A lot of people want to make a website now a days. You can use a site builder or start from scratch. People create a website to make money, do something when they are bored or just to help people. One thing that a lot of people ask when creating a website is that, what should I include or do and what should I not include and do. Follow these tips on what you should and should not do on your website:
What to do:
- Build a good theme. What we mean by good theme is, clean and simple, easy-to-use and featured
- Have a commenting system
- Have a forums system (if it applies)
- Pick a good font (easy to read), good font size (not too large and not too small) etc.
- Good color contrast- don’t have purple text on a black background- it makes everything hard to read
- Use the same type of colors- don’t have purple and green on the same page
- Have a simple navigation bar
- Organize your posts into categories
- Use a Content Management System like WordPress or Joomla
- Use social networking- Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc.
- Proper grammar and spelling
- Test your site in all web browsers (a great, free tool is http://www.browsershots.org)
- Optimize your site for search engines
- Have a good host with good load times
- Choose a topic that you like
- Continue to update your content with up-to-date news etc.
- Always write your own articles
What not to do:
- Don’t have flashy ads
- Don’t have a simple HTML page. Use a theme
- Don’t resize the browser window for users
- Don’t have pop-up ads
- Don’t have music play automatically when a user visits your site
- Don’t have video start playing automatically
- Don’t open all links in a new browser window- it’s pointless and looks bad for you. If you don’t want people leaving your site, look into toolbars that sit at the top of the page when somebody clicks a link from your site and brings them to a different site
- Stay away from frames- it’s confuses search engines
- Don’t put copyrighted content on your site
This is the first of a series of tutorials that we will be doing on how to create a website, tips when creating a website and how to’s. Stay tuned for more!
