One of those quirky little things about this industry that I like so much is the fact that so often webmasters build sites or galleries to be viewed by millions of people but at the same time it is obvious that the site builder has no idea what the surfer is seeing.
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"I often have to review sites that require me to scroll off my desk, out the window, down the backyard and over the fence just to see what is on each page." |
You sit in front of your computer screen and the site sits there looking back at you. You have put so much time and effort into your site and spent so much time thinking about it and visualising it that often what you see on the screen before you is not what is actually looking back at you. Instead what you see is the perfect perception that you had of your site when you first started to build it.
Now that may sound fairly esoteric to you but it is an extremely important concept for you to understand. What you are seeing is the perfect marketing tool of your dreams but what the surfer may be seeing is something that could look more like a dog's dinner and be incapable of selling a life jacket to a drowning man.
Every webmaster who builds a site or a gallery is anxious to get it uploaded and submitted so that it can start earning money. New webmasters often want to get their new site uploaded and posted for review as soon as it is complete. However, for both experienced and new webmasters that is the precise time where it pays to actually stop and put your site away for at least a few hours before you do anything else.
You see, it is very easy for every webmaster, new and old, to make simple mistakes that they never notice because they keep seeing the perfect visualisation rather than the rough pixels that they have actually produced. By taking the time to step back from the site you are giving yourself a chance to see all those silly mistakes that can turn perfection into a dog's dinner.
The very first thing you need to do is to realise that not everyone is going to be looking at your site on the same monitor with the same screen resolution as you. Some won't even be using the same browser as you are. Have you even checked your site in those other browsers?
Internet Explorer is extremely forgiving when it comes to bad code. It can cope with tags that aren't closed and tables that are incomplete but just see how much of your page will display in Netscape if you miss closing just one tag. When you build a site it is vital that surfers can actually see it so make sure that your site can be seen in other browsers and if they cannot then don't submit your site till you have found the problem areas in your coding.
Here are some of the other things that keep seeing time and time again when I review sites that have been submitted to the link lists that my partner and I run:
You may be building your sites using a huge monitor with great resolution and so you build your site to fill the screen. Unfortunately slightly more than 50% of the world's surfers are still viewing the internet with a screen size of 800x600 and when they come to your site they find that they have to scroll a huge distance to the right to see what is there. Fortunately for them, the back button remains in place at all times in the top left hand corner of the screen and most surfers who are forced to scroll will much rather use the back button to take them back to a site that caters for their viewing preference.
This is a common mistake! I often have to review sites that require me to scroll off my desk, out the window, down the backyard and over the fence just to see what is on each page. Make sure you build for your surfer, not for you.
The default setting for a link is blue, everyone knows that and everyone can see that when the link is sitting on a white background. Black is a popular background color for adult websites and of course we all know that blue writing on a black background is almost invisible. Well I'm sure everyone would if they stopped to think about it but unfortunately many don't. They don't even notice it when it is sitting on the screen in front of them.
When you build your sites make sure that you use colors for the text and links that contrast with the background colors. If they don't contrast then the surfer is not going to see them and your great marketing text will be wasted.
Make sure that your sponsor links really do point to your sponsor. Now you may think that is so simple it really doesn't need to be said but you might be amazed at how many people get their links messed up. When I check these I often end up with a 404 because a simple coding error is trying to send me back to the webmaster's hard drive.
You should also make sure that you have your sponsor codes correct. You will often find sponsors who provide linking codes that include a group of XX's. The instructions are always there for the webmaster to change that row of XX's to their individual tracking code so that they may be identified by the sponsors software.
At some time or another, people forget to alter the link so that it includes their sponsor code. Some do it every now and then while others seem to do it so often you begin to wonder if they are ever going to make any money.
A nasty red X where an image of a beautiful naked woman should be is not going to turn the surfer on or encourage sales and it sure won't get you listed anywhere. Make sure that the paths to your images point to those images on your server – not back to the C drive on your computer.
Again, it is a mistake that everyone makes but some seem to make it more frequently than others.
Trust me, I'm not an English teacher but I can assure you that spelling is very important. Many WSIWYG editors these days include a spellchecker, be sure to use it unless you are purposely trying to attract some typo traffic.
There is nothing that makes a page look crappy than poor spelling. It sends the wrong sort of message to someone that you should really be trying to impress and sell something to.
There is a time and place for just about any color combination but the internet is not necessarily the place for all of them – at once. Your background color should be just that, a color that sits in the background without jumping off the page and assaulting your eyes.
Colors that clash have a limited application on the Internet. If the surfer is confronted by colours that dazzle him he will bail out of your site well before he has taken the time to read your sponsor ads.
Give yourself time to step back from your site and then do a self-review. I'm sure that even if you have not made any of the mistakes I mentioned above you will still see some areas that need a little fine-tuning.
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