What do Top Sites Have in Common? Content and Ease of Function
In recent years much of our time has been invested in building news and classified Web sites that first attract new audience and secondly cause them to consume as many pages possible in a visit while spending as much time as possible. Sounds easy, right? Candidly, going back a ways, we took great ownership of our precious babies and cared a great deal about how the style sheets looked following graphics principles in the use of text, colors, borders, shading, etc. etc. Sound familiar? Do you think you think droves of people came bounding to my sites because they were so pretty? If you said no, you are correct.
What top sites like Google, Yahoo, the Drudge Report, and Craigslist show us over and over again, users could care less about pretty. What really drives users is content and ease of function. Keep in mind, I’m talking to small business owners…Here’s a few of our rules of the road when designing your site:
- Keep it SIMPLE. Do everything you can to get the most frequently requested or used information on your home page. Everything else, do what you can to make it only one click away. Example, on your local television or newspaper site one of the top viewed items is typically weather. You’ll notice weather is easily viewed and accessed on most local media sites.
- Navigation: Make everything easy to find. Don’t be afraid to pull out all of your content and list it the navigation bar down the left.
- Keep it FAST. Avoid the temptation to incorporate numerous third-party applications and more than a picture or two on your page. Yes, all the latest little whiz-bang gizmos are fun to include, but don’t. In this day and age, people expect pages to open yesterday. The more callouts you design in, the slower your page will load. If yours takes a minute to load, your potential audience is already on to the next site. If you must load a gallery full of photos, load them into a software app designed to handle the weight of photos and create a link.
- Content: Give them what they want. If you have a bicycle shop, give them bikes! They didn’t come to you for ice cream. Chances are no one knows more about bikes than you do. Give them blogs — yours, theirs, everyone’s. Give them inventory, give them accessories, give them used, and please, give them deals! Most of all, give them the means to contact you. Over 80 percent of offline purchases are made only after researching online. Don’t forget to put an address and map in your site.
- Keep it fresh! No one wants to go to a site that was last updated in 2006. You wouldn’t run the same ad over and over again in the newspaper or on TV. Same goes with your web site. Give it a little attention and it will pay big dividends.
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