Things You'll Need:
- Dictionary
- Style Guide (Chicago Manual, MLA or AP)
- Internet accessibility
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Step 1
Spellcheck and edit your entire site. No matter how relevant or beneficial the content on your site is, if the site is full of typos and grammatically incorrect sentences, most users will not find your site to be sufficient. Even the most popular sites have a typo from time to time, but while editing your website, you can clean these errors up as you see them.
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Step 2
Make sure the content on your site reflects the present day. If you have a page promoting your book, and it has a press release that reflects last year's accomplishments but nothing current, readers will wonder how often you check your site. Readers will also be less likely to contact you if your site looks outdated.
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Step 3
Click on every single tab, ad, and banner to make sure they connect to their correct content. If someone is paying you to add an ad to your page, but the ad does not link to their company, not only will you owe them money for not completing the project in full, but it could also lose money for the both of you. If a company sees that they are getting more customers from people who visited your site, their ad space will stay longer. If they see that half of the time, users didn't know how to click on the promotions, the company who asked for ad space may ask for their money back early because you didn't follow through with your end of the deal.
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Step 4
Take off all of the italics, different fancy font colors and countless zooming words. Your website is not supposed to look like a fireworks PowerPoint presentation. Studies have shown that the color black is the easiest to read and font types like Times New Roman and Arial are sufficient for long reading. On a white screen, bright color fonts and lots of animation may make you lose viewers. A site doesn't have to be boring in just black and white, and color brings life to the page, but make sure the reader can see that the content is as important as the website design. (Note: There are exceptions to this rule. Interactive parts of the site like digital magazines or newspapers should still be readable, but animation, such as electronically turning the pages while reading, may entertain the reader. Also, this rule may not apply if your site is about webpage design, graphics or photography. Although it's not a good idea to make your site look like a neverending cartoon, for visual features, people are going to want to see the designs more than the text. However, when they read the text to find out how to buy your designs or photography, make it easy to read. Leave out the bright pink words.)
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Step 5
Make sure to have a Terms of Use and Privacy Policy on pages that use third-party content to sell a product, has forums, or collects private information (i.e., credit cards and addresses). It's not mandatory that every website has these options, but it's essential for users, who purchase things on your site or need to know about reprint rights, to know how their information is being tracked while visiting your website.
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Step 6
Update your content regularly. Even if the site is not as popular as a news site or an entertainment site, if you want people to keep visiting your page, find new material to add or even new pictures. If a user keeps visiting your site, and she doesn't see anything new in the past month or so, she'll stop visiting. Keep your viewers interested. Every time something new happens that you want users to know about, add it to the site. Consider blogging. That's a creative way to keep your readers in-the-know.
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Step 7
Decide on a Style Guide that you will use to edit your site, and make sure any other web editors who may work on your site stick to this style as well. For a keen reader, it is annoying to see serial commas in one sentence and lack of commas in another. If one title has all uppercase letters minus the articles (a, the, an), but another title is formatted into sentence structure (only the first letter of the first word is capitalized), users will wonder how many people are working on your site, and have you all ever had a meeting to decide on style.
