Peace of Christ!
Today we will begin a series to help everyone who wants to use the internet and its resources to speak about God's Love, create a website for their denomination, share their testimony, publicize events to the gospel audience, and so on. Our goal is to share five tips in each post of this series, so the reader can absorb some information and then move on to the remaining tips.
In this post I will talk about five factors that do not contribute to a great homepage for your website or blog:
Unnecessary widgets;
Music that starts automatically;
A background that makes the text difficult to read;
Countless images in the sidebar
An online chat space in the sidebar
1 – Unnecessary widgets
I know you may enjoy feeding little fish or playing with the hamster on your blog, but these widgets increase the time needed for your site to load on the visitor's computer. Remember that in Brazil, broadband is not all that broad! Unfortunately, many people still use dial-up internet. For you, the site may load quickly, but for a dial-up user, for example, it takes much longer, and these applications sometimes even make accessing your site impractical.
The same applies to widgets from the various social networks where you have an account, which end up displaying how many people follow you on each one in your sidebar. And they continuously update, with the application constantly exchanging information with the server, thereby consuming a good share of the user's bandwidth!
So I recommend reassessing the focus of your blog or site to determine how necessary using several widgets really is.
2 – Music that starts automatically
When it comes to music on websites, two points tend to be considered: privacy and bandwidth consumption.
Regarding privacy, I would like to warn that not everyone enjoys being surprised by music that starts playing without warning, especially when they have forgotten their speakers' volume at maximum! You can be sure that, as studies have shown, you will almost certainly lose a reader and also create a negative image of your site in that reader's mind.
The user may not like that music, since people's tastes vary. Also, given the large number of denominations with their preferred musical styles, you may fail to serve people with your site's blessed content by imposing music to your taste rather than the reader's taste.
Remember that not everyone clicks Stop. Most close the page to make the music stop!
Regarding bandwidth consumption, as I mentioned above, most Brazilians do not have a connection fast enough for good use of the internet, and if you force them to load a song you will not make them very happy…
3 – A background that makes the text difficult to read
This tip is so simple, yet I still see so many people who do not understand this concept.
If you use a light font color for your blog's text and put it on a light background, you will make the text harder to read because the lettering will barely stand out from the background.
So if you follow the relationship below, you will make your reader's life easier.
Light fonts >> Dark background
Dark fonts >> Light background
Similarly, using dark images as your blog or website's background with a dark font will greatly hinder reading. So simply follow the same logic.
4 – Countless images in the sidebar
It has already been mentioned that widgets and online music can make your site take much longer to load on your reader's computer. The same happens with images.
I always encourage using images in posts, but I do not recommend using them in the sidebar. I have been following some excellent blogs that require a long time to load because of the large number of images in their sidebars.
I really like those images with verses or beautiful phrases, but placing several of them on your site's main page will not help you. I recommend creating a series or choosing a day to post them.
I also mention the importance of aesthetics. Sometimes less is more!
5 – An online chat space in the sidebar
Everything you have read so far about making your site load slowly does not compare with this great “villain”! Those applications for online chatting in the sidebar or message boards are the main enemies of a slow connection. And some, as though automatically updating at set intervals were not enough… also have a Refresh button! I do not think I even need to keep talking about them…
If these tips were useful to you, or if you have a suggestion, please share your comment with us!
May God bless you!
Wishing you success!
João Victor