What makes a great website

Don’t cram too much information into each page. Web users have a short attention span and are easily put off by a great wall of text. Use your front page as a launch pad for other areas of the site. Break down the content into categories, then put them on different pages, with links from the front. And be sure that wherever the user is, they can get back to the front page or to another page with a single click. If you’re adding rich media content to your site, be sure you’ve got the hardware to deliver it. A 5MB file takes about 27 seconds to transfer across an average internet connection. In a country like New Zealand, where connection speeds vary quite a bit, users could get very impatient waiting for some special content from your website to download. Talk with your developer about file sizes, to be sure you’re not giving users another reason to click away from your site. Get links back to your site (backlinks) on as many other sites as you can. Don’t be tempted to join link farming programmes, however – most search engines regard this as spamming, and you may end up being linked to websites that have no relevance to yours. Instead, seek out sites where you know there are readers who might be interested in you, then contact that site and ask them if they’d like to backlink with you. If you respond in kind on your site and they see no conflict of interest, you’ll probably succeed.Create a sitemap for your site (see tinyurl.com/2ct86hb) and then submit it to Google (see tinyurl.com/2c2lyqs). This will help search engines to find you.