Website Usability Guidelines

Website Homepage (1 of 4)

Follow these usability recommendations:

The Homepage is the most important page in the entire website. Your website's homepage should set-up the key elements necessary to close a sale, generate information, and create a friendly environment for your website visitor.

HTML Title Tag - The Homepage must have a HTML title tag. The title tag is visible in the browser and title bar and should be used on the Homepage and interior pages. The title tag is the most important tag for search engines and should be relevant to the page content.

Meta Description Tag - The Homepage must have a description tag that is relevant and inviting to your website visitors. The description tag is used by crawler search engines to describe the content of your web page. Make the first sentence of the Description Meta Tag relevant and inviting to your visitors in order to capture their attention. Search engines that support meta tags will often display the description tag along with your title in their results.

Download Time - At most 10 seconds at the prevalent connection speed for your customers. For modem users, this means a file size of less than 50 kb. Faster is always better.

Homepage to Interior Pages - Homepage load time to interior pages should be at most 1 second lag. Users must know that something is happening. This can be accomplished by using ALT or Link tags.

Navigation - The most popular navigation position is the the left side-bar. Keep navigation constant from Homepage to interior pages. Do not use two different navigation schemes.

Frames - Do not use a frame design. Use a table design. Reasons:

• Poor use of screen real estate
• Cannot print
• Useless on a PDA and small screen
• Search engines's have problems reading and indexing frames
• Visitors get locked in middle of site and can't escape
• Difficult to bookmark
• Produce lower customer conversion rates.