Do's in building a website

1. Good Domain Name

Choose a good domain name that is applicable to your company and will support your product, information or services that you offer.

For example:

If your company's name is Mylene's Restaurant, you should consider buying the domain name mylenesrestaurant.com as well as the other additional top level domain extension of this domain name such as .net, .org, .us, etc... This is a good practice to prevent your competitors from benefiting from your marketing strategy.

Also, you should consider buying a domain that contains keywords relevant to your business. If your restaurant is in Florida, it’s good to purchase, floridamylenesrestaurant.com, or any other domains that relevant to your services.

It is also a very common practice to point multiple domain names to one website.

2. Company Logo or Banner

Make a solid logo that represents you company's services and make it visible throughout your whole website.

3. Visibility of your Phone Number on every page

As a service provider, the goal is to encourage potential clients to avail your services while viewing your website. Therefore, your phone number should be on every page of your website.

4. Promoting your expertise, specialization and credibility

Your website should tell your customers why they should choose you over your competition. Use your website to sell yourself.

Put your experiences, achievements, sample of works, customer testimonials and other list that will legally support the services that your company offers.

Your website visitors are looking for a good reason to decide to avail your service, make sure to provide them credible information as much as possible.

5. Simple and Clean website

A very common outcome of DO-IT-YOURSELF web design is a messy, confusing and very difficult to navigate website. This kind of web site design will surely not engage potential clients.

First thing to do is to think of your website's hierarchy, menu navigation and contents to assure that you will be building a website from an organized structure.

Each page of your site should present your information clearly and concisely. Make sure not to overload pages with too much information.

Visitors will first respond to the visual presentation of each website page and then will focus to the web contents. The visual appeal of your website should go hand in hand with your website/service information.

Don'ts in building a website

1. Flash Intros/Animation

Flash intros or animation seems to be visually appealing for a website but they are usually tolerable by only a short period of time. Movement on a website can be distracting, customers visit your website to read and gather information.

You should use flash or animation when it is absolutely necessary. There are many ways to catch your customer attention by the simple use of colors, bold or larger fonts and other diagrams or pictures.

Keep in mind that flash or animation can be frustrating for some users that don't have a high speed connection for it will load slowly.

2. Many Images

Keep the number and size of images on your website to a minimum, having too many images and large images can make the load time of you website slow.

Even though many users have a high speed connection, there are still a significant number of users that will visit your site using a dial up connection. Develop your site for the lowest common denominator.

One of the very common mistakes in using images on a website is hiding important text or content within images. Major search engine put a high importance on the content when it comes to ranking websites for keyword versus recognizing image based content. The search engine cannot read the content if it is a part of an image.

3. Don't use free hosting providers

There are number of reason why using geocities or similar service is not recommended.

First, this site is not professional, instead of attracting clients they may turn away.

Second, the domain names tend to be very long and the templates that are provided to create your website pages are very limited in regard to website structure and design standpoint.

Third, included in the agreement with this kind of free hosting service is streaming ads, these are paid ads that will often be in competition with your business or service.

4. Presenting Irrelevant Content

Do not confuse your customers with irrelevant contents. As a service provider, you need to publish information that is going to attract your customer to avail your services.

Present relevant content in a simple and concise manner. Make it easy to navigate directly to information your client is looking for. Don't make them search through unnecessary information.