10 Rules When Making A Website

1. Make it professional. It’s been a long myth that you can get just as good of a website for free as you can for paid. Well, in reality, the first step in making it professional is investing is your own website domain. This makes it professional and yours, and not look like something a high school kid created. This also makes it easier to find. Compare www.(first name)(last name).com opposed to (first name)(last name).(weebly pr words press).com. The first is much shorter and easier to find and will also come up on top of search results. The other is harder to remember, longer, and often will not show up within the first 10 pages of search results. Your website means nothing if your audience can’t find you. 
2. Keep it simple. Don’t load your landing page with every detail of your life and pages upon pages of information. Make it clean and easy to navigate. Utilize images in some places to help catch attention and direct your audience. If you have long articles or reviews put a quick tease on your landing page, but direct them to another page to read the whole thing to keep from cluttering up the landing page. 
3. Make contacting you easy. You don’t need all your personal information and phone number on there, but a simple contact form can go a long way. Make it clean and simple such as subject, name, and comments on it. Also, test it first to make sure it works correctly before putting it up on your website and just assuming you’ll get the messages. 
4. Navigation bar. Creating a navigation bar can really assist in making smooth transitions for your website visitors. Remember, they are like tourists entering your town for the first time and can get lost easily. Make sure there are plenty of ways they can find where they are going. 
5. Simple colors and fonts. Keep things simple and consistent. Choose no more than three fonts and don’t mix them. Typically you’ll have a heading font, sub-heading font, and main text font. With colors choose a scheme of 2-3 to match your font. Make them easy to see and read. A page of all neon text of bright, hard on the eyes, and often overwhelming. 
6. Golden 250. Each page of your website should contain at least 250 characters to ensure good descriptions and examples. To little text with a lot of images can be confusing for your visitors and to much text, unless it’s specifically a blog, can be overwhelming. 
7. Marketing. Make sure you have a good marketing plan weather it is paid such as Google AdWords or organic growth from social media connections. Plan your growth and set targets. If you’re not hitting them, then refresh your plan. 
8. Mobile friendly. In this day and age most people do things over their mobile device or tablet. This makes it extra important that our websites are mobile friendly. When setting up a website check reviews or similar sites to see if this site will be compatible. If you’re using a place that helps you create your own webpage, remember that not all of them are mobile friendly. 
9. Social Media Links. Link it. All of it. This is the age everyone is connected so letting people add you and follow you easily on social media will make networking and growing your following easier. 
10. Reviews. People listen more to reviews than anything else when trying to make a decision. Put your business reviews on your website. Don’t let them either. People will figure this out and it will reflect poorly on you.