Tips For Designing Your Website

by Lucas Heijn

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.

Plan 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.

You need to make it simple for visitors to get around and find the content on your site. Let’s state you’ve 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.

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’ll 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’re 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’ll find helpful.

#1 Don’t 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’ll 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 Don’t use excessive banner advertisements.

I would nearly say that I failed to see why banner ads are used today. Nobody even bothers to look at them anymore. For this reason, I would suggest that instead of using banner ads you provide content for your visitors. You are also able to weave in affiliate links into this content. This would help your visitors to feel when they buy that they’re buying because they want to and won’t feel pushed.

#3 don’t use audio on your site

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’ve some control over it. This could be volume or muting controls, these would work fine.

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