The 6 Things You Should Include In Your Website

Your website has a beautiful design with tons of useful content but there may sill be scope for improvement in other areas. For instance, does your website support Live Tiles? Can regular visitors search your content from their browsers? These are small things but they collectively add up and can surprisingly make a big difference to your website.

1. Build a Windows Live Tile

With Windows 8.1, people can pin your website as a live tile on to their Windows start screen. This is a live tile so it will automatically pull new stories from your site’s RSS feed and may even show them as notifications.

Go to buildmypinnedsite.com, upload your site’s logo, add your RSS feed URL and it will generate the meta tags that you can put in the HEAD of your website template. See Scott Hanselman’s blog for the more technical details.

2. Add OpenSearch to your Site

Most web browsers now let you search any website directly from the address bar without having to go through Google. For instance, in Google Chrome, you can type a website URL  press the TAB key and then enter your search query to find related pages from that website.

You can link to the OpenSearch XML from your site’s HEAD and your site’s search engine will automatically get added to the user’s browser when they visit your site the next time. The Chromium website has more details how you can include OpenSearch in your website.

3. Add a humans.txt file

You know about robots.txt but the other text file that is also gaining popularity ishumans.txt. You need to place the file in the root directory of your website and it is expected to contain information about the different people who are behind that website.

Humans.txt files are totally optional but big websites like Google and Flickr have created one. 

4. Include Touch Icons for iOS & Android

You should upload touch icons for your website and these will be used when someone places a shortcut of your website on their mobile homescreen. The touch icons may have your site’s logo or even the initials so that users can instantly relate them with your brand.

Use the iconogen tool to generate the various touch icons for Android and Apple devices. 

5. Add the Homescreen Call out

If you have ever visited the Google Maps website on your iPad, you may have seen a prompt that points to the share button of the Safari browser inviting you to add a shortcut to the Maps website on the iOS homescreen.

You can include similar functionality in your own website with this JavaScript widget. It works for the both iOS Safari and Chrome on Android and the messages can be shown in many languages.

6. Allow RSS Auto-discovery

RSS feeds are alive and there’s a section of Internet users who still prefer to read stories in their RSS Clients.

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