PRIORITISING CONTENT

Placement of prioritized content is critical for your visitors—this skill set is typically learned in an information architecture class in an accredited academic institution.

READABILITY

Make sure your pages are easy to read. Research shows that the major activity on the web is reading. Your visitors won’t know if you have great content if they can’t read it. Some factors to consider increasing readability are font size and colour, website background, white space, and alignment of text.

CONTENT

Content is the heart of your website. Keep your users coming back by providing quality, updated content. Great graphics will not make up for poor content.

Writing good content for your site is crucial for credibility—make sure that updates contain the same quality content as the original content written during development. A website editor (with credentials) can determine what is good content for your site and where/how it should be displayed. A beautiful new site with good content can loose its quality quickly when untrained personnel add content haphazardly.

WEBSITE MAINTENANCE

If you have an HTML website that is updated by a professional webmaster or a website developer and they have quoted you $XX per month to maintain your site—consider a maintenance contract by the hour instead. Some websites may only take a few hours every month or two. If you are paying $500 per month and you only need a few hours of maintenance per month, then you are paying far too much. Additionally, you can ask if maintenance charges can be by the 1/4 hour rather than a minimum of 1/2 hour or 1 hour. Invoices should include dates and work performed so you can track your maintenance.

USER-FRIENDLY (Usability)

User-friendly websites are easy to use and intuitive. Your visitors should be able to find information and complete tasks (e.g. filling out a form) quickly and easily. No one wants to have to figure out how to use a website—it’s supposed to be self-service. Research shows users prefer simple and distraction-free sites (non-flash).

OWN YOUR URL | DOMAIN NAME

You should register your url or domain name, www.YourOrganization.com, in your name or your organization’s name. Only a few trusted people should know where your domain name is registered and the user name and password. Anyone with this information will have the ability to transfer your domain name or take down your website.

DESIGNING FOR DIFFERENT BROWSERS, MONITORS, PCs AND MACs

Good website designers test the website during development—early stages and again later on—to make sure that the pages they build look identical on different browsers, monitors, and operating systems. Following website standards and implementing best practices should be the foundation of your website.

·                 Browser examples: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, the new Google Chrome, AOL

·                 Monitors settings vary from monitor to monitor

·                 Operating Systems: PCs and MACs

·                 Mobile Devices: PDA, Phones and iPhones

Websites should be developed so that visitors with a low monitor resolution (800 x 600) will be able to see all the graphics and text on the site with little or no horizontal scrolling. A monitor with a medium resolution (1024 x 768) will see more "space" on either side of the graphics and text—this can be white or colored space. A very high resolution (1280 x 1024) or even higher (1600 x 1200) will display a smaller website with even more space on either side.

Some websites with a lot of text are designed so that the text flows across most of the page.

Recent research indicates that website designers now need to consider designing for even higher monitor resolutions because of the use of large screen monitors.