With internet technologies evolving at such a rapid pace the pressure for website owners to bring their pages in line with current standards is constantly on.

Unfortunately not everyone has the time to sit down and spend hours researching modern website building techniques, and if you’re not a particularly technically minded person in the first place, you may not have a clue where to start!

The following collection of words constitutes a quick overview of, what I feel are probably the most important web development considerations for any sales driven website. You can use this as a brief check list of things a modern website should have implemented if you are considering an update, or simply bookmark it as a reference for later dates.

Performance

In my eyes, site performance is one of the most important but commonly neglected development considerations. The evolution of the internet is seeing websites sites getting more complicated and the responsibility of ensuring performance falls squarely on the shoulders of the developers.

Your websites performance is vitally important; if the user gets bored or cant find what they want whilst browsing your site they will leave and probably won’t come back impacting your sales figures. If your site is slow my first suggestion is that you speak to whoever manages your website about implementing some speed fixes.

On the other hand, if you want to try and iron things out yourself Yahoo provides a great place to start. The Yahoo ‘ySlow’ tool tests and evaluates your website’s performance then tells you what you need to do to improve it. The tool is available free as a fire fox add on from http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/.

Usability

What would you do if you found a website that was annoying to use?

A user friendly site is a must when it comes to keeping customers interested. A ‘user-friendly’ site is easy to navigate, has a good layout and contrast and most importantly portrays your message with minimal confusion and ambiguity.

Improving your website’s usability can involve changes from altering text colours and form layouts to a complete overhaul of the whole site. Usability is a massive subject and there exists many resources to help you and your site developers get your website up to scratch. If you are not sure whether your site is easy to use or not, get someone you know doesn’t often use a computer to traverse the pages for ten minutes and ask them how easy they find it to understand and navigate around your site.

Accessibility

This is how I think about accessibility: the more accessible your site is the larger your potential audience/customer base. A highly accessible website is a site which can be viewed, and made sense of, by anyone.

Here is an example: a partially sighted or blind user may need the option to view large text or a use screen reader to make sense of your site. In this case it is important to ensure that your websites support re-sizable text and can be read by a screen reader, or we can forget about getting any blind or partially sighted customers from our website.

On the other end of the scale ensuring accessibility for your audience may only require some sensible browser testing to ensure your users can see your site how it’s meant to be seen in their browser.

So whoever your target audience is, if you think you might be losing customers due to your sites accessibility you should talk to your site’s developer about getting some changes made.

Design

A good designer will find a balance between ‘flash’ and practical. While is it is important that your website looks good and is presented well you also need to get your message across and sell your products/services. For this reason e-commerce sites do not lend themselves to overly flashy/visual designs.

Design considerations also have a massive impact on the search engine compatibility of your website. Take for example a website designed and created using Adobe Flash. Flash content is not viewable by most search engines and they will simply find no information on your website to store in their databases, thus your site will suffer in terms of rankings in search engine indices. On the other hand a well formatted website designed to provide search engines with lots of juicy content to index will perform much better, bringing in more visitors and more potential for conversions!

Tags: Accessibility, Design, Performance, Usability

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 26th, 2009 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Website Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.