Designing Your Website
(Part 2) - Web Site Content
Web site Design :
Basic Considerations
|
Web Site Content
| Search Engines
| Our Services
The most important part of web site design has to be the actual content on your
pages. This should be driven by the needs of your business balanced
against the needs and expectations of your website visitors.
The content should be interesting and relevant enough to
make people stay on your website and take their time to look around the site and
be able to find the goods or services which they want. However, you do
need to consider the amount of information you provide on any one page as people
will not scroll through long pages to find what they want. Provide search
and different types of navigation to help direct your visitors to what they want
to find.
Website content can be obtained from various public domain sources and
advertising flyers although ideally your website should contain as much unique
content as possible in order to distinguish it from other websites and also to
attract a niche customer base that will keep returning to your site for more.
If you are promoting other people's products, then don't just insert them as an
advert - include some interesting details, maybe a review or background
information, which will bring people to your website to find those products,
rather than going to one of your competitors.
You need to ensure that none of the material you use on your website is
subject to copyright restrictions (if you want to protect photographs used on
your website for example, you can quite easily do this by editing the photo to
include the website address emblazoned across it as a watermark). You should also ensure
that any files which you offer for download have been scanned for viruses and spyware before you add them to your website - this is essential to protect your
reputation and also provide the highest degree of customer reassurance.
Whatever the source of your content, it is important that you carefully consider
your audience and the type of content you will provide, including any videos, pictures, text and flash elements.
Is this suitable for all audiences, or should access be restricted in some
manner.
If you plan on offering any adult content on your website, you
will need to ensure that the host provider allows this type of content and also bear
in mind that some search engines will restrict your submissions (you may need to
pay for submissions - see our section on
making your site search engine friendly).
You should also beware that many search engines now provide the ability to
search for images and videos based on the same criteria as standard keyword
searches - it is therefore essential that you identify adult content clearly in
order to protect the vulnerable and attract the type of visitor who is likely to
be interested in your content.
If you offer videos on your website you need to carefully
consider how these will be delivered. You will need higher bandwidth than
most websites (see our section on website hosting)
and you will want to protect your content against file sharing.
Unfortunately you cannot easily prevent this as most video formats can be
downloaded, or software used to capture the video as it is displayed on a users
screen. Perhaps the best form of protection (as well as including a title
screen with a link to your site), may be to use Java video streaming as this is
more difficult to capture and share. Also please avoid adding spyware or
popups within videos as this tends to put people off using your website.
Once you have made the decision about the suitability of your content, you should then submit your
website to the various parental control providers in order to ensure that it is
added to their lists and classified correctly as soon as possible. It may
also help to use tools such as
SafeSurf
to generate adult rating meta tags (known as PICS) to add to your website.
|
There is no standard for controlling the content of
websites on the internet and as a result it is all too easy to get inappropriate
search results appearing in search engines. This has lead to a dramatic
rise in the number of people who sign up for Parental Controls services, such as
the ever popular Cyber Patrol, Net Nanny and the built in parental controls
functions provided by AOL. When designing your website, you therefore need to
give thought as to whether access to your website needs to be restricted in any
way. Most search engines and directories allow you to define the category
into which your website should fall, but this does not necessarily affect the
age range of users who can access the website. Most of the Parental Controls
programs operate by means of both keywords which are used to determine the
suitability of a website and a white list of website URLs which are suitable, and a
blacklist of websites which are only suitable for adults. Depending upon
the degree of parental controls protection chosen by the Internet user, your
site may only be available for viewing if it has been added to one of these two
lists.
|
Click Here to
Buy Now |
Net Nanny® 5.0
Net Nanny®, the world's leading parental control software, provides you with the broadest set of Internet safety tools available today.
- Filter websites with adult content while providing age appropriate content for your children.
- Control online chat (including AIM and instant messengers from Yahoo!® and Microsoft), time spent online, and Internet-based games.
- Block file sharing of music, images, and videos.
- Protect your privacy and freedom of speech online.
|
The main parental controls software
is provided by AOL, Net Nanny and Cyber Patrol. Unfortunately, there appears
to be no way for non AOL members to recommend or report a site which does not
appear in the parental controls list. This is a shortfall in their system
and can only be circumvented if you know an AOL user (or become one yourself).
Net Nanny allows you to submit the URLs of websites, FTP sites and News
Groups which have
questionable
content here - they can be marked under one of several different adult
categories.
Cyber Patrol
is probably the best known of all content controls software and is well
known for both its home solution and business wide SurfControl solution.
Cyber Patrol enables you to submit a website for consideration by them for
addition to its lists under specific categories -
click
here to submit your website for review
- Consider the audience for your web site content
carefully - do you need to register it with any parental controls software?
- If you provide video, consider providing it in
several formats or use a Java video player
- Break your content into several short pages, rather
than one long rambling page.
- Ensure you do not use someone else's copyrighted
content on your web site - either use your own unique content, or look for
some of the broad range of public domain articles which are available on the
web.
- Consider how accessible your content is for people
with sight problems or text only browsers
- Consider how search engines will see your site - if
you provide images on your site, are you happy for search engines to list the
pictures or other people to use them on their own web sites?
The next page is devoted to making your site search engine friendly.
|
