The best practice website

To ensure that your website is consistent with best practice, there are three considerations you may wish to take into account.

Firstly, use coding standards to ensure that your website looks and functions consistently for all visitors.

Secondly, design your website consistent with agreed protocols to give it the best possible chance of a high placement in search engine results, as part of a search engine optimisation strategy.

Finally, assess what information your customers, supporters and donors will expect to find on your website.

Web coding standards

Just as written and spoken English varies from person to person, computer code can vary from programmer to programmer. Web coding standards formalise best practice for web developers because they:

• ensure that code developed by one programmer is easily understood and supported by any other programmer (this is important to ensure the long-term support of your website)
• ensure that certain core functions of a website are commonly presented across most compliant websites to maximise ease of use by the general public.

Web coding standards are set by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, a global, not-for-profit association of member organisations that leads international efforts to develop standards for the internet in general and websites in particular. You may want to discuss the W3C list of published standards with your developer to make sure coding on your site is consistent with them. In particular, you should have a conversation about with your developer about how to maximise the accessibility of your website for people with reading and hearing difficulties consistent with the WC3 accessibility standards.

Search engine protocols

Discuss with your web developer the use of the site maps protocol, which is jointly supported by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, which are the major search engines. Structuring your website according to the protocol tells search engines about pages on your site they might not otherwise discover. Using the site map protocol will assist in the valuable practice of search engine optimisation.

Achieving a website consistent with visitor expectations

As well as aiming to meet web coding standards, it is usually important to conform to conventions for presenting standard information.

In this way you can achieve a website that is consistent with the experience, knowledge and expectations of your visitors. While this should not hamper creativity, there are some standard items most websites should include:

• contact information
• opening hours and a map of your location
• a search function and site map to assist visitors in finding specific information within your website
• the ability to return to your home page with a single click
• terms of use and a policy outlining how you wil treat private information collected from users (see the legal issues section).