Make Your Site User Friendly

Keeping your site user friendly is important. You don't want people to wait and download to all the neat graphics you want to show them, keep the images to a minimum.

Remember: Not all people have fast modems and great browsers. You lose potential customers who have old browsers and slow modems. So keep it professional looking without over doing it.

Text

Use dark colors that are easy to read and pleasing to the eye. We recommend good old black text on a white background. It has been shown that black text on a white background is the best way to go.

GIF or JPEG?

Backgrounds

Keep your backgrounds simple because your background will load after your text does, which means viewers will be looking at a white background until your background loads. Fancy backgrounds have some people waiting for a long time.

We recommend going with a plain white background because certain Internet service providers like America Online do not have direct connections to the Internet, which means that their backgrounds will look terrible even if they look great through a direct internet provider like AT&T. So avoid fancy backgrounds.

Frames

Frames look very good and make web sites easy to navigate, but try avoiding making your homepage using frames. You will encounter problems with some search engines when registering your web site with them.

Graphics/Pictures

You do want some pictures on your web site if you are selling a product. Pictures can show your customers the product that you want them to buy. Pictures are truly worth a thousand words on the web. Do you really think that a person would buy a product if they didn't know what it looked like? Don't go over board with pictures but just enough so a person can get an idea of what you're selling.

A good thing to do is have a page just for pictures. You can write at the top of the page that this page may take some time to load but it's worth it to see our product.

Be Consistent

Be consistent throughout your web site by keeping all the colors and the "feel" of the web site the same throughout. This will allow the person to easily navigate your entire web site once they have visited your homepage.

Java/Animation

Yes Java and animation are neat, but even with today's fast modems most people still have to wait quite a bit before the animated graphics load into their browsers.

Tell Them to "Click Here"

Yes it's okay for you to put "click here" on links because so many new internet users are signing on each month. It's estimated that there will be 300 million users worldwide by the year 2000. So tell them to click here, or they might not know to click.