Designing A website? Here Are Some Tips
July 14, 2008
Your website is the heart of your business. It’s much like the headquarters of an off-line company. For this reason, it is very important to practice good design principles this make sure that your sites reach the maximum number of people, and thus make that maximum number of sales.
Navigation.
It is very important that you give clear direction on how to navigate your site. It should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to get around your site. If a visitor is confused about how to get around your site they will leave it and go somewhere else.
Visitors come to your site, because they’re interested in the content. Let’s say you have a large number of articles or downloads available on your site, you need to make it simple for your visitor to find what he is looking for. You may do this by providing an SQL driven data base search, or just a simple index. By providing one of these features you have made it simple for your visitor to to be able to find the content they were looking for.
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.
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.
A few more pointers that may help.
#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 Banner ads don’t work. be careful not to waste too much space on them
Even the newest people using the Internet have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements. This means you would be wasting valuable Web real-estate in using banners. It is far better to provide valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content. This will lead your visitors to feel they want to buy instead of being 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.
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