The NewVista News

1. Respect Your Visitors — Don’t try to force your visitors to read the content of your web-pages. Let them choose and decide what they want to read. If you have something to say, there will be listeners. Remember, that your views are as valid as anyone else’s.  (Big tip, DON’T use dozens of pop-ups and over-flown ad blocks.)

2.  Bad Advertisement is Bad —  Tasteless Ad-blocks might improve your ad revenue for a while, but in a long run they won’t make your website successful. Plus, you won’t gain respect in the web-world. That being said, ads tastefully combined with well-written content and placed well in the structure of the site, generally don’t disturb the web-viewer.

3. Inform and Teach your Visitors — Share your thoughts, ideas, experience and knowledge with those who need or maybe will need your advice. Since you have this information, you have a powerful instrument to draw the web-viewer’s attention to your work/services. A side point is, if you share valuable knowledge with other users, you’ll gain professional respect and be regarded as a person who knows what they are talking about.

4. Develop Your Own Style, Your Own Ideas — Be inspired, and don’t copy. It is far more interesting to share what you are capable of – rather than repeat what other people are capable of. Expand your imagination and curiosity. New or improved ideas are more likely to attract web-viewers, than the copied old ones.

5. Respect Web standards — Taking web standards into consideration will help your site be found. Spend some extra hours checking the code and applying it to the standards; then, you won’t have to be concerned about the various versions of browsers. Remember these three “abilities”:   Read-“ability” / Access-“ability” / use-“ability”; respect them, and you will respect your web-visitors.

6. Be Clear — Don’t be afraid to say what you mean. Ambiguity creates an unneeded distance between you and your web- visitors. Saying precisely, what you want to discuss or present, you start an active dialogue with your readers. Besides, if you specify, what you are talking about, you’re more likely to get feedback or a response to a “call-to-action” you’ve posed.

7. Care About Content — Try to make your website informative, interesting and well-presented. Don’t forget that your web-visitors remember everything. Once you’ve offered them a link to some inappropriate web-page without proper description of what is hidden behind the link, you’ll never see them again. It’s been said that “Code is poetry,” then, “content is prose.”

8. Be Aware of Web-spiders and SEO — It’s ok to think in keywords – but it’s FAR MORE EFFECTIVE to be clear in what your website has to offer. Tweaking your site for search-engine position will pay dividends, in parallel to writing a useful article in your “blog.” SEO is continually “optimized” over the time in order to get better results in search engines.

9. Avoid Bad SEO —  Poor Search Engine Optimization, for instance, (exchanging links with every possible site in the net, placing your link in link farms, etc.) will sooner or later get your site banned from the major search engines. The search-algorithms they use are improving all the time. In the end, poor SEO will put your site at risk and you’ll your site with “Pagerank 0″ above all the possible results. Plus, once your reputation is low, it will be extremely difficult to get a good position in the online community.

10. Answer E-mail Immediately —   Make contact with your potential clients as quickly as you can – don’t let e-mail sit in the inbox-folder for more than 12 hours. Don’t send auto-reply messages. The person who has written to you knows they have written to you. Try to make an impression on the person who has contacted you. Reply with confident, professional, friendly and open style of writing.

11. Think in Global Terms — The content of your web-pages might not appeal to the public in your region, but the frontiers of the Web are vague and hardly visible (if they exist at all); so why not send your message in the world? There is no need for searching a new niche near you if you have almost unlimited opportunities all around the world.

12. Never Compromise Your Web-Principles — Respect your clients and their point of view; but, keep in mind that YOU are actually the one who develops the site. Don’t do just what you are told to do. Correct mistakes if you realize that your client is wrong. Be professional – in the end your aim is to create a web-site for web-visitors, NOT for your clients.

13. Stay in Touch — Keep informed about what is happening on the Web. The Web is practically “exponential” and new ideas are shared instantly. The best way to stay “tuned” is – READ!  Subscribe to popular subject-matter blogs. Subscribe to graphic-design magazines and web-development-journals like:  AListApart, Digital Web Magazine, Graphics.com. All are worth daily reading.

14. Make Your Website More “Visually Appealing” —  “CSS”, clear, readable, intelligent designs are beautiful. - How can you tell if your site is attractive?  It’s just like photography; do you ever go back and take a 2^nd look at that picture you just saw? Same way with your website; design it so the web-viewer comes back and takes a 2^nd look.

15. Be Aware of the Power of the Web — You… all of us… are creating the Web every day. We, individually and collectively… have something to say. Read, participate and support web-projects, and web-forums that are important to you. Remember it’s a world-wide web… Be grateful you can participate in such a dynamic community.