Triquetra Design

Archive for the ‘Webmaster Do's & Don'ts’ Category

In this day and age there are lots of readily available tools to help us avoid obvious mistakes in website content. Whether you write your articles in something like MS Word™ or directly into Dreamweaver™ you should always use the spellchecker.

But don’t stop there. Spellcheckers are a valuable tool but they are not foolproof. Take the following sentence:

“My girlfreind is a widget.”

Your spellchecker will correctly identify “girlfreind” as being misspelt. What it will not do is identify the typo “widget” which should have been midget. Widget is a perfectly valid word and will be ignored when spellchecking.

There’s no excuse nowadays for misspelling words but unless you proofread everything you write you will end up making silly mistakes and that does not look professional. Proofread, slowly and out loud. That way you will usually pick up on any mistakes.

Just as an aside, for those of you who copy text from somewhere else to use (which is an SEO no-no anyway but many do it – particularly for product descriptions), don’t assume that it is error free. Proofread it yourself.

What is a splash page? Well, basically it’s a page that sits between your visitor and your website. Typically it is graced by an “Enter” button. When a visitor comes to your website they have come for a reason. They want to see the content that interested them in the first place. They do not want to be held up while your splash page loads.

This is even more important if your splash page has a pretty, pretty flash intro. Some 40% of website visitors still use dial-up. It’s wrong to assume that everyone has access to high-speed Internet connections. So for many of your visitors you are not only putting a barrier between them and your website but you are expecting them to wait while your masterpiece loads. They won’t. They will go elsewhere. Always remember that there is an alternative to your website and with today’s search engines they’re easy to find.

About the only time you should ever use a splash page is if you are going to present your visitor with unique and USEFUL information prior to entering your website. And that doesn’t mean an “in your face” ad.

Remember, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.