September 24, 2010 in Blog by Colombo Web Solutions

10 Tips To Improve Your Website Professional Look And Feel

Today I changed the template of my blog on Blogger Blogspot back to my old template design. That was because the new magazine look and feel templates I tried out last during the last 2 months though improved blog navigation and gave it a more conventional look or magazine website look and feel they weren’t increasing the traffic of the website and were making the website slower. On top my traffic actually decreased in this period so I reverted back to my old template for Planet Apex. But is the template design I’m now using in Planet Apex professional looking enough? You can decide it for yourself if you visit my Planet Apex blog.

This made me wonder what Makes A Website/blog Look Professional And Elegant?

That’s what I wanted to know when I searchecd this question a little while ago in the Internet. I thought the professional-ness of a website depended on the design alone. I was wrong. It’s much more than that.

According to this ezine article I found called “How To Improve The Professional Look And Feel Of Your Website” to improve the professional look and feel of a website you can do the following 10 things. I’m posting the excerpt of the 10 points listed in that article on Colombo web solutions website. Now this is a list you definitely have to work on…

1. Make a ‘favicon.ico’ file if you don’t have one.
Look down at your computer’s task bar, you should see a version of a favicon of the programs on your computer. These are small ’16×16′ icons or symbols for your site or product. All major sites have them.

2. Make a logo. Or have someone design it for you. Nothing says professional than a cool looking logo! A really good one will brand your site in the minds of your visitors.
Have this logo on all your web pages.

3. Make a Sitemap for your site. Extremely important, make sure you have a sitemap for your website. Place all the links (if possible) to your site on here. It will unify your site
and be of tremendous benefit to your visitors. It’s a common courtesy you cannot, must not ignore. Ideally, you should have a link to your sitemap on all your web pages.

4. Redirect Page. Create a redirect or error page if your web host doesn’t provide one. This is a catch-all page for the ’404 Not Found File’ that pops up. It will make your site more professional; plus, you won’t lose all those hard fought for visitors. Make sure your Redirect Page has a link to your Sitemap. If you have a blogging software like wordpress you can automate the sitemap to automatically update and add new webs page links as you add them to your website. You can see a example of wordpress site map in my Aksam Sri Lanka blog’s Google complient XML sitemap. For a conventionally designed or coded website or a blog in Google’s Blogger platform for that matter like my Planet Apex blog you will have to manually make a post with links to all your blog articles and posts and keep on updating them.

5. Start a Blog and RSS Feed for your site.

6. Doctor HTML. Check the html code and spelling of your
site.

7. Next check your site in all the browsers. You might be
surprised how your site looks in a different browser. Firefox browser is increasing it’s users, check your logs, see which browsers your visitors are using.

8. Spend a day or so, checking all your keywords. List down your site’s major keywords. The ones you’re targeting. Optimize for the search engines. Most of the traffic on the web come from search engines, so make sure your site is optimized for them. Make sure you have submitted your site to all of these engines.

9. Make sure you have a Bookmark link. Simple, but many websites don’t actively encourage visitors to bookmark their site. Have a bookmark logo or link on all the pages of your site. Remind your visitors to bookmark. It’s a great source of free traffic.

10. Jazz up your site! Try to find things that will make your site more interesting. Give your visitors a reason to visit your site other than the great content. Offer a free service, like the one the doctor uses above! Run a contest! Give away free stuff or extra bonuses if they visit your site. In whatever way you can, make your visitor feel special.

So these are the 10 Tips To Improve Your Website Professional Look And Feel. If you have any questions drop us a comment below.