Website Design Tips

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.

Keep Navigation in Mind

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.

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 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.

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 Be careful not to use too many banner ads

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 don’t use audio on your site

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.