Ten tips for a successful website

1. Be clear about purpose and audience. Imagine your audience and what they will be looking for. Keep this in mind when you design and build the site. Continually review and update if necessary.
2. Marry your purpose to your budget. Don't worry if you can't do everything you want initially – you can always add more later.
3. Get the information architecture right. Think carefully about the organisation of information on your site – your navigation and menu structure. Get some outsiders to have a look at the structure. Make your site easy and intuitive for users to find their way around. Any changes to your main template and menu structure are going to be time-consuming to implement. Get it right the first time.
4. Content is king. Getting everything else right doesn’t matter if the information on your site is badly written and poorly targeted. Web writing is a special skill. Avoid headlines that are hard to understand. Always make sure you know what you want to say and say it concisely. Have others review and critique your text to ensure that it is delivers the intended message. And always double-check your grammar and spelling.
5. Keep the site up to date. Nothing is more off putting for a user than to find badly out-of-date pages on a site. It reduces the credibility of the site and of your organisation.
6. Test and test again. Find out what real users think of your site – use interviews, online testing and perhaps focus groups. You are wasting your money if key parts of your target audience can’t find information on your site or can’t order and pay. Use online testing services such as Bobby. Thorough usability and accessibility testing are at the core of any good website.
7. Speed matters. The faster that pages download on your site the more users will persist and return. Keep graphics to a minimum and optimise them whenever possible. Use flashy technologies and animation sparingly if at all. Keep the file size of your pages small. Check your server-response times and bandwidth.
8. Keep it simple. Don't use unnecessary graphics. Keep the design clean and consistent.Stick to user-interface conventions for menu bars, tick boxes and radio buttons. Keep link colours, navigation and themes consistent throughout the website. Choose standard web fonts. Try to avoid pop-up windows. Use animations and other fancy stuff sparingly. Avoid frames. Remember that background colours reduce legibility. Keep tables simple and get rid of table borders.
9. Promote your site. Use email alerts and newsletters to tell supporters and others about new information or campaigns on your site. Put your web address prominently on all your literature and stationery. Design your site for easy search engine indexing. Start learning about keywords and search engine optimisation to make your website search engine friendly.
10. Talk to staff and clients about your site and ways to improve it. A good website is always a work in progress and never finished.