Create living websites!
Many businesses have dying websites. Though it is a grave concern, the frequent updation of their websites is either too tedious or too costly. Most of it is because when they set out to create a website, they didn’t have any long term plan in mind. Anyways, here are a few pointers that can help you create websites that breathe, interact and earn for you! Since you might not make your own website, you can still get better results if you are aware of what you can get.
1. Plan ahead: Do not go contented for simple HTML websites with state-of-the-art graphics. Always get an admin interface created. Ask your web designer to enable you to add/edit some part of the text and some of the images via an interface. If it costs a little more, it’s an investment. Try tossing terms like content management, wordpress/joomla to sound IT-aware.
2. Feeds: Your website should get regular updates from your blogs, tweets, facebook - as you may like. This makes the website quite alive.
3. Gadgets: Add a few dynamic widgets like visits counter, quote of the day(if relevant), Quick-polls, Weather, news and many others or you may even build a custom gadget.
4. Contacts: Always add a section/page to enlist all the contact details. All the ways in which you will like your visitors to connect with you (includes Twitter, Facebook) Address, emails, phone-numbers, fax. You may also provide a facility where visitor can make you VOIP call, or leave a message. You may include live chats, so that visitors can contact you directly when you or someone in your team is online.
5. Security: All the places where you may have to display emails, or where you expect the user to fill a form are susceptible to spam attacks. Ensure mail-hiding and captcha.
Posted by
at
18:40:54
Nice new theme
Another thing in your website may to see how your hyperlinks open. Sometimes too many windows opening up is irritating and some a new window opening in the same one (hence taking u away from current page) is also bad. You can trade of with options like small pop windows or mouse over text boxes etc.
Nice article. Small crisp and informative.
Thanks Pal, Hyperlink is a nice pointer. I like to keep External references to open in a new window (so that readers do not leave my page), And internal references (links to my other posts) to open in same window to avoid opening too many windows of the same blog.
I feel that all the hyperlinks should open a check box with a few options like,
1) You wish to open the link a new window
2) You wish to leave this page and open the new link here itself.
3) You wish to save this link (in a text file, the hyperlink I mean) for later refrence. Or even a pop up where in the reader needs to put his/her email-id and the link is forwarded (saved) instantly.
4) Do nothing (because someone may just click on it by mistake).
Thank you for writing up. That sounds like a nice idea for some websites, or may be some part of websites. Personally, at least on a blog I would not like to have to choose from a menu that pops-up every time I click a link.