Design & content

Promoting a poorly built site is much like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it with water. You'll never succeed unless you plug the holes before pouring the water in. In order for your site to 'hold water', you must succeed in creating a good, clean design and interesting & original content. I will not discuss website design in depth here, because there are plenty of other sites devoted entirely to that subject in the Net. However, I thought it might be useful to include some general suggestions on how to fine-tune your design.

Despite the fact that design can heavily affect the success of a site, I'm one of those who believe that a site rises or falls depending on its content. Jakob Nielsen's site has became very popular despite the visually unattractive design he uses. Users will forgive many design issues if the content is good, but if it's bad, no design tricks can save you. Thus, we'll take a look at creating content first before moving on to the design stuff..

Good content is essential in website promotion

When you are starting to build your site, it's important to choose a topic that you are interested in and are familiar with. If your site is about something that doesn't interest you at all or you aren't really familiar with the topic, the user can usually see it and deem your site to be worthless. Besides, building a site about a topic you're not interested in will be a pain, and updating it will be even more frustrating. But if you want your site to be popular, in addition to interesting you the site must interest other people.

If your site is about yourself, or a special topic with limited interest to the vast majority of population, it isn't going to be a big hit. So explore what people are interested in, and if you happen to be interested in the same thing, try building a site about it. A good place to find out what other people are interested in is Search Engine Watch's "What people are searching"-section.

When you have decided on the topic of your site and start to write, keep in mind that spelling is an essential part of good content. Even if your thoughts are brilliant, a bunch of typos might ruin the professional look of your site. So try to use a spell checker if possible and fix any errors you find. Also make sure that the text flows naturally and is easy to read. It is annoyingly easy to write a grammatically correct text that is nearly impossible to read - forgetting to divide it into paragraphs and use sub-headings every now and then is a good way to achieve this.

Unfortunately, creating content is unlike creating a design in some ways. A nice design can be used for several years, but even the best content tends to get stale after a while. You have probably stumbled upon some of those funny articles that were written in 1998 and just forgotten on the web. They might have been top-notch at the time they were written, but time has degraded them into little more than a joke.

What I'm trying to say is that static content is dead content; you should try to update old articles with new information every now and then. This rule applies to most sites, but not all - a site reviewing the newest computer hardware would probably want to archive its articles for users to browse, but there would be little sense in updating the older articles at a later date.

While this process of keeping old information up to date is important, it should not prevent you from creating completely new articles. People that regularly visit your site love to see completely new stuff, so you should try to give it to them. Don't think that the building process of your site ends when you put it on the web - think that it has only just really begun.

Polishing your design

As stated above, I tend to focus more on content than design, but no siteowner in their right mind should completely forget the design aspect. While a bad design might not drive away your regular visitors, provided that your content is good enough, new visitors might be so 'shocked' from a poor design that they won't even take the time to actually read your articles. I'm not going to write about issues like how to choose the best colors, or how to create nice-looking graphics. Like I pointed in the beginning of this article, there are specialized sites for that purpose. But nevertheless, let's take a look at some of the basics:

The first objective is to ensure that the users can easily and quickly access your content. If possible, you should aim for the possibility to move from one page of the site to any other page on the site with one click. I have implemented this by placing links to most of the content pages on this site to the left side of every page.

Naturally, sites that have very large amounts of pages cannot use the same method, but you should at least make sure that users don't get lost on your site. It's usually very useful to have someone other than yourself test the navigation system and give their opinion about it. Several times I have created a navigation system that I think works perfectly, but later noticed that nobody else but me doesn't really know how to use it :).

If it's broken, fix it

The second objective is to correct any broken images and links. In my opinion, broken images make a site look like a house that has two broken windows and a lawn that is never mowed - either there has been nobody to take care of it for a long time, or that someone is damn lazy.

Broken links on the other hand won't damage the visual appearance of your site, but they will make using the site a pain in the ass. Broken links within your site are a very bad mistake, and you should try to do everything in your power to prevent them from appearing. One good way to do this is to try to change the filenames of your pages as rarely as possible.

You should try to constantly keep an eye on your in-site links, but especially when you have just made changes that have required you to change the filenames of your pages. For people who have access to their site's log files, this task is a bit easier - the log file shows if some page was requested from your site but was not found, usually meaning that you have a broken link somewhere on your site.

Links to outside your site get broken more easily, since you have no control over the pages of other sites. It is understandable if your site contains some broken links to out-site material, but try to correct them as soon as you are made aware of their presence. A nice method is to use an automatic link-checker to check all links on your pages for possible broken links; there are several free programs that do this out there.

A few more hints

The third objective is not to overload your pages with stuff. Many people fill their pages with blinking banner ads (often 3 or more), several different font types and sound files. Remember not to stuff too many things on one page, because not everyone has a T3 connection at home. If it takes too long for pages to load, users will not wait, they'll leave. I'm not saying you should only have plain text, but do think before you start adding more and more stuff. Sometimes less is more!

Fourth, validate your HTML code. It ensures that your site works on all browsers and platforms. Unfortunately, it will not ensure that your site looks good in all screen resolutions, so I suggest you test your pages in different resolutions. A page that looks extremely good in 1024x768 might be annoying to use in 800x600.

The final thing I'd like to say is: Get someone else to look at it. There are many places on the 'Net where you can find people who are willing to look at your site and comment about it for free. The Usenet newsgroup alt.html.critique is an example of a place where users may request feedback about their site, but several others exist as well. Use them to your advantage, because it's often hard to look objectively at one's own creations. I can't count the times the advice of other people has greatly helped my design work.