More people are going online more regularly to do business, so developing your company website is an increasingly important part of how you communicate your brand.

This is an area that is constantly changing; new technologies, improved internet access (now including smart phones) and the ever-evolving search engine environment mean there are always things to learn in the online arena.

Heard of “Web 2.0”, “HTML 5”, “Flash”, “Java”, or “CMS”? Don’t worry, despite the numerous technological changes there are some things that never change. As long as you’re dealing with someone competent in the technology of the day, there are some basic rules for developing a website you should always follow:

1. Know what you want.

Your website will only be as good as the brief you provide to a designer. If your brief is vague and confused, your website will be too. Be absolutely clear in your own mind why you want a website, what you want to achieve with it, who it’s aimed at, what you want visitors to think and feel about your business, how interactive you want it to be, and how many pages you want. 

2. There are no original ideas.

Research other sites.  Take a look at your competitor’s sites.  Pick sites at random from totally unrelated industries.  What appeals to you and why?  Who has some great ideas on their sites and what ideas would translate well onto yours? 

3. Work with the right person.

Use a designer you feel comfortable with.  Apologies in advance to my computer nerd friends, but although there are many skilled and talented web site designers out there, not all of them are great communicators. 

Find someone who fills you with confidence in terms of their technical ability, but talks to you in layman’s terms.  And the less you understand about the technical side of website design, the more important this rule is. 

4. Take professional photographs. 

I don’t care how much this is going to add to your budget, but if you rely on happy snaps taken on your mobile phone I promise you will live to regret it - even if you have the new iPhone with a 7 bazillion megapixel camera.

5. Death by Flash animation.

Unless there is an extremely good reason for using an introduction page with flash animation or graphics that take too long to download, avoid them like the plague. Simply put, they are annoying time wasters, usually highly pretentious and fly in the face of search engine optimisation (and that’s a whole separate article).  

6. Assume everyone is lazy.

One of the first (and most important) decisions is how your website will be structured. Make it easy to navigate.  Don’t let visitors get lost in your site, or have to work their way through several layers and sub-menus to find what they want. Because they won’t.

7. Think before committing to a daily blog.

If you set an expectation that your website will have regular updates, make sure there are. If you won’t have time, don’t commit to it. What’s more, there is absolutely no excuse for out of date content on a website, so make sure that someone in your business or organisation is given ‘ownership’ of the site and has the authority and ability to change content as required. 

A poorly-managed website which has obviously been neglected for the past six months or more will reflect poorly on your business.

8. Make it snappy.

If people have to scroll down forever to read your website pages, then there is too much content.  Cut it back and make it as easy as possible for people to see the content without having to overuse the scroll bar.

9. Keep it simple. 

Don’t overcrowd your website.  Keep it clean and easy to view.  There is a huge temptation to overload the home page in particular with everything you think visitors need to know about your business before they go any further.  If it looks like it needs to be on Ritalin, start again.

10. No music, please.

Don’t be tempted to use music or any other theme tune on your website.  Unless you happen to be selling a piece of music it’s usually irrelevant and always annoying, especially to everyone else in your office.

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