02/ 13/ 2006
by Doug Addison
1. Explain who’s responsible
You need to make sure that your Web site’s visitors understand who you are, how to contact you and how the information exchanged over your site is created and managed. Making this type of information clear and easy to find will greatly improve how visitors perceive your business. Be ready to answer visitors’ questions by creating the following components: a page listing the name, mailing address, phone number and legal name of your business; an e-mail address for webmaster@yourwebsite.com; auto-responders for e-mails sent to webmaster@yourwebsite.com and other generic addresses set up for fielding specific questions or complaints; names of third-party content sources and destinations of off-site links; and, most importantly, a privacy policy.
2. Write meaningful link textWell-written, well-formatted links guide visitors to the page or information they're seeking as they browse your Web site. Follow this checklist to ensure that your links are useful and Web-surfer friendly: Links should be colored to stand out from other text. Followed links should look different than typical links. Links should describe their destination in a straightforward, succinct way and should avoid riddles, sarcasm and culturally specific references. And, above all, don't use the all-to-common but useless phrase “click here” to identify links. Strive instead to use action words or highly informative phrases in your links, so that impatient visitors to your site can understand them as quickly as possible.
3. Offer a printer-friendly versionThe desire to read Web pages on paper rather than on a computer screen hasn't diminished much at all in the 10-plus years of the Web’s existence. Fortunately, the techniques for facilitating this common Web surfer behavior have evolved. Web sites no longer need to use complex scripting to facilitate printing or have separate, specially coded printable versions of every page, which can make site maintenance a real headache. Instead, you (or your Web designer) can embed multiple “style sheets” on each of your site’s pages to enable multiple formatting “personalities”—one for the screen and one for the printer. Then, when visitors find something on your site that they want to read, they can easily print the page and retire to a more comfortable off-line venue in order to fully absorb your content.
4. Make your Web site internationalGiven that more than half the world’s Web surfers speak a non-English native language, your Web site needs to reach out to a worldwide audience. Translating your entire site into one or more languages can be costly and time-consuming to do and maintain. But offering multi-lingual versions of critical information, such as shipping policies or an “about” page, can be a hospitable addition. Here are some other steps you can take to improve your Web site’s utility with a wider range of visitors:
- Know your audience.
- Use statistics about your site’s traffic to find out from where your visitors are coming.
- Use international time and date formats, such as “1 March 2006.”
- Design forms to accommodate non-U.S.. addresses.
- Avoid culturally specific icons and language.
One of the best ways to improve your Web site’s effectiveness—and its contribution to your business’ bottom line—is to know which pages visitors look at last before leaving your site. To do so, you (or your web designer) will need to enable any tools your Web host provides for distilling your server’s raw log files into meaningful reports. Exit page metrics can, for example, reveal an online ordering process that leaks customers (and sales) because people don't make it to the checkout page. While this information can't give you a definitive “why,” it will provide a starting point for finding and correcting otherwise unseen traits about how your site and its visitors interact.
Excerpted from Web Site Cookbook, Copyright 2006 O’Reilly Media Inc. Used with permission. Doug Addison is a freelance journalist and Web producer in Austin, Texas. You can contact him at doug@daddison.com.
