Although this article is geared towards a T-shirt site, it can be very helpful for anyone looking to create a successful website.

In order of importance, here are the 5 best practices for creating a successful website.

#1 Your website MUST be people friendly! This means it is easy to navigated, loads fast, is usable in all browsers, and is professional. I just read an article on CNN.com which determined that on average, people take less than 1/2 of a second to judge the appearance of a website. This means, your customer must know exactly what you’re selling and how to buy it in less than 10 seconds. Also the basic layout, i.e. color scheme, pictures, etc. all must be up to par. Although this particular practice does not get people to your website, it cannot be overlooked or people will never come back to it.

One more quick point. From a usability perspective, I personally think it’s a good idea to put all of your t-shirt designs (or other products) on the main page. The rule of thumb is to create as few clicks between the customer and the sale. If you can eliminate a click, do it!

#2 Make your site search engine friendly. By this, I mean SEO.

If you don’t know what SEO is, you need to. SEO is short for search engine optimization, or in English: Figuring out how to word your site (and coding) so that search engines will not only find your site, but for specific words that you want them to find you for. It’s also about being high in the search engines. Let’s face it, if you’re site doesn’t show up in the top 20 (first 2 pages), it doesn’t exist.

It may be easy to fall into the trap of paying for SEO, but I think it is something you can (and should) do yourself. This way you will have full contral and understanding of what’s happening on your site. You can’t trust anyone in the SEO business anyway.

The most important thing to do to “please google” is to get as many link exchanges as you can, with people who come up when you search on yahoo, google, msn, for whatever you are selling. This is viewed as most important to them. Links from your site to others do not help you. Only links TO YOUR SITE help you. The more you have, the better the chances your PR (pagerank) goes up.

Next, you want to determine what your keywords are, i.e. what people will type in to find what you are selling. Some keywords or keyphrases are more competitive than others. Take your time to choose the right ones. Don’t pick too competitive ones, but also don’t pick ones with no hits. I recommend only concentrating on 3 keywords or keyphrases. Next you want to update your site to include text and alt descriptions that say your keywords. If there are no alt tags on images the search engines have no idea what the images are. So make those your keywords too! It’s all about enriching your site with your keywords.

#3 You must accept all payment types. The worst thing in the world would be for your site to look beautiful, attract good customers, and then not be able to process Visa or Mastercard. Make sure you can accept as many, if not all payment methods. Visa, Mastercard, Amer. Ex., Discover, PayPal, etc. Again, this seems like common sense, but it is overlooked way more than you would think.

#4 Have ALL potential questions answered by your website text since you can't be there to answer the customer's question. All of these should be answered: How much are the shirts? What brand of T-shirt do you use. How much is shipping and where do you ship to? How long does it take? What is the sizing like? What are the T-shirts made of? What’s the company history? Do they have good customer feedback? Did you leave a telephone number and a good email contact? Do you reply fast to emails? Printing methods used? I could probably go on forever, but you get my point. EVERYTHING needs to be answered, and well. Obviously these questions will be different for every business, but the point is it all must be answered.

#5 Great designs (products which are unique!) The reason this one is not higher up is because even a great design or great products can’t sell if no one knows about it! The above 4 practices help you do just that, let people know about your site. Great designs (or products), however, are very very very important to be successful. It is what you’re selling right? Unfortunately, no one person can determine what is a good design or what is marketable and what is not. If that person existed, then he/she would be very rich. The trick is to follow your heart and interests. Don’t get opinions from bias people. Do market research which is brutal, but in the end very helpful. If I could do it all over again, I would have done a lot more research before I spent any money. You have to know your market, what they like, what they dislike, what they are looking for in the future, and a plethora of other things.

Well good luck, I hope this helps.

(For more detailed info on SEO, please CONTACT ME) http://www.recklessts.com/contactus.html

Michael D'Elena
President/Owner
Check out my funny T-shirt http://www.recklessts.com/ website.