As more websites are made, users become used to the logo or company name being the first thing on the page, either in the top left hand corner or the top centre, this is often made to be a clickable link which will take you back to the home page. There are other rules with navigation, such as the 'contact' page holding contact details like phone numbers, emails and postal addresses, when you change these rules on your website, it confuses users and they are less likely to come back to your site as people who are trying to find information don't want to have to complete a quiz before finding it. because of this I will need to make sure I think about what will be on each page and wether that will suit my users or not.
Internet users are often looking for information quickly, if someone is looking for a phone number on the internet and by using your site they have to make 4 clicks, while on another its just 2, they will use the other site and forget about yours. It is very important to make sure everything is easily accessible through the whole site and can be found quickly and if anything needs to be downloaded either for the site or off of it, this also has to be quick, waiting for a large background image to load is not going to keep users on your site, they will simply go elsewhere for what they are looking for, to make sure this isn't a problem, I will make sure that I compress all of my images so they do not take ages to load and if I need any documents for my viewers to download I will also take into consideration the size of these and compress them accordingly.
Another thing I need to be aware of is opening links in a new window, as around 60% of internet users, use the back button as their primary navigation, opening a link in a new window stops the back button from being effective and upsets a lot of users.
The site below gives some great tips to help keep sites usable, I will try and keep to as many of these as possible when I create my site.
http://www.keyrelevance.com/articles/usability-tips.htm
SEO
"SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines."
http://www.webconfs.com/seo-tutorial/introduction-to-seo.php
SEO has become increasingly more important as search engines such as Google have grown, now when users are looking for something they just type it into a search engine and normally travel as far as the first one or two pages. If your site can not be found by a search engine, you will miss out on tons of traffic.
To make sure that your site ranks highly on Google, they have provided a list of things you will need to think about.
- Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as cloaking.
- Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
- Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
- Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
Here is a very helpful site, talking you through each step of making your site SEO effective, I will need to consider a lot of this while building my site.
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-search-engines-operate
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