12.21
My Mom is on the board for the retirement where community she lives. They have finally gotten with the program and realized that more people (even seniors) are using the internet for their information than snail-mail newsletters. So they are looking to revamp their website to make it more usable. My Mom then asked me if I would take a look at what they have and make some recommendations. Certainly, Moms. That is what I do! I ended up going a little overboard with a document but it did a good job of covering a lot of the bases with suggestions on site structure, navigation, design, functionality as well as SEO improvements. I won’t go over all that with you but I thought I would share what I highlighted in all-caps bold at the top of the document.
Note: These suggestions are specific to their website and not necessarily a generic top four website suggestions.
IMPORTANT MUST-DOS
- Photos on site should be jpgs, not gifs. Gifs should be limited to graphics that are just a few colors. Just one photo (gif) on “Bowling Lessons” page is almost a meg. All images should aim to be 50k or less.
- All images should have relevant alt tags for accessibility purposes. Headers across site should be clickable back to home.
- All external links should have target=”_blank” to open up external links in new page so as to not take the users out of the site.
- Put Google Analytics on the site so you can see what people are clicking on, what kind of browsers they’re using, what kind of connection they have, where people are being referred from, what keywords they’re using in google to get to the site and so on.
