Make your website worth a click for user

Updated on 04 March 2006.

To make users visit on your website, there are many factors that affect. First of all your website should be user friendly with proper navigation. Second factor which is most important is download speed of your website. No matter how attractive your site may be, if visitors go away just because they don’t want to keep waiting forever for it to finish downloading, you have wasted all your time and effort. You need to monitor your site carefully and control factors that slow down your website.

Keep the following things in mind:

• Keep your web page small. Divide your content into several pages. The page should not exceed more than three scrolls in length. To estimate the ideal length, just press ‘Page Down’ three times on the keyboard.
  
• If you know html, using the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes of the IMG tag can help your page load faster on some browsers. It will behave as a placeholder, in which the image will appear positioned in the appropriate area, and text will be organized accordingly.
  
• Reduce the number of boxes, which you make with one click on the HTML editor software. Designers call this “tables’. Use less table tags. Second, since browsers don’t show you a page until the tables’ load completely, making small table (boxes) can also enhance page download.
  
• HTML editors can also help you remove unnecessary tags from your html files. For example, dreamweaver has the cleanup HTML’ option, which can search your page and delete unwanted tags.

Give visitors a choice: Sometimes you can’t avoid using big images, even if these are heavy to download. So let visitors to your site choose what is important to them. For example, if you want users to see a big image, called a thumbnail, on the web page and write “click here to view larger picture” below it. The larger image can then open in a separate window on clicking on the thumbnail.

If you aren’t sure about the type of technology available to your target audience, and you want to present a certain part of your site enabled by certain software --for example, Macromedia Flash – you should ideally design two home pages, one in HTML and one in Macromedia Flash. That will offer the user a choice between two links in the homepage itself, one for the html page and one for the Macromedia Flash page.

Avoid using application files: Another way to reduce load time is to remove any java applications that may be embedded in your homepage. Java applets definitely takes time to download.

Third party links on your website: If you enter into a link program with another site, links on your site will display banners or advertisements of customers of your partner site. These links can slow down your site considerably because the server speed of the partner site can affect your site. You can display third party links at the bottom of the webpage, so that browser loads your content first.

Construct your site with download times in mind if you want visitors to keep coming back to it. And because Web Designing is an ongoing process monitor it wisely and continuously.

The article is written by Rakesh Sidana. He is a senior member of DOW. His articles on web technologies have been published in leading magazine in India. He contributes his aricles to DesignOweb website for visitors.