VERY often the avalanche of information that comes at us when we research things on the net is somewhat overwhelming, and the basic essentials get lost in an effort to process it all.

I thought this simple list of important DOs and DON’Ts might help to clear the air for businesses or individuals thinking about having a new website developed.

DOs…

1. Keep it simple — You do not want to bombard your prospect with wordy text or overlapping calls to action as this will confuse them, and confused visitors do not buy!

2. Make sure that you make it possible for your visitors to clearly see a path to contact you on the home page of your website. Don’t make them work for it.

3. Use easy-to-read fonts and colours — visually appealing and easy on the eyes.

4. Invest in having a professional and secure website. Most visitors will not pull out their credit cards if they feel they are going to lose money to cyber criminals, or worse yet — risk identity theft.

5. Aim for a minimum of 250 words per page — relevant text, and make sure to include keywords that you want for ranking purposes and ones that your customers will be searching for to find what you have on offer. One to three images with alt tags is an absolute minimum here as well.

6. Have a clean, well- organised navigation, and segment your information according to theme and relevance to your customers so they can easily find what they are looking for on your site.

7. Make sure to have professional keyword research done so that you have the right keywords to ensure that your website will show up in the search results for these terms.

8. Be sure to add social media widgets that link to your social network pages so that you can build your brand and get third-party validation and sharing in action.

9. Make testimonials visible on the home page. You can also use business reviews here. People want to see what other clients or customers have to say about your product or service. This is the best form of advertising.

10. Be sure that your website is built as a responsive one, that it looks right and is easy to navigate on all mobile devices. Click-to-call phone numbers are a must for mobile websites.

DON’Ts…

1. Do not have videos on auto play or music playing as soon as a visitor enters your site. This will cause people to hit the back button, increasing your bounce rate and decreasing your position in the search results.

2. Do not underestimate the power of simplicity. A confusing navigation is a huge turn-off.

3. Do not use a complex contact form; keep it really easy for people to get hold of you.

4. Don’t crowd the pages with irrelevant content as your customers will become confused and back out of the site. A big no-no!

5. Do not use multiple fonts and colours (this one I see used often); it looks unprofessional and cluttered and does not convert well to sales.

6. Do not make it confusing for visitors to find what they are looking for. If there is layered navigation, make sure the steps to take are clearly defined.

7. Don’t lose the social juice! If you link to your social pages, content is added often and this will make the search engines crawl your site more often, as well. Don’t miss this!

8. Almost 75 per cent of online customers trust third-party validation online. This is almost as powerful as a person-to-person referral. Do not leave out the testimonials.

9. Do not just throw together some keywords or build a site without regard to them. As I have mentioned before in previous articles, get inside the head of your client. What are they searching for? This is a very important step in the process.

10. Do not forget to test your site across multiple devices and multiple browsers. You want to be sure your first impression is a good one in every instance.

Once you build your website with these points in mind, you have the foundation for a website that will be seen and will convert to sales. So many websites are built with no thought to many of these points, much to the detriment of the website owners’ bottom line.

Melanie Phillibert is a web developer and Internet marketing consultant. A multiple-award-winning online marketer, she has studied Internet marketing and web design/development, SEO, PPC, Spcoa; media management and e-commerce development for the last 10 years. She can be contacted via e-mail at melanie@internetmarketingsynergies.com.