Ok, this is an article I really had to post. Since I have been working in the website development industry for the last 10 years and I have visited hundreds of websites of racing pigeons fanciers, I think my advices can be useful. Here we go!

1. FRESH. Please, try to update your site at least monthly! You can’t tell me there is no news. Our hobby offers us news and surprises daily! Ideally, you would have a blog where you would post often. You can post news about the races, results, evolution of the loft, and so on. You should also interact with users, they should be able to add comments. Of course this doesn’t have a high priority, if you are very busy and the internet isn’t the place where you spend a lot of time. But please, don’t let us find the note “last updated january 2004″ !

2. DESIGN. The site has to be very user-friendly. In the first 5 seconds after I entered your site, I must already be able to know what’s the site about, who’s site it is, what sections it has and when it was updated. It’s very important. We are very busy nowadays, and the information available is too much, our eyes browse the pages very fast in search of interesting bits of text and photo. Offer such interesting stuff right from the beginning!

3. ORGANIZED. Please arrange all your content and don’t just drop it on a single page. You should have a section for each main topic of the site, like “About me”, “Photo gallery”, “Results”, “Stock pigeons”, “Articles”, “Contact”.

4. WHITE DOVE. Please! Give up that white dove with its wings flapping. It looks nice as an animation but damn, it doesn’t have anything to do with the racing pigeons hobby! (well, I know there are some white racers too, but they are rare).

5. ALL CAPS. Never use ALL CAPS. Jakob Nielsen, usability guru says: “That’s always bad. Reading speed is reduced by 10% and users are put off by the appearance of shouting.”

6. FONT. The font family used should be easy to read. The size of the text should be medium to large, offering the possibility to change the text size if the user wants to.

7. TEXT COLOR. Black text on white page background will always work. White text on black background is ALWAYS very hard to read, so please avoid it. If you want, test this and your eyes will tell you this in a few minutes. Think about the good old paper… it’s never black! Think about newspapers and books!