Rules to Better Websites - Branding and Marketing

It's crucial that contact details are placed exactly where the user expects to find them - preferably on every page. People will often come to your site just to find a phone number or an email address, so make sure they're search isn't harder than it needs to be.

SSW has its contact details in the top navigation, which is found on all pages across the site.

Why do so many interesting pages have no owner? There are countless articles on the web that have left the reader wondering: "Who wrote this? What is their background?

Sometimes, the only available link is author’s email, which doesn't say anything about them. Sure, contact info is often a good part of the biography, but it should not be the primary or only piece of data about the author.

Not only do we try to keep our designs clean and simple without too many images, we also try to minimise the number of words. If something can be revised to make it cleaner and simpler, we will always do it. A lack of superfluous words means your readers don't get bored and will stick around longer.

One of the first things you need to include when building a website is an 'About Us' section. An 'About Us' section gives the website credibility and more importantly gives readers an overview of you and your company.

At SSW we based our 'About Us' page on 4 criteria; these are 4 aspects that we feel potential clients would want to know. Below is an example of the most important aspects we felt needed to be addressed on the SSW 'About Us' page:

How come there are so many pages that don't have an contact on the page? Every page on your site should have an email hyperlink.

People don't go to your Twitter profile as often as they visit your website. It's a good idea to have your Twitter timeline on your website. The Embeddable timelines are interactive and also enable your visitors to reply, Retweet, and favorite Tweets directly from your website pages. The best place to put it is on the sidebar.

If all you have time to ftp up is a couple of simple html pages with few contact details and a brief "About Us", then leave it as that. Writing "Under Construction" says "We have a few ideas, but we really just don't have the resources to get our website together at the moment." Bad idea.

In the past, Web people thought it would be useful to tell people how many visitors the site has had. The idea behind it was that each visitor would see a figure and think "oh, this site must be good, it has had X number of visitors" and elect to stay with the site. It was basically a gimmick. So counters were born in various shapes and sizes and more and more sites used them until someone realised it wasn't actually adding anything useful to the site: the numbers meant nothing to the visitor especially if they were really high. And if the numbers were low or perceived to be low, depending on how long the site had been up, then visitors often left before going any further. Plus the counters were virtually useless for website owners. They didn't provide any useful information other than the fact that there were a certain amount of visitors. There was no way of knowing how many of these visitors were "unique" i.e. new to the site.

Behind-the-scenes Web tracking software now makes it possible to get rid of the counters and most professional sites have. Google Analytics allows them to track their visitors much more comprehensively and use the statistics to guide their marketing efforts.

See our to Better Google Analytics Reports

Here are my thoughts on a couple of product sites critiqued against our criteria. The following are the first 3 things I look on a product site:

• Screenshots
• Testimonials
• Product Box

Most people are reluctant to share personal information and may provide false data, especially when asked to disclose a lot of information at once. Collecting personal information in intervals, rather than in a single session, may lead to more accurate and thoughtful answers.