EssentialContent.com uses a set of specific guidelines when designing websites in-house. This is a highlight of these guidelines.
Although this paradigm sounds a bit rude, it's a very effective rule of thumb. The simpler a website - navigation and presentation - the more people can use it and benefit from it. You can get an idea of the importance of this paradigm at the Useit.com website by the Nielsen Norman Group, one of the World's foremost experts on usability for the web. EssentialContent.com closely adhere to the guidelines for user friendly websites given by Jakob Nielsen and the Nielsen Norman Group.
When you visit an EssentialContent.com website, you are not a moment in any doubt as how to navigate the websites, or what parts of the website are links. Links are almost exclusively text links.
All EssentialContent.com websites are designed with flowing text, font sizes are specified in relative terms and all pictures have an alternative text, making the websites easily adaptable to visually impaired and blind users.
All links on EssentialContent.com websites are of the kind that search engines detect and index the fastest and easiest. Search engines have no problem whatsoever searching and indexing EssentialContent.com websites. This makes the websites faster indexed initially, and absolutely no accessibility problems to pages lower in the site hierarchy.
All websites are submitted to the major search engines the moment they go public. This has significance because search engines use the age of a website as a parameter in the calculation of its importance and value.
Sitemaps specifically for search engines are used to make changes in website structures known to search engines as fast as possible.
Most webdesigners work at fast workstations with blazingly fast internet connections, and forget to take into consideration that there is a sizeable number of internet users that conect using a modem or a slow cable connection. EssentialContent.com websites are designed to render as soon as they arrive at the browser, and text will appear even if the images are still loading, keeping visitors from leaving the website again because of long waits.
It is common to use a content management system to avoid having to do much else than writing content. This is fine on websites whose content change by the minute, but on websites with a more static content the use of a content management system slows down response times and require larger hardware investments to do the same job.