When designing a web site you need to take several things under consideration.  First and foremost you must decide on what you want to accomplish.  Much like you should do at the beginning of every wrestling season, make goals for your website.  For example, do you want to promote wrestling, promote your club exclusively, communicate information to other parents about your club, showcase your talented wrestlers, encourage your beginning wrestlers.  All of these are good goals for a web site.  The more specific, the better the site.

Keep in mind when designing your site that it is a good idea to separate pages into two or three separate pages. For example, if you put several photos or worse yet, all your photos on one page - the page will take a long time to load and your visitors will leave. Break your photos into one photo per page. Take a look at the photos at http://www.eteamz.com/raiderswrestling

This is a good example of how to separate your photos so they load quickly. 

Another tip for photos, is reduce the size of the photo by cropping the photo to remove unwanted extra space and then reduce the photo's actual size in the image editor.  If you don't do this and do the image reduction on the web page, your photo's size in kilobytes will still be high and load slowly.  Keep in mind your visitors don't want to wait for photos to download.  Your photos and images may be awesome, but if no one sticks around to wait for them to download you have not accomplished anything.

Keep in mind that many of your visitors may not start at your home page when they visit your site.   You need to make navigating the site very easy.  Put links to your main pages.   On this site you can get to every page within a couple clicks.  At several of my competitor's sites I get lost and can't get back to where I want to go.  Put links to your main 5-8 pages on every page. At the very least, put links to your home page and site map.

Finally, if you are going to go through the trouble of building a web site - make sure your visitors can actually read it.  Your team colors might be the greatest in the world, but if your colors are similar you won't be able to read the text.  I can't tell you how many wrestling sites I have been to that I can't read the text because the background and text are so similar.  Also, keep the background simple so people can read the text.   Don't make the background so busy that your visitor gets a head ache.

The final suggestion is to exchange links with other wrestling sites. This will be bring visitors to your site from the other links and people will revisit your site to take a look at the new links you have added. Let us know if you would like to trade links with us. We are always looking to add more links.

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