Hint 5 - Forums

A Forum or a guestbook, as mentioned above, are very important for a page that wants to get as many visitors as possible, because they offer the possibility to give feedback to the webmaster. He gets to know what other people like about his site, and which problems they have. That’s the same way big companies do it. They don’t use guestbooks but use market research or hire people to give them feedback.

Another interesting aspect is a community. If you have a good going page and offer your visitors a forum, there’ll be soon a community just for your site.

Hint 6 - Accessability

In order to make your page accessible for everybody you should think about the following aspects: Flashpages for example usually look very good. They have nice but not for all the users. Everybody behind a firewall is not able to view the page as well as everyone who is not willing to install a plug-in. Firewalls by the way are used by every big company, so you keep a lot of people outside. If you still want to use flash, make a entrance page where the visitor can decide whether he wants to see flash or not.

Another aspect of the usability is the size of the graphics. Although a lot of people are on the internet with ADSL or faster, there are still people using slower connections. If you have a 4 MB intro on you page, they’ll never wait till the loading is finished.

The resolution is another problem. 1024x768 is very common, but there are still people using 640x480 so if your site is “un-scrollable” people with lower resolutions are kept outside.

The last aspect is the browser. Although most people are using the IE, not everybody does. Make sure, the other browsers support your page, too.