PurposeAs a general rule, a website exists to link it's audience's problems to its creator's solutions. The problems may be serious ("I'm sick. I need medical advice.") or trivial ("I'm bored. I need entertainment."), but in any case the site can only be considered successful to the extent that it guides people to the appropriate solution. Your site will never fulfil your needs (by generating income, for example), until it fulfils your audience's needs. This may appear obvious, but the amount of websites in existance which, although they may look like a miilion bucks, have no clear purpose suggests that in the scramble for buzzword compliance many people treat their audience's needs as an afterthought, if at all. "Once I got over my 'About Us' syndrome, and started writing real content, preparing articles and resources, I started getting hits like gang-busters." - http://www.advancedwebdesign.com/search-engine-optimization/seo-tips/content CurrencyGet into the habit of posting new content regularly. If you honestly find yourself in the rare situation of having months or years go by before you have any new information that your audience could potentially find useful, you may need an advertisement in the Yellow Pages, but not a website. Regular news of new products, promotions, industry or regulatory developments, and so on, can all bring visitors back to your site. But if the latest information on your site is months or years old, the news you're most successfully spreading is that your organisation is slack. LinkageThe web is about links. It's links that put the "hyper" in "hypertext". Where "old media" was about "capturing eyeballs", the web is about guiding your readership to the information they need, even when that information doesn't ultimately originate from you. Links to external information relevant to your organisation's mission makes your site more useful at virtually no cost to you. Links to other sites aren't to be grudgingly dispensed as though they were costly favours to the owners of those sites, they are a service to your users. The more useful your site, the more other sites will link to you. It's web karma, man. Never succumb to the lure of the "capturing eyeballs" conventional wisdom. Tricks like opening external links in a new browser window, leaving your site stuck to the user's computer like a wad of chewing gum on the sole of their shoe, will only antagonise your audience. SortingThe maintainer of a web site is simultaneously author and librarian. You will need to know how and where your audience will expect to find what they're looking for, and meet those expectations. The most current and most popular information on your site should be easiest to find, and nothing should be hard to find. Give serious consideration to how you categorise information, and how you expose this taxonomy to your users. And no, a search form isn't always the best way to find what you're looking for. Put some effort into making your site browsable, instead of sending your users to Google. ArchivingThe cost of putting information online can be significant, but the cost of leaving it online is negligable. From a user's perspective this is like getting the National Archives for free with their morning paper. Highlight what's current, but don't purge old content without good reason. Further Reading |
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