Internet - The World Wide Web
Organizing the Web Site

Organizing the Web Site

Work out what you want to say and do on paper first. It is critical to get the sequential order of the Web site right. You need to consider page length and page layout and create a style sheet for uniformity. Make some rules for yourself.

How will your customer navigate from the front page to the next page? And how will he or she go farther in or back to the front if they want to recheck something? Don’t offer too many choices, either, because the customer will have to go back and forth too many times.

Be cautious with links to related sites as well. Users could click off to a related link and never come back to you.

Figure out how to use repetition. Some things should be on every page, such as the name of your company. The navigation bar should appear on each page. Your name or the site’s author, along with copyright information, should be on every page, and so should your e-mail link.

The cover page should include a welcome paragraph, a site map and navigation bar, FAQs, a help page, and related links. Most businesses sites would need a way to search for a particular product, give background about the company, and show customers how to register, how to shop, and how to pay. Include a hit counter so you—as well as your visitors—know how many people have already visited your site. This is a continuous market survey for the Web business owner and one of the great advantages of doing business in cyberspace. Every time you add another product or service or revise an existing one, this new information should show in a special banner or starburst with the word “New” inside.

Text and typefaces
Reading on a screen is different from reading on a printed page. You need to keep paragraphs shorter, use bold type to emphasize things, and use breakout lists. The text needs variation and interest. Most users of the Web like to click onto another page or link, they will not read a long story that seems to scroll on forever. A few hundred words on a page is enough.

How the type is laid out is critical to readability. You don’t want your customers to have to read small print with lines of small print close together that goes all the way across the page. Leave space between the lines, make the lines short, such as half the screen width or less, and keep paragraphs short.

Make sure you proofread it. You would be amazed at the number of typos you can find on a Web site. It always looks more conspicuous on a screen than it does on a sheet of paper.

Don’t use too many different sizes and typefaces on a page, and don’t use elaborate typefaces that look like calligraphy. Condensed typefaces are also hard to read. The body text is easiest to read in a serif face, like Times Roman. Use a larger version for headlines, or a sans serif face like Helvetica, a plain and clean looking face.

Images
Keep photographs and art work small. They always look bigger on the screen. Clip art, or common commercial images that are in the public domain and free to use, are included in most computer software programs. Most Web sites have photos of products or people scanned in. You can find other art on the Web.

Icons
Iconbazaar.com and other media companies have a vast array of bullets, stars, marquees, navigation bars, page transitions, shared borders, tables, and so on. You can even add animation, video, and audio. However, Web sites loaded with gizmos such as animated characters, flashing buttons, all the colors in the rainbow, and hard-to-read type, are not the most successful.

Colors
Web browsers display only about 256 color variations. This means you cannot control how your colors will look on everybody’s computer screen. Try out colors with Color Maker first. There may be a great headline and bulleted list, but if the colors are wrong, nobody will bother looking further. For example, a fluorescent color headline written over an equally intense background screen will be difficult to read and will hurt the eyes.

Copyrights
Many people find a picture they like in a magazine and cut it out and scan it onto their Web site. This is illegal. Even if it is a picture of a nineteenth-century advertisement for shoes, which is long in the public domain, the photograph itself belongs to the person who took it. You must get permission to use intellectual property and that includes words, music, and pictures. You may want to put audio on your used car site with Willie Nelson singing “On the Road Again,” but you need to get Willie’s permission first and pay for its use. You then have to show that permission on the site. Copyright infringement is a common occurrence, and it is usually up to the holder of the rights to be the watchdog.

* Source The Best Internet Businesses You Can Start
              Lessons from success stories of both
              small and large internet businesses