Things to consider when creating a site

There are certain things that you and your developer must consider while developing a new site. Based on my experience, here are some points I think should not be ignored:

1. Make it load fast
   The site should load fast enough. I have heard that people don’t wait more than 15-25 seconds on a page if they don’t find anything that interests them. If your page doesn’t even load within this time frame, what good is it for you even if your site looks incredibly elegant and contains wonderful content? Therefore, you should make sure that it doesn’t take much time to load your site page. To insure this, make sure your site is going to be hosted in a good and fast server. Don’t use too much of big graphics, applets, animation or flash movies. Rule of thumb should be minimizing the use of things that are not really needed.
   
   
2. Target the Market
   You should know about the audience of your site. Will they be teenagers? Will they be business executives? Or will they be IT experts? Once you know about your audience, you can offer and cater better service and your audience will also prefer your site over others. For instance, if your audience is mostly teenagers and your site is full of entertaining and flashy stuffs, and has informal looks, your site will perform well.
   
   
3. Focus
   Make sure your site is focused on its objective and on the product or services. You can surely do up-selling and cross-selling for different products or services as they can be essential for your business but do it deviously. If you have to offer many different kinds of products, categorize them and display them in different pages.
   
   
4. Build Trust
   Will you buy a product if you think the product is not going to work after 24 hours? Will you buy from someone who you think is a fraud? I won’t. I am sure you won’t either. No one will if there is no trust. Therefore, it is extremely important to build trust first before convincing your visitors to purchase from your site or use your service. Make sure you clearly write out your privacy policy about visitors and your site users, your contact information including your email address, mailing address and phone number.
   
   
5. Easy and Secure Payment Method
   The various options you offer for payment method, the more ways people can purchase from your site. You can really make your client’s and customer’s life simple if you adapt easy and many payment options. Set up merchant account and start Credit Card payment processing. In addition, set up for e-checks. Accept Bank Drafts, money orders and regular checks and provide your address to send it to. In addition, make your payment processing pages secured by installing SSL.
   
   
6. Easy Navigation and Consistent Look and Feel
   Make your site easier to navigate for users. It doesn’t worth it if the site is too complex and confusing. If you maintain inconsistent look and feel for different pages within your site, it may be confusing to users and they might leave from your site without knowing your site is valuable for them. A good navigation structure will let users find what they want very easily and quickly and thus can convert them into your happy customers more effectively.
   
   
7. Search Engines Indexing
   More than 80% of your new site traffic comes to your site from major search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo and so on. Therefore, you can really tap into your intended market if your site pages are well indexed in all search engines and if the placement is good in Search Engine Result Pages. Therefore, spend some time doing research in effectively creating meta-tags for keywords and descriptions. In addition, make sure to create a Sitemap page. All these extra concerns help in indexing your site to all major search engines.
   
   
8. Content
   Content of your website is the major factor in driving traffic to your site and converting that traffic to customers. A good content in your website positively impresses all major search engines, thus your site can be better ranked in SERPs. In addition, a good content makes your site users understand well about your products and services and compels them to purchase. Therefore, your focus in developing a new website should be for creating a good and persuasive content.