.Com or .Bomb?

If you have your website done by a non-professional, you may end up paying the price later on. There are many fine details that determine whether your website is perceived as a site that attracts visitors or just sits out in the far reaches of cyberspace.

Right now the average screen size is between 14 and 15 inches. You want to have the size of your webpage fit their screen size. People are reluctant to scroll over. Although a webpage that is 1080 pixels looks fantastic on a 17 or 19-inch monitor, the average person will have to constantly scroll to read all of the information.

Your opening page needs to come in fast, no more than thirty seconds. To keep the file size down, try to have only one or two pictures on the opening page. It is best if the total file size for the front page is between 60 and 80k. Don’t make your front page very long. Ideally, everything should fit in the first screen shot. If that is not possible, do not have your visitors click on the scroll bar more than once. Statistics from CyberAtlas show that less than 10% of web surfers will click on the scrollbar three times.

Be sure to include your contact information on every page so that no matter which page people use to come onto your site, they do not have to dig around for your telephone number. Include your business name, phone and fax number, email address, physical and/or mailing address and your hours of operation.

Be sure that your navigation is simple and easy to use. It doesn’t matter whether you use graphic buttons or text links for your navigation, but it is very important that you are consistent and use the same type of navigation for each page. Many website designers like to use frames as an easy way to organize a website. This is not recommended because the search engines do not pick up websites that are in frames. If there is an important reason for you to have your site in frames, than get rid of the frames on the front page, and use them on the inside pages. The search engines will be able to read your front page, but will not be able to spider through the rest of your website.

There are now so many websites in cyberspace, we have become a visual society. If you don’t catch the visitor in the first millisecond, they will be off to the next website. Quality equals duration and profit. Without quality everything goes away.