Advice and useful links

Resources & Advice

Web Site Design

Visitors to your site are your most important asset, so you must stop your target audience hitting the dreaded 'back' button.  Here's some general advice on how to avoid the 3 second visitor:

• Keep it simple.  Make it obvious what your site is for and use a simple navigation.  A cluttered site or one with huge amounts of graphics is more likely to be backed out of before your visitor has seen what's on offer.
• Don't just use Internet Explorer.  There's a general trend towards other non-Microsoft browsers. We suggest you also install Firefox, Netscape or Opera and make sure your site still works.
• Comply with the latest web standards.  Your site will be more likely to work on more browsers and operating systems and will have a uniform look and feel for all your visitors.  Visit www.w3.org for information on standards and compliance checking
• Avoid free/low-cost hosting if you want a site free of adverts that is available when you need it.
• Avoid publishing email addresses on public pages.  This will drastically reduce the amount of spam you get because the spammers use web crawlers that look for email addresses.  Use a contact form or put your email addresses behind a login.
• Get links from other sites.  Links are one of the best ways to get visitors, and some search engines use the number of links to a site to increase it's ranking.

These sites will help you get an idea of a design for your website.

If you are asking for a quote it will be helpful if you can provide addresses of pages that you like the look of.

• CSS Zen Garden has hundreds of variations on the same page, more artistic than functional but great for ideas on how you want your website to look.
• wellstyled.com has tools for selecting a colour scheme

Hosting

Avoid free/low-cost hosting if you want a site free of adverts that is available when you need it. One of our clients was happy with their 1.99 per month hosting package until they got a mention on national TV and their site crashed, they probably lost their chance with thousands of visitors. Many of the cheaper packages on offer have restrictions that will mean you can't actually run the site that you want.
We have used the following providers with good results:

• One and One is one of the biggest hosting companies. Mid priced Microsoft Hosting packages are reliable, well priced and are give enough capacity for all but the biggest users.
• Namesco are UK based and have good support.

Search Engines

You need to get noticed, so try these hints.

• Get links to your site. Links are followed by the search engines crawlers as they index the web, the more links you have the more likely they are to notice you.
• Submit your site to search engines so they'll know you are there.
• Ensure your home page is relevant and a simple site navigation will help the search engine index your site.
• Advertise to increase the number of visitors.
• Submit your site to Google using this link.
• Advertise on Google using their AdWords program. Great value for targetting your site.