Four Easy Ways To Improve Your Website


by Rod Bland - Date: 2007-01-23 - Word Count: 499 Share This!

The company website is often the most neglected asset bar none. Many companies will budget to spend six figures on producing their annual report this year, while the company website often fails to receive a mention in the budget. In addition, the task of maintaining the website is also often allocated to an already over-stretched I.T. Department, ensuring that it fails to receive the attention it deserves.

The fact is that a website, like any other piece of printed material produced by a company, makes a strong statement to it's readers, regardless of whether it is good or bad. If you are looking for a place to start to make improvements, but don't have a lot of resources to invest, I recommend to begin with the basics:

Spelling mistakes and poor grammar
Spelling mistakes in any written material produced by your company, be it emails, printed advertising, or your website, can spell disaster for your professional image. Most html editors have built-in spell-checking, or there are several free and paid services available online. Grammar and wording is more likely to require a human to look over. If you have been tasked with writing content, be sure to have it revised by two other people from different departments for grammar and readability.

Animated graphics
I'm still amazed by the number of websites that use animated graphics, spinning logos, and scrolling banners. Ask your readers if they prefer static or animated graphics and it's very likely they would prefer the static versions. Most people find them tacky, cheap, and they also add unnecessary bulk and additional download time.

Take a look at any of the top websites from the likes of Microsoft, Ebay, Dell, or HP and you'll find few graphics, and certainly no animated ones (unless it is an advertisement)

Broken links and page errors
We all know how we feel when we find a page with an error or a link that no longer works. You may look past the broken link, but the page error is almost guaranteed to turn us off instantly. There are plenty of link and html validation programs and services to be found on the internet. I use a free link checker called Xenu's link sleuth, and have also found a free program called HTML Validator Lite that works well.

Relevant page titles and other metadata
This is an area that still attracts very little attention, even among some of the largest companies. A good start is to include a title tag that contains a relevant description of the page no more than 10 words long. Create a relevant one for every page of your website and I can guarantee you will get better click-through results from search engines such as Google, and better page rankings.

I took a sample of the top 10 companies listed on the ASX100 and 3 of them had poorly designed page titles. Gerry McGovern, a web content author and management consultant, has written an excellent article on this topic which is well worth the read.


Related Tags: links, website, search, engine, improvement, hits, building, ranking, page, titles

Rod Bland is a Technology and SEO Consultant who owns several websites. Visit our site to learn more about how we use technology to improve business performance.

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