Elements of a great web site - Yahoo! Small Business Insights

Not every small business owner knows where to begin when building a web site.
Some aspects of the process are more important than others, so knowing what
to focus on can make the process more effective. Joe Palko, CEO of SolidCactus,
a full-service web design firm that specializes in building Yahoo! merchant
sites, offers the following advice.

Navigation

Palko says that making it easy for customers to navigate your site is one of
the most important design aspects site owners need to consider during the design
process.

“The core element for any online business is effective navigation - the
ability to get to any category page using the navigation and being able to return
to the point from which you started without using the ‘Back’ button on your
browser,” he says. “One of the most common mistakes people make is
when they build pages but don’t provide access to them from the navigation,
or they don’t provide a way for them to get off of a particular page.”

Some important things to consider for your site’s navigation are:

• Set up naming conventions. The names of your site sections should
  be consistent. Try to keep the number of words, characters, and verb tense
  the same.
• Avoid complicated menus, homemade icons, and jargon. These navigation
  techniques can confuse your customers and make sections of your site less
  accessible.
• Use readable text for your navigation. Palko recommends using text
  links as opposed to image maps. “Text links are more visible to search
  engines and will improve your functionality,” he says. “You can
  spice up their appearance using cascading style sheets (CSS), so you don’t
  have to use Flash or an image map to provide a stylish appearance.”

Color Choices
Customers respond on an emotional level to the colors in their environment,
and the colors you choose for your web site can go a long way toward both setting
the mood for your site and defining your brand. Palko offers the following recommendations:

• Choose “comfortable” colors. “Most popular sites use
  earth tones colors and shades of blue or grey because they’re subduing and
  non-confrontational,” Palko says. “When potential customers see
  that, they don’t feel threatened.”
• Don’t clash. Palko says that it’s important to consider the product
  images on your site when choosing your background colors. “Most people
  photograph their products on a white background, so having a white background
  on their web site looks better,” he says. “If you shoot your products
  against a black background, then you should use a black background for the
  site.”
• Use appropriate palettes. “For every site, there’s a specific
  audience with specific needs,” Palko says. “The color palates for
  a site that sells baby clothes are obviously going to be softer than a site
  that sells motorcycle equipment because you’re trying to conjure up different
  emotions. You have to determine what you’re trying to accomplish and base
  your colors accordingly.”

Make Your Product Pages Stand Out
To make your product pages more search-engine friendly, it’s important to give
each one original content.

“If you sell products on your site from a third-party vendor, try to create
original descriptions for your section and item pages,” he says. “If
other sites are selling the same product, they’re probably going to use that
same product description that the manufacturer provided them, which will make
those pages less relevant to search engines because they’ll think it’s a duplicate.
If you use your own, you have a better chance of standing out.”

Palko adds that the description should not be heavy on keywords. “The
description should be something you’re not embarrassed to say out loud,”
he says. “Be descriptive, but avoid keyword stuffing, and make sure that
it reads normally.”

Load Times
Minimizing the loading times of your pages is also key. The less time your customers
have to wait for your pages to appear, the more professional your site will
seem. Palko says that using CSS is one way to accomplish this goal.

“We try to keep the load time down by not making the page heavy with lots
of useless code,” he says. “Using style sheets can eliminate a lot
of the HTML code on your pages, which will help them load a lot faster.”

Following this advice will help you build a site that not only looks good,
but also provide a good user experience. And the more your potential customers
like using your site, the more comfortable they’ll be doing business with you.

Reprinted with permission of Yahoo! Incorporated.