What is the Perfect Website?

THE idea that if you build it, they will come, might have worked for Kevin Costner in the movie “Field of Dreams,” but it certainly does not hold true for Web sites.

Build a bad-looking small-business site filled with poorly written text, and your potential customers will go away. Build one that is attractive, compelling and clever, but crucial design mistakes will still guarantee that few people will know that the site exists.

Your Web site is like a digital business card, the first online look at your company that a customer gets. With good design, it will not be the last.

A site must have addictive content, load fast and get a company’s message across quickly. Visitors are a fickle bunch. Most people do not go beyond what is in front of their faces.

Studies by the Nielsen Norman Group show that only 50 percent of Web visitors scroll down the screen to see what lies below the visible part on their PC monitor. A business must encapsulate what they do in very few words. Visitors must immediately find out who you are, what you do and how they can reach you.

Furthermore, your viewer must be able to see the screen within 15 seconds - or they are GONE! Statistics show that the average user will only wait 15 seconds for a page to load. So your page must be fast loading and user friendly.

You can't assume every viewer has a large monitor and a fast high-speed connection. Do not use large, spinning graphics that take a long time to download. Make your pages quick to load and easy to read.

Graphics also do nothing to help a site get discovered by search engines like Google or Yahoo. Those sites troll the Internet for key words, as well as the frequency and quality of one site that links to another.

Text embedded in a graphic, like the name of a shop in a photograph, cannot be seen by search engines. And the old practice of embedding key words in white-on-white type will not increase a site’s page ranking; in fact it will do the opposite.

Make sure that the entire geographic area you serve is mentioned in text on the site. To increase the number of sites that link to yours, list your business in online trade directories, and mention it on various blogs.

Google offers free Web master tools that automatically analyze a site to determine if it is being optimized by search engines.

In the end, getting a prominent placement in a search engine is the only way to ensure that your site will be seen by those who can increase your business.

If your site is not listed on the first page of search results, you might as well not exist.