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Don’t talk too much about yourself

Talking about yourself can be fun from time to time for yourself, but mostly it is not funny for your auditors. So don’t do this too often on your website, because no one is reading this. The visitors on your website are not interested how successful you are, how many people are employed, and what is the history of origin of your company.

Your visitors want to find useful information on your website: what do you have to offer, what does it cost, what can I get, can you solve my problem, what can I earn, what is my benefit....

Don’t be blind by the number of visitors

The number of visitors finding their way to your website is of course very important. But visitors without return are of nu use for you. Better for you to have 100 visitors asking for an offer, than a 1000 visitors asking for nothing and simply continuing up to your competitor.

Correct contents

The contents of a website has to be:

• interesting for your target public
• correct (provide correct information)
• up to date
• quickly adaptable by the owner
• clearly structured

Texts are the most important elements of your website !

Full stop !

Therefore they have to be good. How do you make good texts ? You’ll find everything (really everything) on www.schrijf.be

This is, of course, easy for us, isn’t it ? The fact is we cannot explain it in a better way. In order not to plagiarise we give you a brief summary of the many tips they reach, together with the useful links :

1. what has to be on the homepage ?
2. pieces ready to consume – legible texts for the web
3. stupid blonds on the Internet : a pleading for websites with contents
4. aspirin against headache : customer’s benefits against product qualities
5. speak as you write : simple texts fascinate

On the pages to which we link on Schrijf.be you find a yellow menu bar on your left-hand side. Each link is really worth while reading it !

Why don’t we do this ourselves : writing your texts ? As we said before : better than anyone else, the owner knows his company. He is the one to explain what the company does, how good they are in this skill, which are their results, their quality requirements, etc.

We try our hardest to improve your texts, but you should deliver us the ingredients.

Golden tip

Gather your text material on beforehand and save it in a map on your computer, preferably in MS Office format (Word, Excel, ...). Internet users are people with few patience. They want to read quickly the information, as if they “scan” the information. Therefore, we adapt the text material. Simply said: we chop it into pieces, make it well-ordered, provide it with navigation links, a table of contents, we make sure the whole is easily legible and good structured.

Copyright : smart stealing or stupid (or less smart) copying ?

None !

Customers often say : “go and fetch the photos on the website of .... it is a supplier of ours, you can”, or “you can copy the text of our products on the website of ...”.

Mind !

Without a written permission it is not allowed to do. You have to consider everything on the Internet as protected by copyright. This is especially the case for texts and photos, but also for videos, animations, flash films, logos, etc.
There are very few cases where you are allowed to borrow something from an existing website. The easiest rule is : just ask for a written permission. Then you are safe.

Do you want to know all about it ? You can find a document on the site of the prime minister :

copyright and Internet

So do read this if you have a minute.

So do read this if you have a minute.

For many owners, collecting digital photo material is as hard as collecting text material. Internet users are mainly “viewers”, less than “readers”. Our actual culture is a “viewing culture”. For this reason, we recommend to absorb enough picture material on your website. But this contains a risk. Bad picture material, or too much of it, slows down loading the page and gets on the nerves of the visitor.

The printing-office.

A golden tip. Probably you already had leaflets or brochures with pictures printed at a printing-office. Ask them to return these if they are still up to date. In this way, you don’t have to start all over. Normally, your printing-office can put your material without too much problems into a pdf-format (Acrobat Reader). For us, this is a welcome source of information.

Camera work

Digital photos made with a digital camera are preferred to scanned photos. The camera should cope with enough megapixels per inch (preferably more than 3 MPx). If you want, we can make a special price to come and make your pictures. But it is not over when the photos are taken. Every digital photo is improved by us by the computer for contrast optimisation, colour improvement, cutting, etc. Dark photos, or photos with too few contrast, mostly are easiest to correct. Unclear and vague photos, on the contrary, are not. Think about the cook and his ingredients.

Scanned material

Many people have quite an idea about scanners. For us, they are an emergency help. If you really have a fantastic image you absolutely want to use, fine. But don’t forget it is time consuming to improve the image.

Photo websites

It can be handsome to put your photos on existing community photo sites like Flickr, and to provide your website with a simple link to these photos. It saves you a lot of web space ! Normally the photo site indicates clearly the link you can copy and paste.

No sound unless the user can choose for it himself

A lot of owners prefer to have some music or sounds on their site.

A lot of owners prefer to have some music or sounds on their site.

Don’t give any sound if the user doesn’t ask for it. In 9 cases out of 10, the user has put on himself music whilst surfing. If this music is on his computer, and you start as well music with your website, he will be most annoyed with it and quits immediately.
Moreover, music via a flash film can interrupt the music of the user or even make his computer crash.  Amusing for a visitor, isn’t it ?

Besides, when using music you also have to deal with copyright. Being careful is the message.

No Flash unless it is functional.

"Can you make a nice intro for my website ?"

"Yes, but we won’t.”  Intros with Flash or some other program can look very nice the first time you see them. But after a number of times, they can work on your nerves enormously. Moreover, they are real “firewalls” against Google and other search engines.
“Then put on a button ‘Skip intro’.”
Nice : first we make an intro (taking hours of work to make it) and then you have to put on a button because the visitor doesn’t want to see it.  And yet you see many of them, of these buttons. Why do you make an intro, then ? Who would watch publicity if the television had a button ‘Skip publicity’ ?

If the customer insists, OK, we’ll do it, but rather not.

"Is Flash not a good program ?"

Yes it is, it is a fantastic program, and we ourselves do like it a lot. But it has to be professional and functional. It is work of specialists to make a complete and quick loading site in Flash. Keep in mind it takes a lot more hours to create in Flash design, and these hours have to be paid for as well.

Flash also has some disadvantages on the web :

• pages in a flash movie often have no separate Internet address, for which reason it is hard to link to them from a search engine, a newsletter or a site of a business connection
• printing is also a problem unless the designer has paid special attention to this
• as we mentioned before : flash films are absolutely badly consumed by search engines
• visitors are used to the classic “scrollbars”, and the classic form fields. In Flash, they not only look different, but they also react in another way. Visitors get disorientated by this.

When is Flash suitable ?

1. the use of Flash can be very important if apart from the contents the presentation is of utmost importance. For instance for sites where a lot of multimedia is involved, such as games, audio-video, art, science, photography. One of our preferred sites is 2advanced.com. Quite impressive, isn’t it ? But we can imagine you are not very sure where to click if you visit this site the first times. This is how Flash presents itself.
2. Quite impressive, isn’t it ? But we can imagine you are not very sure where to click if you visit this site the first times. This is how Flash presents itself.
3. Flash often is the only possibility to make interactive games, interactive manuals and courses.

Film and video

Film and video are excellent means to fascinate your public. Interesting applications are, amongst others, showing a machine in action, yourself in action, demos of activities.
A big disadvantage is they take a lot of space on your 30 Mb server space.
Another problem is that the normal film formats need more time to download.

The visitor also needs a special program (for instance Windows Media Player) to watch the film. If he hasn’t this program, or if he only has an older version, then there is a problem.

But there is a solution

Therefore we prefer to show films via a special ‘Flash’ format: the flash-video-format, for which the classical Flash-player is sufficient, and almost 99% of the surfers have this. Flash-video is the format used on Youtube.

You can also decide to put your films first on Youtube or another film-community-site. On your own website you simply put a link to these films. It saves you a lot of web space ! Normally the film site indicates clearly the link you can copy and paste. Have a look at Youtube.