Create a Google Sitemap
- Create a favicon
- Upload a robots.txt file
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