Website Design Tips
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.
Plan Navigation
Avoid confusion.You must give clear direction on how to navigate your site. If your visitor is confused about how to get around your site they will just leave it and go somewhere else. Your navigation, must be clear, uncluttered, and concise.
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 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 Banner ads don’t work. be careful not to waste too much space on them
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 Audio
Have you ever visited a site and you are trying to concentrate on the content, but find the audio overwhelming. What did you do? There are a few options. One is turn down the sound on your computer or hopefully, there is a volume control on the site. If you have plenty of content on your site you will be better off not using audio. If you are determined to have audio on your site, make sure there is a volume control or muting available.
