Following up on part one, in this post we discuss further website design and development pitfalls to avoid.

Make use of web-safe fonts
Not all fonts render the same on different computers. Web-safe fonts are those fonts that are commonly installed on all computers by computer manufacturers. The overall look and feel of a website influences your visitors’ first impressions, and the font you decide to use is an important part of establishing the “look” of a website. Ideally, the font used should be attractive and easy to read. To help you choose a font, use the Font Tester.

Make sure your website is compatible with all browsers
You want visitors to see the website as you’re seeing it. Since each website browser and operating system interprets code in a different way, it is important to ensure that your website renders properly in all browsers. Brower Shots is a handy tool that allows you to preview your website in various browsers.

Make use of a sitemaps
A sitemap classifies website information and graphically illustrates the structure of the website. Not only does a sitemap help human visitors to find information easily but an XML sitemap is a communication tool used to show search engines all the pages on your site.

An XML sitemap allows search engines easy access to all of your site’s content and also notifies them quickly when your site is updated. You should create one using the correct protocol and upload it to the root directory (yoursite.com/sitemap.xml). Once you’ve done this, submit the sitemap to Google to ensure that the search engine’s spiders visit your website and index those pages.

Meta tags
In September 2009 Google announced that their search engine no longer makes use of the keyword meta-tag to rank websites. Yet, this does not mean that meta-tags should be ignored since other search engines still use them.

Search engines use the content in your website’s meta-description tag on their results pages as the ‘snippet’ describing your page. It’s therefore important to optimise the meta-description by making the content enticing and descriptive of the page to ensure higher click-through rates.

Title tags are one of the most important elements on a page. They play an important role in SEO and for click-throughs from SERPs. The title tag is used on the search engine result pages as the clickable link, and these need to be descriptive and concisely describe the content of the webpage. Titles should contain the page’s most important keywords.