Website Design Tips

by Lucas Heijn

Designing your website is usually done with sales in mind. First impressions are very important. It’s much like visiting the headquarters of an off-line company. For this reason, it is very important to keep good design principles in mind. Your site needs to be unable to reach the maximum number of people in the most styles possible.

Navigation.

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.

Simplicity is the key word. let’s say your site had 1000 or more articles. Your visitor is looking for a particular article, you need to make it simple to find. You can do this by using an SQL driven database, or just an index. This means that your visitor is now able to locate a particular article easily. By providing this index or database driven search you have created a hassle free way for your visitor to find what he was looking for.

Navigation must always be simple and straightforward, so that even a young child could work it out. It’s a good idea to stay away from complicated flash-based navigation or multi-tiered drop-down menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate your site, they will leave.

It is important to avoid confusion. If your visitors become confused you will lose them. At times your visitors will be deeply engrossed in surfing your site. Your pages must make it possible for them to know where they are, and how to get back to the main page.

Here are a few more ideas that you will find helpful.

#1 Do not use splash pages.

A splash page is the first page you see when you arrive at a website These are often very beautiful with graphics. They often have the words welcome or, click here to enter. In fact, they are just pretty pages with no real purpose. Don’t give your visitors a reason to click the back button. You then give them the real value of your site up front without the splash pages.

#2 Do not use excessive banner advertisements.

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 don’t use 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.

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