Web Design Checklist Part1

Posted on: July 28, 2010 | Category: digital / web media | 14 Comments

Designing websites can be a long and complicated process. Dealing with clients, designing prototypes, coding, programming, and testing – there’s a lot to keep track of and a lot to make sure gets done.

I have made this checklist to make my life a whole lot easier. With lists of points covering multiple areas from content to usability to accessibility to standards, making sure it will be a lot less likely to overlook important parts of a site.

If you choose to develop your own site, or even if you are planning to hire a web designer, here is a web site design checklist you can use to evaluate your options. Consider this checklist as a jumping off point for creating your own customized list, based on your own needs.

Logo

Your logo is not just a pretty image. It is a chance to leave a lasting branded impression of your business. Having a quality logo is critical to branding and site recognition. Also you should place your logo on the top left with a link to your home page.

(Top)Banner/Slogan

A banner adds a graphical or even textual element in which you can emphasize the purpose or merely the name of your website.

Title tag and META-tags of each Web Page

Each page title should be unique and keyword rich so that the search engines can quickly understand and classify the content of the current page.

Meta description and keyword tags aren’t as important for SEO (at least for the major search engines anyway), but it’s still a good idea to include them. Change the description on each page to make it relate to that page’s content, because this is often what Google displays in its search result description.

Favicon

A favicon brands the tab or window in which your website is open in the user’s browser. It is also saved with the bookmark so that users can easily identify pages from your website.

Navigation Menu

Have a clearly defined navigation menu on each page that allows a user to get to any major section on your website. Your navigation infrastructure should not change from page to page. Try to be consistent with what most web sites are doing with site navigation.

If your potential customers get confused trying to navigate your site they will usually show you their confusion by leaving your site. You should consider repeating your primary links at the bottom of each of your web pages – also known as a text footer. The text footer becomes doubly important if your upper page navigation uses javascript or images and the visitor has javascript disabled on their computer system.

Also include a site map, for your visitors and for ease of indexing for the search engine robots.

Links to other sites

Have a links page to other relevant sites. Exchange links with other people in your industry. This is great for SEO purposes.

Contact information

If you’re not afraid of giving away personal information, put your phone number, email address or a link to a contact form at the bottom of each page or in your site-navigation.

Images

Make sure to optimize your images so they are compressed to a minimum file size so that they enjoy a quick loading. Images on your website should be under 10-25kb. A good image optimization program can reduce the size of most images to acceptable size. Extremely large images can be sliced into multiple pieces which also helps.

Remember to specify height and width attributes in your images because this will allow your images to load much more quickly and efficiently because the browser now knows how much space to leave for each image. For search engine optimization purposes, make sure to specify a name for the image in the alt tag, this provides a description for search engines indexing your site.

Web Page Content

Make sure you offer help or information. If people have questions, put up answers to frequently asked questions (FAQ’s) and make sure you answer them, or your competitors will. Web page content should inspire action; to click, or subscribe, or join, or buy. Just putting text on a page is not going to produce a sale.

It’s important to consider the flow of data within your web site. If you are building a site loaded with tons of content (ie. lots of pages) then you have to chunk up your site – divide the long streams of data into what are called bite-sized chunks or sections that will become categories (or “main links” within your site).

*Update – thanks to Vincent van der Horst, see comments*

a FAQ has enormous SEO opportunities. without any hazard to “boring” content you can explain (over and over again) what your site is all about.

Under construction pages

If your content is not ready then don’t put it online. People don’t bookmark unfinished pages to come back later… they just leave your site and don’t return.

Inconsistent layout

Maintain visual consistency to make your visitors comfortable throughout their visit.

Spelling and html mistakes

If your website does not look professional, and contains spelling, grammar or html mistakes, people will extrapolate and conclude that you are sloppy with your business.

Frames!

Search engines don’t index frames well. Don’t use them except, perhaps, for inside content areas that you don’t want found in the search engines.

Long Download Time

If you think they will wait.. they won’t! Second of all, speed is one of the factors that is very important for a good SEO.

Dead Links

Don’t just assume all your links work. Click on them. You may often forget to add “http://” to links to external websites. Poor navigation, and dead links all drive traffic away from a site

Conclusions

Developing a web presence or web-based services is not an ad-hoc activity, but needs careful planning and good project management. I have tried to share with you my list that I used for the (re)design of my online portfolio and my (ongoing) redesign of my corporate website.

Next week I’ll publish Part 2 of this serie. If you have any questions or remarks, please write them down in the comment-section.

 

{This article contains : 1070 words}

 

 

 

More Posts about this Topic:

• Web Design Checklist Part 2 → August 4, 2010
• How to set Goals for your next Website → June 29, 2010
• Things-To-Do Before Publishing Your Site → June 1, 2010
• How to Design a Fast Uploading Website → February 20, 2010
• Why Quality Web Design is Expensive? → November 12, 2009

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14 Gorgeous Responses,
to this article: “Web Design Checklist Part1”

1. Melle ~ Jul 29, 2010:

   Consistentie zou ik zelf voorop zetten gevolgd door een heldere sitenavigatie en een korte download tijd.

   Het optimaliseeren van (achtergrond)afbeeldingen zou ik graag willen onderstrepen! CSS Sprites en andere technieken zorgen ervoor dat je met een achtergrondafbeelding meerdere elementen van een mooie achtergrond kan voorzien. Normaal zou je daarvoor bijvoorbeeld vijf losse afbeeldinkjes voor gebruiken, terwijl het vaak ook in een afbeelding kan.

   ~M
   Melle´s last blog ..Visitekaartjes zijn gearriveerd!

2. gonzo ~ Jul 29, 2010:

   Hoi Melle,

   bedankt voor je goede en constructieve opmerkingen. Consistentie is inderdaad (in alles) waarschijnlijk nr.1, zonder consistentie wordt alles een grote puinzooi ;-P

   De navigatie en een snelle site zijn zaken die voor de gebruikersvriendelijkheid en ook o.a. voor SEO van belang zijn, op dat vlak heb je gelijk dat deze de prio’s zouden moeten zijn bij het maken van een (nieuwe) site.

   CSS Sprites zijn nog niet helemaal ingeburgerd in webdesign, ikzelf moet ook heel eerlijk toegeven dat ik deze nog nooit toegepast heb (schande ;-P), maar het optimaliseren van je afbeeldingen is goed voor een snellere upload-time van je site.

   Maar, ik heb geprobeerd om met dit artikel (en strax ook in deel 2) de belangrijkste algemene punten neer te zetten waarbij op gelet moet worden als je een (nieuwe) site maakt, waarbij ik geen volgorde heb gemaakt in prioriteit.

   Maar nogmaals bedankt voor je goede feedback, Cheers & Ciao …
   Twitter ID: gonzodesign_

3. Vincent ~ Jul 31, 2010:

   Hey Jan,
   I have some (advocate of the devil) remarks to your furthermore great checklist.

   1: Why doesn’t Gonzoblog have a cool favicon?

   2: “Teh” search engine is indexing the Title-attribute for images, right?

   3: in “Webpage content” you mention the FAQ. I miss the fact that a FAQ has enormous SEO opportunities. without any hazard to “boring” content you can explain (over and over again) what your site is all about.

   4: HTML mistakes. You might want to point to: http://validator.w3.org/
   And please(!) don’t forget to mention to NOT put the W3C XHTML 1.0 “logo” on the site ;)

   5: Frames? Does your computer run on coal?;) If you want search engines to not index your content; consider a robots.txt, or .htaccess, or (most save) not putting it online all together…

   cheers, Vincent.
   Twitter ID: cry_design

4. Melle ~ Jul 31, 2010:

   Thank you too! Mee eens, de belangrijkste punten.

   Ik ben benieuwd naar deel 2!

   ~M
   Melle´s last blog ..Caption over Afbeelding zonder javascript

5. gonzo ~ Aug 1, 2010:

   Hi Vincent,

   haha, how are you doing? Long time no see, bro! Cheers for your great comments, much appreciated!

   First of all, thanks for the reminder of my favicon ;-P, I also saw that my favicon is only ‘live’ on the indexpage of the gonzoblog.nl – the rest of the pages the favicon is missing!

   I don’t understand what you mean with your second point, but in general tagging your images will help your SEO – or did I make a ‘typo’ somewhere?

   Including a FAQ-section or page is a very good way to help your SEO, you’re completely right about that – I will make an update in the text of this article, cause it’s a brilliant way to score better in the SE’s (search engines)

   The W3C-Validators (both HTML and CSS) are great – and free – tools to check the validation of your site, I have mentioned this already more times in previous post here, but I’ll update this post with a link to both validators, cheers for the remark.

   Only I really don’t know why you should NOT include the W3C-logo on your site? Although in the (ongoing) redesign of my corporate site I ditched the logo ;-P

   Frames are thingies from the 90-ties (yes, when you needed coal to run your computer ;-P), I never used them myself! But I still find a lot of websites that still use frames (also iFrames), this is a complete SEO-suicide for your website! You are completely right when you want to exclude content from your website (if you really feel the urge to do so) to rewrite your robot.txt or altering your .htaccess-file

   But once again, thanks for your great remarks, you ‘advocate of the devil’;-P

   Cheers & Ciao mate …
   Twitter ID: gonzodesign_

6. gonzo ~ Aug 1, 2010:

   Hi Melle,

   The second part is scheduled for this wednesday .. hope nothing will come in between on my holidays?

   Second part is more ‘technical’: cross-browser validation, javascript, sitemaps, analytics and more …

   Hope you’ll find these handy too??

   Thanks again for your comment, Cheers & Ciao ..
   Twitter ID: gonzodesign_

7. vincent van der horst ~ Aug 1, 2010:

   Hey Jan,
   What I ment was that you should use the title-attribute instead of the alt. Or rather use them both ;)
   Twitter ID: cry_design

8. gonzo ~ Aug 1, 2010:

   Hoi Vincent,

   Okay, that was you meant ..

   Alt text is meant to be an ALTernative information source for those people who have chosen to disable images in their browsers and those user agents that are simply unable to ’see’ the images.

   Image title should provide additional information. In FireFox and Opera it pops up when you hover over an image.

   So both tags are primarily meant for your visitors, though alt tags seems more important for crawlers / spiders – SEO!

   I myself use the alt for images and the title for text-links, having the best of both worlds?

   If you want to use both tags, please look out; include your main keywords in both of them but keep them different. Keyword stuffing in Alt text and Title is still keyword stuffing, so keep them relevant and meaningful.

   I hope I answered your question? Once again thanks for your comment and constructive remarks! Cheers & Ciao, my dear friend!

   BTW: let’s go out for a beer together, I’m interested to hear how you’re doing!?
   Twitter ID: gonzodesign_

9. Cabinet Knobs ~ Aug 20, 2010:

   Great post. Thanks. This needs to be dugg.

10. gonzo ~ Aug 20, 2010:

    Hi Cabinet Knobs,

    thanks for the compliment, you just made my day! And thanks for the digg, .. more exposure never hurted anyone ;-P

    Cheers & Ciao ..
    Twitter ID: gonzodesign_

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