A Guideline for Webmasters

If you are a new webmaster, you may be wondering about the kind of information that you should include on the website.  The truth of the matter is that there is no clear cut answer.  In fact, it can be difficult to disseminate the different information, so you will want to be sure that you understand the overall goals of the website before you begin construction.  Sitting down and making out a list of what you hope to accomplish with the website can be a tremendous help with the construction of the site.  Something to remember is that the website is an online representation of the company that it is representing, and as such you should try to focus on making the page clear and concise.

One of the first things that you will need to make sure that you accomplish is having an established set of links to every webpage that is online.  The largest way to do this is to make sure that you set up a navigation toolbar with all of the links clearly presented.  Something else that you can do is to provide a site map has a ink on every single page so that you can make sure that no matter where someone is on the website they are able to easily find their way around.  Easy navigation is an important aspect of every website as people tend to get frustrated if they cannot get around easily and will leave the site.  Do not clutter the site with links; try to make sure that you keep them at a reasonable number of less than one hundred per page.

Since navigation is so important, you will need to make sure that you periodically get online and check every single one of the links to ensure that it is not broken.  While there is no clear reason that this would happen, it frequently does.  This means that even if you set the site up right the first time you could run into problems later if links are dropped or broken.  That is why site maintenance is so important.

Also, remember that a good majority of your business is going to be based on web searches.  Because of this it is important that you convey as much information as you can through print instead of graphics and images.  So, even if you have pictures up, you should include a description of them to make sure that the search engines recognize them, thereby putting them into play.  This is a tight rope to walk because you do not want to cause too much clutter on the site, and bogging it down with excessive information can cause people to get discouraged and look elsewhere.

While separating out the information over several different web pages and hyper-linking them may seem like a complicated process, it is something that can help to make sure that your customers find all of the relevant information they are looking for on your site.  In the end it is something that is well worth the time because of this.

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