July 19, 2008

Tips For Designing Your Website

by Lucas Heijn

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.

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.

Once we have the visitor to our site, it is important to keep them there. They will only stay if they can work out how they can get to the content they want. if they can’t work out how to navigate the site, they will leave. I would recommend that you stay away from complicated flash-based navigation and drop-down menus.

You need to make sure that there’s navigation on all your pages. visitors can become deeply engrossed in surfing through your site, so they need to know where they are and how to get back to the main page. Make sure your visitors never become confused. Confusion means that they leave.

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 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 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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Filed under Home Based Business by Lucas Heijn

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