Website Design Tips
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When you come across the headquarters of an off-line company, what you see gives you an impression of the company, good or bad. Your website is just the same. This makes it very important to practice good design principals. Your website need to reach the maximum number of people so that you can make the most sales possible.
Keep Navigation in Mind
keep your navigation simple. It must give clear direction on how to navigate your site. It must be uncluttered and easy to follow. Make sure you avoid confusion, if you’re visitor becomes confused. They were just leave it and go somewhere else.
You need to make it easy for visitors to get around and find the content on your site. Let’s say you have a thousand articles on your site and a visitor is looking for a certain one. You need to make it easy to find. You need to provide a feasible means for someone to find it without a hassle. This could be an SQL driven database, or just a glossary Index. By providing such a feature you make sure your visitors use your site.
Your goal in navigation should be to keep it so simple that even a young child would be able to navigate your site. Multi tiered drop-down menus and complicated flash-based navigation should be avoided. If your visitor can’t work out how to navigate your site they will leave.
If your site has many pages and your visitors become deeply engrossed in surfing your site, you will need to make sure that they know where they are and how to get back to the main page. It is important not to create confusion with visitors. Confusion means abandon ship!
Here are a few more ideas that you will find helpful.
#1 Do not use splash pages.
What is a splash page? It’s the first page you see when you arrive at a website. A splash page is often a very attractive page with lots of graphics. They will often have the words welcome to my site or “click here to enter”. They are in fact, just pretty pages with no real purpose. The reason not to use the splash pages is so as not to give your visitors reason to click the back button. Visitors come from content. Not pretty pages.
#2 Be careful not to use too many banner ads
Do you even bother to look at Banner ads or take notice of them? I would say that almost nobody does. It is obvious from this that they are not effective. If you use lots of banner ads, you are wasting valuable web space that would be better used in providing content for your visitors. In this content, you could weave affiliate links, helping your customers to feel that they want to buy and never feel pushed to buy.
#3 Avoid using audio on your site.
With plenty of content on your site your visitors will spend quite a lot of time reading the content. You will need to make sure that they do not become annoyed, because of some looping audio on your website. If you feel that you must have audio on your site, make sure that you also provide a volume control or muting.
