Designing A website? Here Are Some Tips
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.
Plan 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.
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.
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 tips that will help.
#1 Do not use splash pages.
On some websites the first page you come to is a pretty page that welcomes you to the site and may also have something like “click here to enter”. This is a splash page. It serves no real purpose other than to be pretty as often they are highly graphical pages. The reason to avoid splash pages is to give your visitor no reason to click the back button.
#2 Do not use excessive banner advertisements.
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 Audio
If you want a visitor to spend a long time on your site reading your content you need to make sure they’re not getting annoyed by some looping audio on your website. If you’re determined to add audio to your site, make sure they have some control over it. This could be volume or muting controls, these would work fine.
