"The deadly dozen Part 9 - boost your business with these free hints and tips"

No. 9 Sounds Effects & Music

Sound effects and ‘lift music’ playing on a web site are a real turn off, most of us enjoy listening to some sort of music, but we like to choose the type we like.

We do not want to be subjected to someone else’s choice, as it may be far removed from our own.

We also visited the web site for a specific purpose, to read some information which requires us to concentrate on the task in hand not be distracted by someone else’s noise in our own home or office.

.....to be continued

"The deadly dozen Part 8 - boost your business with these free hints and tips"

No. 8 Pop Up Windows

Pop up windows should be used very sparingly, if at all.

Pop up windows do exactly what they say, they pop up and cover the content your visitor has come to see.

This can be very aggravating and we are trying very hard across all areas of your website not to aggravate and thus turn off and loose your valuable visitors and potential customers.

.....to be continued

"The deadly dozen Part 7 - boost your business with these free hints and tips"

No. 7 Font Styles

Font Styles are another key area to making the site easy to use and comfortable for your visitors.

There are many font choices now available to add to the confusion and decision making process, but the choices are really very simple and few.

Think about newspapers, magazines and books all are of a similar font type very often Times New Roman as this prints well, however it is not the ideal choice for use on websites.

Text is much fuzzier on a web page than on a printed page and Times New Roman is fuzzy on the web, this means it is more difficult for your visitors to read, they read more slowly and get frustrated more quickly, perhaps even leaving.

If you look at Image Connect’s site it is Verdana which is clear and easy to read even when zoomed in and out.

.....to be continued

"The deadly dozen Part 5 - boost your business with these free hints and tips"

No 5. Colour

Web pages with complicated colour schemes using too many bold bright colours are usually very off putting.

Three or four colours are more than enough; this provides a primary and secondary colour together with one or two highlight colours.

The colours are there to enhance the content of your site; they are not the main reason.

.....to be continued

"The deadly dozen, Part 4 - boost your business with these free hints and tips"

No 4. Size


Pages need to be a sensible size to avoid, where possible the need for horizontal scroll bars, there is nothing more frustrating when reading the page to have to keep flicking back and forward, obviously some people with very small screens may need to scroll, but catering for the majority of your customers and prospects is vitally important.

.....to be continued

"The deadly dozen, Part 3 - boost your business with these free hints and tips"

No3. Loading

The site must load quickly; nobody in today’s busy pressurised society is prepared to wait minutes to find out if this is even what they want or where they thought they wanted to be!

.....to be continued

"The deadly dozen, Part 2 - boost your business with these free hints and tips"

No2. - Navigation

You must have simple straight forward consistent navigation, horizontally or vertically on each page.

This allows your visitors easy access to all areas of your website.

If someone has to think about how to navigate your site, its simple they will not, they will go elsewhere to a site with simple, obvious navigation, not one where they have to play a guessing game to get around.

.....to be continued

"The deadly dozen, Part 1 - boost your business with these free hints and tips"

The Deadly Dozen

Over the next few weeks I will be looking at various points that must be taken into account on your web site. Ignore these at your peril....

No.1 - What’s in it for me?

This is the Key question that visitors want answered quickly.

You have a few seconds to hold visitors when they arrive at your site.

You need to answer this question in the top part of the page i.e. the first screen without needing to scroll down; it’s a bit like the headlines on the front page of the newspaper.

Do they grab your attention?

Yes, so you read on because you are interested, think you might learn something new or were thinking/talking about that very subject earlier, whatever the reason you are now hooked.

.....to be continued

Welcome from Image Connect

Welcome to Image Connect’s blog.

Firstly let me introduce myself, I am Vanessa, the author of this blog and owner of Image Connect.

Image Connect design websites and provide marketing support and printing services to a wide range of small businesses. So, in my blog I will be writing about web sites, marketing, PR and anything else I think will be useful to small businesses.

I hope you enjoy reading them, the first series – The Deadly Dozen will be about web sites.

Image Connect connects you with your customers.