The User Experience Blog for Website Architecture Planning

In the modern world, websites play a very crucial role in business growth and online presence. According to a recent study, 80%-85% of people search for products or services online before going shopping to malls, streets, etc. Websites can provide several benefits such as free product marketing, 24/7 product access, tracking visitors' behavior and accumulating data, etc. Websites can also serve as an additional source of income and generate additional revenue streams along with a retail store.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the international standard needed to make website content more accessible to those individuals with any number of disabilities. These requirements are what is known as “success criteria”. Here, you will find some of the most basic actions that will help you get started to make your user interface and design absolutely accessible to those individuals with disabilities. These tips are what would be considered good practice to get you on track to meet the WCAG guidelines.

Sitemaps are the best and easiest way for webmasters to inform major search engines about pages on their website that are open for crawling and indexing. Broken down simply, a sitemap is an XML file that is a list of URLs contained on each site, along with added metadata about each of the URLs so that the search engines can more accurately crawl these sites. This metadata can be anything from how often it changes, when it was last updated, its priority in relation to other pages on the site, and much more.

HTTP or Hypertext Transfer Protocol response status codes include status codes from internet standards, other IETF RFCs, IETF, and others. The first digit of the status code indicates one of the five classes of response. These classes must be recognized by an HTTP client. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) governs the official registry of HTTP status codes. Additional decimal sub-codes provide a little more specific information and direction. The following list details what each of the five classes mean as well as the specific decimal sub-codes under each class.

Having a great URL structure for SEO might seem straightforward, but it is often times overlooked. URLs are really the building blocks of your website and can make or break your traffic. While it is important to mindfully create these URLs, these tips are not critical to every single page that is created. Your website will not perish if every single suggestion is not followed, but it's more about doing these things where you can so that you are contributing to the success of your website. Keep in mind that these URLs are being read by humans and search engines alike, and it is not very difficult to structure them in a way that will please both.