Guidelines for Having a Professional Corporate Website

One of the most frequently issues that I am always asked about is the guidelines for developing a corporate website. I've jotted down some items and would like to share it with the world!

Web design nowadays incorporates highly sophisticated yet easy to use interfaces and it’s continuing to improve. Today’s internet focused age users are exposed daily to graphic design elements in the modern web 2.0 design style which is focused, clean and simple, and would not easily tolerate websites with less standards. Therefore having an appealing website with a modern interface is crucial for its success.

There are two aspects that should be taken into consideration when developing a new website; the design aspect and the technical aspect.

Design: - Professional modern website; you need to benchmark competitors’ websites in order to make yours as good or even better. - Stick to 1 concept; be consistent throughout the whole website. - Incorporate various flash headers (as part of the concept). - Look & feel should go along with the web 2.0 guidelines. - Colors: incorporating your logo and color themes
- Always update your website; add new links, images and banners.

Technical: - Website not to be fully developed in flash. - No iframes to be used. - No flash intros. - Website graphics to be optimized to 1024 resolution, using 960 pixels layout grid. - Website to have no broken links. - Usage of Java Script should be implemented using JQuery library. - Website to pass the w3c markup web standard http://validator.w3.org/
- Website to pass the w3c css web standard validator http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
- Browser compatibility: website to be compatible with latest versions of Firefox, IE, Chrome & Safari. - Hosting preferably to be in USA or Canada (for reliability).

If you wish to get a complete set of guidelines tailored to your website, check LOJINE Consulting’s Functional Requirements Document service at http://www.lojine.com/website_functional_requirments_document.php/