Good Practice for Commercial Website Design

abstract:

A practical guide for business owners - how to specify your commercial website design to achieve your business goals.

We usually have three choices when it comes to managing our websites as a small business owner.

• Create and manage the sites ourselves, saving money but potentially not understanding the tricks of the trade to create a good website which ranks highly in search engines and is useful to our clients by:
  • Learning HTML
  • Using a WYSIWYG editor which never seems to actually see what we get.
• Contracting a website designer which costs us more money, gets us a more consistent result but reduces our control as we struggle to translate what we want in webdesigner language

In any case, we tend to struggle with knowing what good design looks like so we can build it ourselves or instruct a web designer properly.

This e-book commences with a discussion of business requirements, then addresses accessibility including colour & contrast, mouse & keyboard, text size, font selection and mobile websites. Good Practice for Commercial Website Design then covers a range of appearance items, including fonts, line length, justification & hyphenation, scrolling, liquid layout common navigational elements and the use of foreign languages.

Next technical aspects of good commercial website design are covered, including hosting, bandwidth, databases, choice of markup and scripting languages, site search and validating & formatting tools. This continues with discussion of cross-browser testing, visibility and marketing, search engine cooperation and traffic analysis.

Then, site management issues such as selection & mangement of email addresses, mailing lists, advertising and e-commerce are addressed.

In conclusion an extensive list of internet resources to address each area is given.

Each section of the e-book is illustrated by a real, fully-developed, standards-compliant sample website, which the reader can examine online and which demonstrates each technique used in construction of a good commercial website.

Includes a specification template which can be easily adjusted to your new website or a website update. Spending some time and effort getting your website design right will repay you many times over. Good Practice for Commercial Website Design will repay you enormously in reducing your risk of creating a site which your prospects do not like or do not see because search engines do not like it.