Middle Ear Media

Going The Extra Mile with a Website Design

October 22nd, 2009

There are many aspects to a pro­fes­sional web­site. There is the over­all design and lay­out, typog­ra­phy, graph­ics, images and hyper­links that are obvi­ous. How­ever, there are a many other things that can be done to add an extra touch of pro­fes­sion­al­ism to a site that may not be so obvi­ous at first glance. Here are a few that may not be absolutely crit­i­cal, but impor­tant none the less because they either aid in brand­ing, nav­i­ga­bil­ity, usabil­ity, or SEO.

1. Fav­i­cons


A Fav­i­con, short for favorites icon and also known as a short­cut icon and book­mark icon, is the lit­tle logo you see next to the address bar of your browser. They can also be seen in your favorites or book­marks sec­tion. They are great for strength­en­ing your brand and visu­ally sep­a­rat­ing a book­marked site from all the others.

It never ceases to amaze me how many “pro­fes­sional sites” lack a fav­i­con. After all, it’s not that hard to cre­ate one. Imple­men­ta­tion of a fav­i­con is super easy too. All you need to do is add a bit of code (which is a link to your fav­i­con image) to the head area of the page and make sure to upload your favicon.ico to the root direc­tory of your domain.

2. Ana­lyt­ics

Google is amass­ing a huge amount of awe­some and use­ful ser­vices, and one of the great­est is Google Ana­lyt­ics. Con­ve­niently inte­grated with Gmail, all you need is a Gmail account and access to a domain in order to use ana­lyt­ics. I’ve used many sta­tis­tics pro­grams in the past to keep track of traf­fic to var­i­ous sites, but none have had the depth and ease of use that Google Ana­lyt­ics offers.

To imple­ment, just copy and paste a bit of code into the footer of your page. That’s it! Now, sit back and wait for the traf­fic. The amount of info about your site and its traf­fic are stag­ger­ing. Unique Vis­its, Unique Vis­i­tors, Aver­age Time on Site, Bounce Rate, Unique Page Views, Pages per Visit, % New Vis­its, Traf­fic Sources and Viewed Con­tent, are only a few of the many dif­fer­ent things you can find out about. These are all dis­played in a vari­ety of easy to under­stand graphs, charts and lists. Also, giv­ing oth­ers access is as easy as typ­ing in their Gmail address.

3. XML Sitemap

XML Sitemaps are used by search engines in order to eas­ily nav­i­gate your entire site for index­ing pur­poses. They can also be used by humans who want to see all the links on your site or who are look­ing for some­thing specific.

An XML Sitemap is sim­ply an XML file with a list of URLs for a site that also includes addi­tional meta­data about each URL such as when it was last updated, how often it usu­ally changes, and how impor­tant it is, rel­a­tive to other URLs in the site. XML Sitemaps can be found (if they exist) by typ­ing “/sitemap.xml” after the domain name in the address bar of your browser or some­times you can find a link (usu­ally in the footer) to the sitemap from the page itself.

4. Cus­tom HTML email to match the site

This is some­thing that won’t be appar­ent until you inter­act with a site. After leav­ing a com­ment about a blog post, send­ing a mes­sage with a con­tact form, or sign­ing up to receive updates via email, etc. a user is sent an email from the site. Now wouldn’t it be nice if all those emails were cus­tomized with an HTML tem­plate so they would retain the look and feel of the site and strengthen the brand? I think it’s a nice touch.

5. Page not found 404 error page

When you type in the URL of a page that doesn’t exist, by default, the server gives you a “Page not found 404 error” page. Although there are ways to min­i­mize the chances of it hap­pen­ing, there is no way to pre­vent some­one from look­ing for a page that doesn’t exist on your server.

One way of mak­ing sure peo­ple don’t get lost, loose inter­est, or get con­fused is cus­tomiz­ing the 404 page. It could be an inter­est­ing graphic, some­thing funny, or any­thing you want. Included on this page should be promi­nent links to your home page, port­fo­lio, prod­ucts, or what­ever it is you really want peo­ple to see.

Tags: analytics, custom 404 page, favicon, Gmail, Google, HTML email, navigability, SEO, sitemap, URL, usability, Web Design, XML

This entry was posted in the Web Design category.