Get the most out of your Internet presence by considering these ten key points when creating your Web site:

  1. Planning
  2. Design
  3. Speed
  4. Organization
  5. Clarity
  6. Content
  7. Service
  8. Administration
  9. Personality
  10. Usefulness

Design Essentials: 1. Planning

Invest some time in planning your Web site and it will pay off. A well-planned Web site will serve your customers better and help you achieve your business goals. Try the following exercise:

First, prepare a mission statement. A sentence or two should be plenty. Try to summarize exactly what you are trying to accomplish with the site. Once you’ve done that, the rest of the planning simply becomes a means towards arriving at your mission statement. If you begin to lose sight of your mission statement, write it on the top of all your outlines, or use it as the title of your template pages.

Now sit down with a notepad and a pen. Lay out a site map in a flow chart style. This chart should show all the pages you intend to create for your Web site and how they fit together.

Once you have your site map drawn, outline your homepage on paper. Draw your tables and the names of the pages linked from the homepage. Sketch your graphics out and position them. Note where you want to place scripts or animations. Even if you aren’t the world’s greatest artist or your handwriting is tough to decipher, you’re on your way to painting that picture in your head.

Now, outline each individual page you link to from your homepage. As you begin each page, ask yourself the purpose of the page. Sometimes you’ll find there is little purpose in a page and delete it from the site map. That’s fine; it’s best to find your flaws before you’re too deep into the project.

Your vision will probably change to some degree during the creation process, forcing you to edit the map or redesign some of the pages. When that happens, get the same notepad out, and modify from there. Laying out a site on paper is faster than laying it out in code.

Design Essentials: 2. Design

Your site should have a similar theme throughout its entire design, so if you decide to enhance your homepage by changing colors or graphics, remember that you’ll want to carry over the theme to your subsequent pages to give your site a unified feel.

If you are not design-savvy or artistically inclined, consider enlisting outside help with the artistic elements of your Web site. Paying for graphics or hiring a professional designer is worth the investment if your goal is a Web site that you’ll use as a serious business tool.

First, figure out what color scheme you want. Establish what colors represent you the best. Usually two colors are enough. You don’t want your colors to be too subtle, nor do you want them to be too vibrant.

Now sketch out your graphics/buttons. Try to keep the colors down. Lots of colors are not only distracting, they are also larger files. Keep your graphics clear and easy to decipher. If you plan to have any effects, such as rollovers, try to do it as subtly as possible.

Before you create graphics, lay out the site out without graphics. Use tables and table backgrounds to illustrate the color of the site. Create a rough draft of your home page. Show your draft to other members of the team or friends, and listen to their opinions. Sometimes the best feedback can come from people who aren’t Web-savvy.

If you aren’t satisfied with the draft, create another one and repeat the same process. Create as many as it takes and don’t work on anything else until you’ve settled on a final layout.

Once you’re satisfied with your layout, create the graphics and plug them in. You may find that what you had initially planned doesn’t work with the final layout. That’s okay. It’s inevitable that adjustments will be made during the creative process.

Design Essentials: 3. Speed

If your Web site is slow, customers will leave before the graphics load. Sometimes when users encounter a graphics-intensive site, they search for an alternative while that page is loading. Your customers will do the same. Optimize your Web site’s graphics and code so that it loads quickly.

Try using Macromedia Fireworks, Adobe Image Ready or Photoshop to optimize your graphics. Make the size of your graphic files as small as possible without compromising too much on image quality.

Optimize your code. There are several utilities that will eliminate extra data from HTML files to make a page smaller in size. Use them on every page on your site. Try iWebTool.com’s Optimizer or search for “HTML optimizer” to find other similar tools.

Reuse graphics. Avoid creating extra graphics when you can use an existing one. A different graphic might make the site look nicer, but the existing graphic will have loaded and be in the visitor’s cache. Your pages will load faster if a visitor’s browser only has to download the new HTML.

Design Essentials: 4. Organization

Your site has to be organized. Keep your directory structure clean. Remember the flow chart you created in the planning phase? Each branch of that chart deserves its own directory. Create a directory for images, and create directories for every other section of your site.

If you leave everything in one or two folders, maintaining it will be an absolute nightmare. The more you update, the less organized it becomes. Finally, you’ll get to the point where it takes longer to navigate the server than it does to create the updates themselves.

If you move pages around a lot, try to use absolute URLs (http://www.yoursite.com/file.html) instead of relative URLs (/file.html) for your graphics and links. It’s easier to work with absolute URLs than to fix 50 broken links every time you move a page.

Design Essentials: 5. Clarity

Your customers have to understand what your point is. Keep your message simple and clear. If you do a lot of writing on your site, be direct and to the point.

Use one-word menus, alt text descriptions in your image tags or window.status Javascripts. Try not to use too many colors, and try not to use contrasting colors. Your visitors should have an idea of where to go and what to do as soon as the page has loaded.

Don’t move your Web site’s navigation all over the place. Keep menus in one place. Keep your links to the left, right or top of your page, and content in the middle.

Leave plenty of white space. Crowding images and text together will give your site a noisy, confusing feel. White space directs the eye where it needs to go.

Design Essentials: 6. Content

Content is the backbone of your Web site. When writing your content, reflect on the planning stage and specifically, your mission statement. Every bit of content should relate to the mission statement. If your mission statement is to make people laugh, then anything that isn’t funny should be left out. If your mission statement is to inform people about whales, then you shouldn’t talk about browser updates.

Don’t create filler content. Plan your content as you planned your site. Use short declarative sentences, bulleted lists and descriptive subheadings so that your content is scan-able.

Don’t steal content from other Web sites. Do your own research and share your own opinions.

Keep the content going. Update your site and your content regularly. Don’t put something up and leave it there for years.

Design Essentials: 7. Service

A common misconception about Web development and Web marketing is that customer service is not a requirement. But putting your business online means that you’re creating another channel of contact with your customers–they’re going to expect replies to their e-mails.

Listen to your visitors for the same reason you would seek external advice on personal issues, or edits to your writing. It’s hard to be objective about something you’ve created.

It’s a good idea to insert an e-mail contact link somewhere highly visible on the homepage. Encourage users to leave a comment about the site. Sure, you’ll get more e-mail than usual, but this is direct feedback from your customers. Use it constructively to improve your Web site’s ease of use and clarity. Plus, you might even receive a positive comment every now and then.

Design Essentials: 8. Administration

Have you ever run across a site that hasn’t been updated in the past year or more? Did that company or organization seem more or less professional to you?

Update your site. Make sure all your content is fresh. You may think that you have a wealth of material and that it could take the average visitor months to finish it, but not everybody will be interested to read it all. If someone visits your site, finds a good article and enjoys it, they will likely come back at some point to read more. But if nothing changes, your visitor isn’t likely to come back again.

Once you stop staying on top of your site, so will your visitors. Sometimes there simply isn’t time to make updates as often as you would like. Maybe set an update goal for yourself when you’re planning, and stick to it. If you’re launching a blog, there will be an expectation of regular updates, so you’ll want to set reminders to ensure those updates happen. But if you’re launching a simple online presence for your uncle’s sleepy accounting practice, then you could probably go months without an update.

An honest understanding of a particular Web site’s needs at the outset will help keep it from going stale too quickly.

Design Essentials: 9. Personality

Your Web site is simply part of your business, and it should reflect the way you do business. While thousands of words have been written outlining the rules of Web design, perhaps the most important one is for you to be yourself online.

If you tend to be conservative in the way you conduct your business, don’t publish a Web site with loud colors and an informal tone simply because some tutorial said that’s the way it should be. The tone will end up feeling awkward and forced. A Web site that engages, informs and entertains will benefit your business, but remember–you can accomplish those goals the same way you’re comfortable doing them offline.

Bottom line–you don’t need to change anything about your business’ identity because you’re putting it online.

Design Essentials: 10. Usefulness

In some ways, this tip might be the most important. Every Web site should fall under one of the following categories:

  • Informational: Serve as a resource for information about a trade, product or cause.
  • Service-oriented: Offer a service, sell a product or advertise a company.
  • Personal/entertainment: Keep visitors engaged via your articles, stories, blog or multimedia.

If your site doesn’t fall into one of these three categories, you may want spend more time brainstorming and planning your site. Try to come up with a mission statement to keep your goal in focus. If you’re going to publish a Web site, do it because you feel you have something of value to offer to your audience.

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