Here is my short list of best practices that all website designers and website owners should consider while their site is under design. If you website is already up you may want to consider any items that you don’t have covered in your next website update.
1. Include a privacy and legal policy. In today’s world, you need to make sure that you have yourself covered. If you are marketing to prospects and clients using email you must have a privacy policy in place. If you are doing pay per click advertising, Google will be looking to see if you have a link to your privacy policy on your landing page. Having one may even improve your quality score with Google AdWords.
2. Consider having your navigation be text based. Don’t hide your navigation in JavaScripted rollovers. Search engine spiders cannot read JavaScript. If you feel you absolutely must have this design element, provide alternative text navigation at the bottom of your page. Consider instead styled text using cascading style sheets to give many of the same effects but with the benefit of search engine readability.
3. We’re seeing a lot of activity in social bookmarking right now. It is a smart idea to add this to your new website as I feel that this interaction with readers will eventually improve traffic to your website and may even be a factor in the future for organic placement.
4. Make sure your website is feed enabled. That means that if you have a blog, install in the head tags the link to allow IE 7 and Firefox to autosense your blogs feed.
5. Make sure to include a site map in the footer links of your website or on your sidebar. Most sites over 10 pages will benefit from this. Arrange your site map by topic or mimic your site architecture. The links on your site map can even be to specific paragraphs on your pages using anchors. Don’t just list your pages. For example if your About page contains team information and your services, in your site map have a separate link to each paragraph. Your web master will know how to do this using links and anchor tags.
6. Consider providing links to important content in your footer. When someone is at the bottom of the page by having navigation right there, you make it easy for people to work their way around. At the very minimum provide a link back to the top of the page so they can access your navigation quickly.