So how many of you have a site and absolutely love it? For some of us, it’s second nature. We can sit down crank out a site based on how we envisioned it on our heads.

However, for some other folks, it’s not quite that simple. One of the challenges with building a website is that we usually don’t have all the skill sets needed to create a good one. On one hand, you’ll need your creative juices flowing for the design and on the other hand, you’ll need to leverage your technical know-how to make it come to life. Most people don’t exercise both sides of their brains to the full extent; that’s why it’s a big hurdle that leaves some at ground zero.

When we find that we’re not perfect for certain jobs, what should we do? We hire help to fill the gaps!

Wildfire Marketing Group can provide you with a web design that is based on your input and tastes. Just tell them what you want and they’ll work with you to get you to that goal. We’re talking about pros who can not only customize a site for you but also help drive success, however you may define it. If you want more visitors, they can help. If you want more conversions, they can help.

For those of you who think you’re all set on your website, take a look at Wildfire’s website checklist. This thing is packed things like:

• Marketing planning and strategy
• Creating a search engine friendly website
• Proper HTML and CSS coding
• Design principles
• Proper use of multimedia
• Branding
• Usability
• Website performance
• Conversions
• Improving credibility

All that for a measly $17 with a money back guarantee!

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How many of you thought about what your permalinks, aka URLs, looked like when you first started your site? Usually this is a pretty low on the thought totem pole. However, once you’re up and running, have you ensured that you have went back to optimize your permalinks for past, present, and future?

I know I’ve mentioned it before as a blurb in one of my past articles, no doubt one about SEO, but this is a pet peeve of mine so I want to be loud and clear. Please use words in permalinks! In other words, freebloghelp.com/how-to-start-a-wordpress-blog is much better than freebloghelp.com/page90.

Not only is using words much friendlier than alphagarble (I should patent the use of that word) since it gives your visitors a good idea of what to expect but it’s also going to help your SEO. People who say that it doesn’t matter are fooling themselves.

Benefits of using words in permalinks

• Helps visitors understand what they’re clicking to
• Builds visitor confidence of the content of the link
• Allows visitors to remember easier if they want to come back (OK, it’s a stretch but it counts!)
• Makes good friends with search engines

Like anything else, you can intend to do well but royally screw up in the process. Please do not:

• Use generic names (e.g. page90.html or news070712.htm)
• Overuse keywords (e.g. make-money-online-mmo-blogging-blog.html)

What am I using? Personally, I love using a Custom Structure in WordPress. I simply go with /%postname%/ and my titles become my permalinks. I then shorten the name if I need to.

And yes, it certainly doesn’t hurt me that I’m also using words for my domain. Woohoo! How are your permalinks set up?

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1. This is your blog, you shall treat it with respect.

Run the blog like a business. That means whatever time and energy you decide to dedicate to it, find a way to keep that motivation up in the long haul. It’s a lot of work with very little results in the beginning but if you are persistent and are a good learner, it will pay off one day.

2. Do not take your blog’s name in vain.

Have a marketing plan. And if you’re not a trained marketer, then start learning online. There are plenty of articles out there on this stuff. Also, don’t discount the importance of simple things like commenting on other similar sites and getting a logo. Oh, learn what a brand is.

3. Remember your scheduled post dates and stick to them.

Create a realistic schedule of when you’re posting articles and stick to it. Early on, you may want to post every day or at least three times a week to gain some traction. Over time, you may adjust your priorities to suit your schedule and needs. Whatever you commit yourself to, stay with it for at least 90 days to track results.

4. Honor your hosting provider’s terms.

Pretty obvious stuff. Violate your hosting company’s TOS and you will get shut down. Good luck regaining any momentum you’ve built.

5. You shall not kill other blogs.

Mudslinging, or negative campaigning, is really pointless when it comes trying to outdo your competition. Of course, if you want to post an article about your terrible experience with a supplier, that’s fine by me.

6. You shall enjoy yourself.

OK, don’t commit “adultery” but definitely find a way to have some fun while you’re building your blog business. Take breaks regularly! BTW, does anyone even know what adultery even means today?

7. You shall not steal.

I’ve been blog scraped so many times it’s almost not annoying anymore. It’s not even worth my time to combat these thieves. That said, I would never do it to someone else. Scraping doesn’t pay off in the long run anyway, especially since it’s usually being done by people looking for shortcuts to success.

8. You shall support other blogs.

No one can build a blog empire along. You’ll find that often times, bloggers who have other blogger friends really can catapult themselves ahead. Look for another blogger in a similar niche and work ethic. That way you can motivate each other and grow together.

9. You shall link to other useful content.

Regardless of whether or not you get a link back, providing meaningful outbound links for your visitors should be seen as helpful. Stop worrying about giving PR juice away or sending your visitors off. A. You probably don’t even have any juice on most of your article pages and B. if your visitors like you, they’ll come back anyway.

10. You shall aspire to be a successful blogger.

There is no need to covet your neighbor’s possessions because if you work smart (and at times, work hard), you’ll arrive at your destination soon enough. Remember to set goals and objectives and create tactics to reach them.

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We all know that poor navigation can not only impede your visitors’ ability to move around on your site but it can also affect their willingness to come back. However, did you know how critical your navigation is when it comes to how search engines see your site?

As a judge for the Web Marketing Association for over a decade now, one of the criteria we judge is a site’s navigation since it plays a huge role in usability. Yet, we still only view it from a users’ perspective. Search engines will look at the taxonomy of the site since the structure can be very telling of the relevance of your pages.

Google, for example, will provide search results based on pages but it also scans to see where each pages falls in the entire site structure. So if you post an article about logos and it’s a page “under” your Design category, it helps tell a story. Moreover, also helps if you have other pages with related content in the same bucket, like articles about heat maps and themes.

Think about the major categories of your site’s content. I, personally, would have at least three but no more than seven. If you need more than that, then it’s probably time to break them into subcategories.

If you look at my top nav, you’ll see that I have five categories (and no subcategories). How many top-level categories do you have?

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Is there such thing as a site that’s too fast?

If you’ve been keeping up, my last article was about Pingdom, which pointed to a tool that allowed you to check the speed of any of your pages. I also mentioned that if your site is too slow, you’d quickly see visitors abandon your site, in some cases, before they even see your core material. In other words, no matter how great your content is, you’ll lose a chunk of your audience due to poor performance!

So how can you quickly decrease those load times? There are so many things you can do but I’m going to start you with the 80/20 rule. Let’s try to get 80% of the way there by executing only 20% of the work. Here’s what I think are the simple considerations.

Stage 1

· Reduce image sizes

· Install a cache plugin

· Remove Flash if you have any

If your site is still slow, let’s move into more moderate changes:

Stage 2

· Remove ads that slow your site down (you can see which ads take the longest to load with Pingdom)

· Merge CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) into a single file if you have more than one

· Remove unused styles in your CSS

· Replace image nav with text nav

OK, that should pretty much do it for most folks. However, outside of redoing your entire site, if you still have some crazy sluggish load times, then you may have to consider the following:

Stage 3

· Remove all ads (you can reapply them later one at a time while you test your performance)

· Move to a dedicated server with your current host -OR- switch to a different host provider (It is important to have a dedicated hosting service that will enable your readers to have easy access to your site)

Obviously, these are a last resort, especially if you have to change your hosting company. That may impact your SERP, PR and other variables if you have an established site. However, I think you’d all agree that none of those things matter if visitors leave before they even get a glance of your content!

What are some of the methods you have tried in the past that have increased load times for your site?

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Look, we’ve all been there. We do a search, see a link that we believe has the content that we’re looking for, and click. Then wait. Then wait some more. And if we’re really patient, we gave it a whole 5 seconds to load before we click the back button.

So how we can measure how fast our site is? Even if we used a stopwatch, which won’t really work anyway (more on that later), who wants to time each page on the site? Also, the reason why you can’t really use a stopwatch is because your computer has likely cached all the slow loading items already. So using your machine won’t be indicative of what others who haven’t there before end up experiencing.

You DO want to know how fast your site is, right?

Use this site timer

So where do I go to time my sites? I head over to Pingdom; tools.pingdom.com to be exact. It’s fast, free, and useful.

I’m not affiliated with Pingdom Tools. I just love the service that they provide. Head over there and give it a try. Enter your URL and you’ll get a detailed report on how long it took for each element of that page to load.

Under 1 second is incredible but many pages’ initial load will fall between 1 to 3 seconds. Anything more than that and you’ll want to correct a few things. As for subparts, such as ads or other images, though not ideal you can get away with 5-8 seconds for them to load as long as your main content is already up. I’ll provide an article on that another time.

Free Blog Help’s home page’s initial load time is at 1.2 seconds with most of the remaining parts taking from 2.5 to 5.5 seconds. I’d love to see what your home pages are so post yours!

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It’s that time of year again! This is my 10th year as a judge for the Web Marketing Association. Throughout the last decade, I’ve watched the evolution of static websites to web 2.0. Regardless of era, usability has always been a primary focus when I judge sites. These are websites from major corporations, you know, the household names from around the world. So you’d think they have it all figured out, right? Wrong!

These companies used to hire my organization to fine-tune their sites. This required us to use all kinds of tools, including eye-tracking and gaze plotting! It was some pretty intense stuff.

I don’t expect such intense usability prep for single-owner blogs but I do expect some basics to be taken care of. Let’s face it, 99% of all bloggers have no design/usability training. Naturally, even without any formal training, they try to work in some design but usability typically falls to the wayside.

There are so many things to consider for usability but if I wanted to show someone a short list of low hanging fruit…

9 easy things to consider for usability

1. Keep important information “above the fold”

That means you shouldn’t make your readers scroll down to see calls to action. This includes every page of your site, not just your home page! Over 4/5 of the time spent on your pages will be spent above the fold.

2. Keep the most important information in the top half of the visible screen

Users will give the most focus between 33% and 50% of the page. So if you’re planning for a 768 height page, stick to the 250-400 vertical pixel range.

3. Avoid horizontal scrolling

There are no good reasons to have users scroll horizontally. That means if you want to be super-safe, you can design for a 1024 width, which should satisfy over 98% of the internet population.

4. Stay left

If you cut your page down the middle, the left side will garner more than double the viewing time than the right side. That means you should place the things you want your users to see on the left whenever possible.

5. Place navigation where users expect it to be

Sure, if you have a artsy site you can break away from the norm. Your audience might be willing to partake in a little exploration even. However, for everyone else, keep your main navigation at the left or the top. Ancillary nav can be at the right, bottom, or anywhere else.

6. Reading should not be taxing – part I

Contrast, people, contrast! This is not hard. Dark text on light background or light text on dark background. (Shakes head.) I’m still amazed at how many sites where I have to strain my eyes to read light grey on white. I usually give up after 2 seconds.

7. Reading should not be taxing – part II

Size matters! I don’t care how niche your site is, the font size for the main content should be a font size 10 at a minimum. And that’s only if there’s a decent amount of white space. Think about it, how many times have you been to a site where you thought the fonts were too small? I bet it’s too many to count. Now how many times did you think the fonts were too big? Unless it’s ridiculously large, no one will complain. So if you use an easy to read font, size 10-12 is usually fitting.

8. Headlines work well

I get it. You have a lot of things to showcase on your site. Welcome to the club. Since your most valuable space is limited (see points above), using headlines and snippets will help. Users are more prone to scroll down if the page is “scannable”. So if you create an environment that convinces your users that a flick of their scroll wheel could provide value, then they will.

9. Pop-ups are rarely good

Do you know anyone who likes pop-ups? I’m pretty sure we all hate them. However, we still see them all the time. This tells me you’re thinking about your needs and not the users’ needs. When I see a new window popping up (or popping under), I tend to not only close the pop-up without reading it but I usually leave the site that sent me the pop up as well. For every user willing to pause for a moment to read the pop-up, you lost 50.

One-size-fits-most usability

Remember when some products, like baseball caps for instance, were one-size-fits-all? Then one day, someone made manufacturers change the label to one-size-fits-most because there are some people with really large meatballs for heads. The same applies here.

Although there are some exceptions where some folks had unique success outside of these guidelines. As a general rule though, all bloggers can follow these simple steps to create a usable user experience. These fundamentals haven’t changed since the dawn of the internet.

There really is so much more to usability than this. I could probably write usability articles from this point forward and never be done. But since I haven’t written one in a while, I thought it might be a good idea to jump back into this very relevant topic for most bloggers.

Anyway, don’t you agree that many of these on the list are common sense? But how often have you come across sites that don’t have those basics taken care of? Do you meet these criteria?

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