The document provides dos and don'ts for an effective website. It recommends doing things like having a clear structure and navigation, understanding the website's purpose, having a consistent theme, and keeping the site updated. It advises against overwhelming visitors, making the site hard to use, overloading pages with too much content or widgets, and prioritizing search engines over users. The goal is to design a site that is easy to navigate and focused on the user experience.

1. THE DO’S AND DON’TS
OF EFFECTIVE WEBSITES
CAR YN B ROWN, DIGI TAL MEDIA B UT T E R F L Y
1

2. DO:
WHAT YOU SHOULD DO FOR AN EF FECT IVE
WEBSI TE
2

3. DO: HAVE WEBSITE STRUCTURE
• Keep your pages structured.
• Have a layout and structure for your pages on your website.
• Make your navigation easy to find.
• Make your menus easy to see and always in the same
place on every page of your website.
• You main navigation should always be visible, a visitor
shouldn’t have to perform an action for your main
navigation to come up.
• Make your website easy to operate.
• Keep your pages consistent.
3

4. DO: UNDERSTAND WHY YOU HAVE A
WEBSITE
• Add Facebook and Twitter buttons.
• These are other areas where visitors can connect with you,
let them know about these.
• Focus on what’s important.
• Talk about what is important to your business’ clients.
• Don’t put something irrelevant on your website just because
you think you have to have it.
4

5. DO: HAVE A THEME
• Choose the right color scheme.
• Choose color schemes that are represented in your logo or are
complimentary to your logo.
• Keep the same color scheme consistent across all marketing
materials, including your website.
• Make it easy to scan your pages.
• Highlight the important information on your website.
• Remember people read websites like everything else, from left
to right.
• Keep your website simple.
• Let the focus be on your content.
• Your content and message can get lost if your site is too busy.
• Focus on great content.
• Let your words speak for you. 5

6. DO: KEEP YOUR WEBSITE UPDATED
• Provide a search box.
• This allows people to easily search for what they are looking
for if you have a lot of content on your site.
• Update your pages with new information.
• This shows people that your website is a priority and you are
still in business.
• Choose the right fonts and sizes.
• Make your pages visually appealing.
6

7. DO: HAVE WEBSITE INTEGRITY
• Make sure your pages look good on PCs and mobile
devices.
• Including all browsers
• Check for broken links and missing images.
• Design your pages on paper first.
• Use page titles that make sense and tell the visitor what
page they are on.
• Set goals with your website.
• What do you want your website to accomplish:
• Get new customers?
• Get current customers to spend more?
• Be seen as a resource in your field?
• Steal ideas from your competitors.
• Look at your competitors websites and take the elements you
like and incorporate them into your site.
• Works great for competitors in other areas
7

8. DON’T:
WHAT YOU SHOULD NOT DO FOR AN E F F ECT IVE WE B S I T E
8

9. DON’T: DO IT ALL
• Just place boxes everywhere.
• Keep to a theme on your pages.
• Try to please everyone.
• Decide how you want your site to look and work towards
that goal.
• Overdo it with 20 different colors.
• Use bright colors sparingly.
• Too busy and people will just click off your site.
9

10. DON’T: JUST WRITE CONTENT
• Write one long paragraph per page.
• Remember your grammar rules.
• Break up text to give readers a visual break.
• Go on and on about nothing.
• Write on topic and keep it short and sweet.
• Stuff your pages full of keywords.
• Write naturally about your topics and your keywords will
naturally work into your content.
• Don’t force keywords into your content
10

11. DON’T: MAKE IT HARD TO USE YOUR
SITE
• Make your visitors search to find something.
• Have a user-friendly layout to make it easy for visitors to find
what they are looking for on your site.
• Put only images on your pages.
• Make sure each page has text on it.
• Pages of just images are hard for the visitor to process.
• The search engine spiders can not index images.
• Have 5 different fonts in 10 different sizes.
• Most websites should only have 2 fonts and at most 4-5 font
sizes used in them.
• Move options around from page to page.
• Keep consistency across all pages on your site.
• Use more than 2 levels of navigation.
• Visitors will have a hard time using more than 2 levels of
navigation.
• The search engine spiders have a hard time indexing more
than 2 levels of navigation. 11

12. DON’T: OVERWHELM VISITORS
• Dismiss feedback and refuse to change your design.
• Your visitors are great user testers, listen to what they have to
say about your website and make changes as necessary.
• Use splash pages to enter your site.
• A splash page to give information before your full site is ready is
great, but don’t make visitors go through that extra step to get
into your site.
• Have video or sound that automatically plays.
• Studies have shown that sound that plays when you
automatically enter a site will cause most visitors to simply click
off your site.
• Flood your page’s sidebars with too many widgets.
• Sidebars are a great way to share information, just don’t
overload them.
• Cram more into a space than what can fit comfortably.
• Use font size and spacing that makes your content easy to
read, don’t shrink fonts or remove spacing to get content to fit.
12

13. DON’T: CREATE A SITE THAT ISN’T USER
FRIENDLY
• Make people think.
• If people have to think about how to get around on your
site, they will simply click off the site.
• Just create content for search engines.
• Create content for your site and visitors, not search engines.
• Use blinking or flashing text.
• This can be distracting to your visitors and take away from
your content.
• Force visitors to download a new browser or special
plug-in to see your site.
• If it’s too much work to see your site, visitors will just go to
another site.
13