Five steps to maintaining a good website

Improve your site's usability

How many times have you come across a page and struggled to find your way around? Navigation is crucial to any website and the average user doesn't have time to wander around and will leave your site without hesitating. So how can you make sure your navigation is up to standard?

Firstly, make sure your navigation is easily visible, big and clear. Always make sure that all your links work and if not, fix it as soon as possible. Having broken links are very bad for your site because it either tells the user that the site is outdated or that you haven't bothered to ensure everything works as needed. If you think your navigation is OK don't be too sure that it is. It's a good idea to ask feedback from someone other than yourself about your website's navigation. Remember that you're the one designing your website and you will obviously know how your site functions and where to find things but for others it might prove to be complex.

Just as important is your site's readability. In other words the size of your fonts. Many people make the mistake of using fixed sizes (e.g: 12px etc.). This poses a problem however because suppose you had created your page on a 17" monitor and set the pixel size to 10 for your fonts, things would appear OK. However the moment you view that same page on a 22" screen you'd be surprised to see you can't read a thing so it's best to use percentages when defining your font sizes. Also remember that your visitors may range from kids to grandparents and the latter usually have visual problems.

Another issue with some websites are their width. Using fixed widths aren't a good idea either, allow me to explain just why. Setting fixed widths poses problems when viewing the page on different resolutions. Having a page that is 1000 pixels wide will look good on higher resolutions will not look so good on 800 x 600 resolutions and will force the user to scroll sideways when reading content and that's just annoying! If you do wish to use a fixed width then make sure it's not any wider than 700-800 pixels. Again, using percentages to dynamically fit to each resolution is a much better option.

Use web standards

There are a number of reasons why using web standards is healthy for your website. On first impression it will definitely make you look more professional and in case you offer services or sell products it will engrave more trust to your customers by proving you have done the best you can to ensure that your content can be read on various browsers. Some websites make improper use of Javascript and/or Flash. Remember that there are a number of users out there whom are forced to use text-based browser because of reading disabilities or because they simply can't use the latest and greatest browsers to-date or even simply for the speed of it.

Web standards will also ensure that your code is much easier to maintain. Maintaining a single CSS file to control your whole site's layout and colour-scheme is much better than using nested tables and will also make your pages load faster and in some cases can even improve your search engine rankings!

Web Directories

Now you're probably looking for a way to increase traffic and generating better search engine results. Google specifically gives you a higher ranking determined by your content's uniqueness and the number of sites linking to your site and also the quality of sites linking to yours. Some of the best web directories out there today are Yahoo! and DMOZ. Having your site in either of these is beneficial since many users search these directories for content instead of using search engines, but getting your site to be listed takes effort. Here's a good site which will help you regarding web directories.

Reciprocal Links

What are reciprocal links? Reciprocal links are affiliated websites linking to one another. It is of your best interest to choose your affiliated partners very carefully because good partner has content that appeals to the same kind of visitors as your site does. If a website doesn't make use of good grammar and spelling and is bloated with images and practices bad design you'd be better off to skipping any affiliation with such site.

Reciprocal links are a good way to drive traffic to your page and also to your partner's page. If you come across a site which you find relevant to yours, contact the owner and suggest it to him and also tell the owner about the benefits of this system. Sites that attract many visitors daily are hard to affiliate with and you can't expect them to always link to you. The two partners' sites should have similar amounts of traffic, but on the odd occasion you might be lucky, specifically if you have good, unique content. That brings me to the next section.

Content will always remain king

Content, content, content! That's the key to a successful website. No matter how visually appealing your site may be, if it lacks the content users won't be coming back and besides, content is why people visit your site in the first place.

One of the most important things of maintaining a good website is to keep the content coming (and up-to-date). Try to create a schedule for yourself to at least write one article weekly, it might not seem like much in the beginning but give it several weeks and you'll be amazed by the amount of content YOU have created. Try to produce unique content. As mentioned before Google is now exploring into technologies to rank pages by unique content rather than the amount since many websites contain similar or even duplicates of the same content. The best way of ensuring to have good content is writing it yourself.

Of course, you should write with good grammar and shouldn't make spelling errors but in case you can't write the content yourself there are many writers out there who are willing to do it for a fee and if you're lucky you might find someone to do it for free. Heck, some even ghost-write, meaning they'll write the articles and still have it published under your name.

Choose a subject that interests you and something which you know something about. It doesn't help writing about something that's not interesting to you and would most likely prove to be useless anyway. Take careful planning when writing a new article and read it over before you publish it to ensure the quality thereof.

Once you've practiced these principles you're off to a good start with your site and can expect it to flourish, but remember that attracting visitors is a timely process that can take several months of hard work and effort though it's all worth it in the end.