7. Cater for different screen resolutions.

Most visitors to your site will use a variety of different screen/monitor resolutions, which these days can be anything from 800w*600h to 2400w*2400h pixels or more; the width (w) is most important for web designers since humans read from left to right and not up to down.

Try to make your site fit as many resolutions and thus visitors as possible, which can be achieved by creating a liquid design around percentage (%) widths or by catering for the lowest plausible resolution that the content will fit into. Don’t forget to leave up to 22 pixels width spare in your templates for the browser windows scrollbars (ignore this if using percentage based widths as they will factor that in dynamically).

8. Optimise the relevance of TITLE and META tags.

Search engines pay a considerable degree of attention to page Title, Meta descriptions and to a lesser degree, Meta keywords. These are important descriptive elements that help search engines and other systems determine what content exists on your site. They typically appear in-between your pages top HEAD tags and may look a little like this:

<title>Mooo Land</title>
<meta name="description" content="Global supplier of mooo products and cameras" />
<meta name="keywords" content="moo products, digital camera" />

These three attributes should be as relevant to your site as possible, making sure to altering the input for different content pages. For example, let’s say I have a second page containing the details for a camera. Ideally, to make the most of this content, I should adjust the above tags on the new page accordingly:

<title>Mooo Land – Camera Name</title>
<meta name="description" content="Global supplier of Camera Name products" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Camera Name details, digital cameras" />

Typically it is important not to make either the description or keyword entries too lengthy; repetition of words should also be avoided as this could be considered SPAM and ignored (e.g. keep descriptions to roughly 150 characters in length and don’t use the same keyword more than 2 or 3 times).

Note that keywords can be almost ‘phrase like’ and it doesn’t hurt to put some into your description, but don’t go overboard and avoid using common words as keywords (e.g. ‘Internet’ on its own is too common).

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