Most small business websites suck. There's no getting around it. Whether it's due to a lack of budget, lack of taste, or too much faith in an incompetent development team (your business partner's nephew, perhaps?), most small business websites leave a lot to be desired.
Here's a quick checklist of some simple (and a couple of not-so-simple) points to help you evaluate your website and hopefully avoid some of the pitfalls.
A Healthy URL
Check you URL. That's your website's address. It might seem pretty simple, but here are some things to make sure you're doing right:
Both YourDomain.com and www.YourDomain.com Must Work
Check that both www.YourDomain.com and simply YourDomain.com both take you to the same place. Since your users could easily attempt to access the site using either, setting this correctly is something that cannot be overlooked. If you find that they're not, have your technical people investigate the issue. It could be a DNS issue or a problem with the way your server is configured.
For extra credit, you should have one redirect to the other. I recommend having www.YourDomain.com redirect to YourDomain.com. The reasons are simple. The www is totally redundant. It's also the most stupid "abbreviation" in history, as it actually takes three times longer to say than what it is "short" for: world wide web.
The important thing is to ensure your site can be accessed regardless of whether or not the user types in the www.
Keep URLs Simple
Ensure that your URL is as simple as possible. Your website's domain name might not be as simple as you want (yeah, sports.com is taken. Sorry!), but that doesn't mean you need to make it worse.
Go to your homepage and look at the address in your browser. Click a few links and keep an eye on the address. Ideally, you'll see URLs in the address bar along the lines of "http://YourDomain.com/" and "http://YourDomain.com/about/". Those are fine.
What you want to avoid are addresses like "http://YourDomain.com/web/public/content/default.htm?pageID=342". Convoluted addresses like this can cause a host of problems and are best avoided if at all possible.
Check Your Home Links
Make sure your links from within your website that take the user back to the homepage are properly set up. These links should go to the website's root (i.e. YourDomain.com) not something like YourDomain.com/default.htm or YourDomain.com/index.php.
Effective Page Titles
Each page on your website should have a title. The title is the text that gets displayed at the very top of your web browser's window, or the text displayed in the browser's tabs (if the browser supports tabbed browsing). They're critically important for a variety of reasons, so make sure each page has one and that it is descriptive of the content that appears on the page.
Descriptive Link Text
The links that appear in your website should contain text that is descriptive of what's being linked to. Avoid using "To find out more about us, click here" and instead use something like "Find out more about us". In fact, just remove the phrase "click here" from your vocabulary. There's almost always a better phrase to use in your link text.
A good test is to see if you could tell where the link will take you even if you read it out of context. "Click here" is meaningless. "About us" is much clearer.
Spelling and Grammar and Broken Links
Don't forget about the basic housekeeping in your rush to get the site deployed. Check every page for spelling and grammar errors. While you're at it, you should also check to ensure that all of the links on the website are working properly.
Traffic Analysis
Your website should be set up with traffic analysis capabilities. Google Analytics provides this capability free of charge and is adequate for the needs of most small businesses. Whatever software you use, you should familiarize yourself with the system and keep track of the number of visits, visitor loyalty, traffic sources, and similar important metrics.
Technical Malarkey
The following may be a little technical, but it's critically important that business owners and managers are on top of these details. You can't always guarantee that your development team will be.
Semantic Markup
Your website should make appropriate use of HTML best practices. For example, headings should be defined as headings in the page's source code instead of just being text that happens to be bold and big. Bulleted lists should be defined as lists. Doing so gives the code more meaning and greatly aids in search engine optimization and accessibility.
Accessibility
Accessibility is often overlooked by small businesses. Don't! It's important. Not all your website's users will be accessing your website sitting behind a desktop computer and using a mouse.
Your website must work regardless of what kind of device or assistive technology is used. Whether it's someone on a mobile device, a visually impaired person using screen-reader software, or a search engine robot attempting to index your site, the website should allow the user to access its content.
While this is very technical and will require trained eyes to ensure proper accessibility, you can get a rough idea of where you stand by using a tool such as CynthiaSays.
XML Sitemaps
Google, Bing, and other search engines allow you to submit every page on your website to them in one fell swoop. To do so, you'll need an XML sitemap. This intimidating sounding thing is simply a file that lists every page on your site in a certain specific format. Simply put: it's the easiest way to ensure the search engines know about the content on your site.
You'll need a little technical expertise to write one by hand. If you don't feel up to it, there are myriad sites which will automatically create one for you.
But what do you think?
So there you have it. If you passed all of the above points, you're way ahead of the majority of your competitors. While the list of points above is by no means exhaustive, it places your website on a very strong foundation for success.
Got some items you think I should have added or some other opinion on the matter? Sound off in the comments below!
Posted on
Tuesday, March 10, 2009 11:00 AM