Criteria Of A Good Website

As an owner's tool to promote his trade, one  has to view a website from the owner's perspective. To start with, a website can only reach its full potential when it is easily searchable worldwide. Next it should readily impress on visitors with a good informative and factual presentation leading to a sale pitch.  

A good website contains common criteria applicable across the spectrum plus special ingredients peculiar to a certain type of website. For instance, a fashion house may need to deploy advanced graphic and animation coupled with audio/video capabilities to fully 3Ds the sleek and glamourous aspects of every piece of work. Others, still photos equally suffice to illustrate the dynamic of the company's workplace and products. The common ones should consist of the followings:

1. Presentation :  Images do play an important role, however  it is the supreme combination of percise text content, graphic and visual illustration which form into one excellence disposition. Factual description is positively preferred  than superfluous style statement. Avoid anything lengthy but it must have depth, enough to impress/convince viewers of your sincere commitment.

2. Top-Level Attention :  Since your web-maker is going to do the writing, he or she must be experienced in business presentation preferably for high calibre business organisations. Even then and unless he has experience in your line of business, he will not have the real feel. He needs top management guidance. As head of business, you are the most appropriate person to give that first outline, followed by review and refinement. The website is afterall another corporate and/or marketing showcase. It is there for all the v.i.p to view until you pull it down at an undetermined point in time in the future. Your involvement will be a time well spent. 

3. Error-Free Website :  As in any presentation, your text should be free of any grammatical and typing errors. Every webpage, hyperlink and thumbnail may be clicked open without fail. It is the sole responsibility of your web-maker to ensure so.

4. Essential Form Fields :  Your website must have the following form fields::
   1) A Clock Counter  which records the number of visitors who click open your website..
   2) A Guest Book/Leave Message Form  which allows each visitor to leave behind messages and his address.
   3) A Catalog Order Form  allows visitors to request give-away catalog/brochure or other information on your products.
   A few websites require visitors to fill in a membership form before a catalog request may be granted. In our oponion, unless it is clearly relevant and beneficial to the conduct of your business, such measure may in fact deter would-be-enquirers from proceeding to make contact with your esteem organization. 

5. Zero-Down-Time :  As different parts of the world operate in different time zone, it is imperative that your website must be on and accessable non-stop 24-hour a day throughout the year. It is afterall the distinct advantage of the internet media's capability to do so. Targeting zero-down-time for a website is certainly not difficult to achieve. It is merely a question of choosing a reliable computer hosting company. We shall discuss this issue in more detail at point 7 of the next page.

6. Readily/Easily Searchable : Having passed through your vigorous scrutiny, the website is finally finished. Your web-maker has also up-loaded it to the computer of your designated hosting company. Both you and your web-maker may access it and it is error free. But your prospective visitors may not access it yet as they do not have the exact internet address (called domain or sub-domain name) of your website. Unless of course you e-mail them one by one informing them of  the new website. The established mechanism in the www is to have each individual website's address listed in the directory of  major seach engines like Yahoo, Altavista, Excite, etc. Interested parties use major search engines and type in relevant key-words to search. For more details, please turn to page on Search Engine Directory.

In summary, a good website must be easily searchable, accessible non-stop around the clock. Its presentation must impress prospective customers to the point that they may be persuaded to contact you through e-mail or leave messages in the guest book.

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