"Dos and Donts" on business websites
What to do and what to avoid on business pages! Some basic thoughts - page 2 (page 1 here)!
- The Fonts
- There are some fonts that are common - most Times New Roman and Arial - and if you choose one of these, there will always be a similar replacement font on the visitors computer! I would not recommend to use other fonts, even if you make the font downloadable. Many people (we recommend that for security reasons) have the automatic download disabled, and they will not be willing to download your favorite font that they can see your favorite style. And if a special font is replaced by another font on the visitors computer, the results can be weird! (I had my PC replace a font with wingdings once - what a surprise!??)
- Do not use very big font sizes. The pages of some people (esp. MLM it seems) have sometimes screaming colors and font sizes, so you have two sentences on the first screen. I judge this as childish and regularly surf on without scrolling!
- Do not use blinking, rolling or multi color text and other special effects. That is for private homepages of teenagers, not for business sites. Children should play, but not a businessman!
- Don't make very long paragraphs without breaks! Use lists, tables, linebreaks etc. to serve your text in small bites, as reading on a screen is not the same as reading in a book! Do not annoy or irritate the eye with large texts in one block!
- General
- Use a spell checker! (I am Swiss, and German is my first language, so there may still be errors in my English even if I use a spell checker - but if your mother tongue is English, you should be able to do better!)
- Check your html source - If you want a professional looking site, the html source is a part of it. Weird, chaotic looking html is a sign of non-professionalism! Use a html validator!
- Check your site online after having emptied your cache! Many links function on your PC or as long as the image is in your cache, but when a visitor comes? So load your pages on the server, empty your cache and test the links! There are tools for that, even free ones!
- Have an eye on the loading times! Your pages should be about 40 KB max. including graphics, make separate pages for big graphic files and tell the visitor that he will see a big picture!
- Let other people look at your site and ask them how they think about it!
- That is a cheap and good method to test the acceptance of your site! If you let other employees of your company do this, be sure that they will be honest with you, give them a possibility to give their critic anonymous if necessary! (especially if you are the boss many will want to please you instead of telling your the truth!)
- Let also people from outside of your company give comments! It will help you to make pages that people like to look at! If they do, they will much more likely buy something!
- Customer service - support - free offers
- If you will have and keep customers, be clear in what service or support you offer - and stand by your word! We changed a cheap and reliable webspaceprovider because he did not do that!
- Beware of promising something and not doing it! Especially free offers should be fulfilled immediate when asked for! Dissatisfied customers or visitors will spread the word about you much wider and faster than the satisfied ones!
- If you don't work on weekends, make it clear that orders and questions etc. will be dealt with after the weekend!
- Please, never speak bad about your concurrent! This will damage your reputation much more than theirs! Or would you trust a man that speaks bad about another man? How long will it be until he speaks bad about you? Is such a person trustworthy? Beware of loosing your good reputation! (That also means: No spamming!)
- More will be added!
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