Dot Your T's And Cross Your I's

By Jeff Colburn
Posted Sunday, June 20, 2004

It's imperative that your website look professional. Why is this important? There are several reasons. People who visit a professional site feel:
* That they can trust the website owner
* That they can trust the website contents and messages
* They feel more comfortable about buying your products and services
* They are more likely to believe what you say
* They are more likely to revisit your site to see what new information, products and services you are offering

So, how do you make a professional site? That's simple, have no mistakes. Your site needs to have good content, design and be easy to use, but you also need to pay attention to the details. That old saying explains it all, "The devil's in the details."

You need to pay close attention to the small things to make a professional site. Checking, and checking again, for the simple errors.

What are these simple errors? Some of the main ones include:
* Misspellings, like: "to" instead of "too", or "their" instead of "there" or "they're"
* Broken links
* Broken graphics
* Incorrect indents, paragraphs breaks and bulleted lists

I went to a website last week that offered health information. What I found were several pages of text that had no paragraph breaks, instead, each page was just one long block of text. It was very difficult to read the text, and after seeing this small error I wasn't sure how accurate their information was.

I went to another site that same week, and every graphic on the main page was broken. I didn't even try to check out the rest of the site since I figured the owner didn't care at all about his site or its content.

These simple errors can be caught, and corrected by:
* Running the content of your site through a spelling checker
* Proofreading everything after spell checking to catch what the spelling checker missed
* Look at your site, to see if anything isn't lined up, bulleted, indented or bolded properly
* Testing every link and e-mail address to be sure it works
* Look at every graphic to make sure it shows up properly

You also want to be sure and recheck all of these things again if you make any changes to your website.

As you do all of these things, you want your motivation to be that when a visitor comes to your site, there are no distractions caused by errors on your site. This will allow visitors to focus all of their attention on your products or services.

(http://www.CreativeCauldron.com)
Jeff Colburn is a website designer and writer. His goal is to make the process of creating or updating your website easy and simple for you, while creating a website that meets all your needs and expectations. Jeff can also create all of the copy for your website.

To see a sample of Jeff's work go to The Creative Cauldron. It's an award winning site filled with information for writers, photographers, artists and other creative people.

About the Author
None