The best design and navigation in the world is worthless if it requires a specific browser or application to run it, or if it generates errors at any point while visitors are on the site.

1.    Does any page on your site take more than four seconds to load?

Four seconds is a long time when you’re trying to just get to some information.  Imagine it taking four seconds for you to flip the page in a book.  Reading it wouldn’t be any fun.  Your website is no different.  Test it on fast and slow connections to see how everything loads.  Properly written code, limited scripting, proper use (not over use) of graphics and good hosting all contribute to the page load speed.  If any of your pages are taking this long to load then fix them.  People won’t complain about them, they will just leave and find somewhere else that has content that loads at a proper speed.

2.    Does your site force people do download plugins to work properly?

The only plugin that you should ever think about using on your website is Adobe Flash.  If users are required to download anything else then your site doesn’t work right.  People aren’t on your site to do anything but get information or buy things.  Stop making them do more work than is necessary to accomplish these tasks.

3.    Are you using Microsoft FrontPage or Word to create web pages?

If the answer to this is yes then you can skip the rest of this series and go to the part where we discuss complete redesigns and rebuilds.  FrontPage is fine for kids doing school projects.  It is not an acceptable tool to build professional websites.  FrontPage and Word violate a great number of standard web rules and put in absolutely huge amounts of code where none is needed.  This makes your pages extremely slow and frequently they don’t work on non IE browsers.  Again, if you are using FrontPage or Word then it’s time for a rebuild.  You will love some of the other tools that are out there and they’re no more difficult to use than what you are used to.

4.    Are you using any kind of content management system to manage your website?  If so, what?

Content management systems (CMS) are pieces of software that reside on the web server which help you manage the structure, navigation, design and content on your website.  If you are currently just uploading pages via FTP then odds are that you are not using a CMS.  You should be.  CMS have built in search engine friendly features and have the ability for you to drop in plug-ins and modules that extend and expand the function of your website with little or no coding.  They also allow full searches of your content by default and offer a host of features that make your content easy to manage and update.  The best part is that many of them are free (Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, DotNetNuke).  The days of editing your web pages in DreamWeaver, FrontPage, or other HTML editors are over.  This is a subject that there are thousands of articles about, but in this case not using a CMS is not good.

5.    Did you know what your website looks like in browsers other than Internet Explorer?

Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari all have sizable market shares and all display content differently and you should absolutely test your site in all of them.  If you have not and don’t want to install a bunch of browsers on your computer just go to http://browsershots.org/ and type in your URL.  It will display the site for you and let you see how it looks in multiple browsers.  Do not, however, assume that your visitors are coming to your site only on Internet Explorer.  A sampling of browser statistics from November 2009 is:

(Data from http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)

1. Design
2. Navigation
3. Technical Attributes
4. Content & Updates
5. Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

Next:  Content & Updates