More people are accessing websites on their mobile phone, particularly as the price of data usage on mobile phones is decreasing. You might find that visitors only need to do simple things, such as find your phone number, but a website that is not built with mobile phone usage in mind can make even the simplest of tasks painful.

The easiest way to support mobile phones is to have your web developer create a stylesheet (css) specific for mobile phones. Then, needless parts of the website can be hidden, and colours, fonts and layout elements can be altered to make the website fit nicely on a very small screen.

If your website is larger and more complex, and each page consumes substantial bandwidth just to view, then you might choose to create a separate mobile phone version of your website. A common standard is to use a subdomain called ‘m’, so your URL would be http://m.example.com. You might choose to present just a sub-set of your website’s content on this URL, but ideally, it would be identical to your normal website in content, but have a custom display suitable for mobile phones.

Spammers use scripts that crawl the web and fill out forms, hoping the form will result in someone receiving their spam message.

This causes problems for business owners who can become inundated with spam through their contact/enquiry, order and booking forms, making it difficult and time-consuming to sort through and find the legitimate submissions.

Two effective ways to prevent, or minimise, this type of spamare:

• Have your web developer modify the form to discard any form submissions that contain more than three URLs (which would never occur in ordinary usage)
• Have your web developer install a CAPTCHA (part of the form that requires the user to do something, such as identify a word in an image, that a computer script cannot do)

The former is non-intrusive, and might suffice for many websites. The latter is intrusive, in that it requires your visitor to do more work, but might be worth it in order to reduce workload in sifting through countless spam form submissions.

Many situations lend themselves to using a popup window, where a smaller version of the browser window opens up on top of the main browser window.

However, recent web browsers go to great lengths to prevent popup windows from appearing, which is great for stopping intrusive popup advertising, but not much good when a website has a legitimate reason for displaying something in a popup window.

All major web browsers now require several clicks (and often a page reload) to allow a popup window for a particular website, so the easiest approach is to find an alternative method of presenting that information.

If you must use a popup, provide graphical instructions to your visitor on how to accept the popup window — ideally, detect the browser your visitor is using, and show instructions specific to that browser. (It’s not that hard to cover the main web browsers in use today: Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.)

When you redesign your website, often you will add, rename and remove some pages as part of the restructuring that inevitably happens at the same time.

You should take care to remove your old website before uploading your new website; this will ensure any old pages aren’t left lying around for visitors to stumble upon and become lost.

Then, make sure your web developer puts in place a “redirect” for every old page to an equivalent new page (or the home page, if there isn’t a good match.) Not only will this benefit visitors who might have bookmarked a certain page, or clicked a link from another person’s website; but the search engines will use this information to update its index and make sure it displays your new pages rather than your old pages in the search results.

Ever notice how big business goes out of their way to hide contact details on their websites?

People want to contact you, and the sooner you can establish real, tangible contact, the quicker you’ll make that sale.

Make your contact details visible on every page of your website, in the footer. Include your email, phone number and physical address. Consider adding timezone details, hours of operation and international dialling codes — and invite your visitors to make contact!

(And, no. Hiding your contact details will not make you look like a big business. Being a big business makes you look like a big business.)