Website Design Tips Guaranteed to Improve Your Site

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:48:27 +0000

If you’re doing business online, your website is your store front, your virtual business location. As such, it’s critical that you use good website design principles to ensure your site reaches the maximum number of customers and prospects. Believe it or not, there are design strategies that are virtually guaranteed to improve your site’s results.

First, be sure you use clean and understandable navigation on your site. Your navigation menu should contain only what’s needed to direct your visitors around the site without confusion.

Next, you’ll want to consider the load speed of your site. Too many graphics and photos make your site load extremely slow. Use only graphics that are truly an essential part of the design. And optimize the ones you do use with an image editing program such as PhotoShop, or even an online optimizer like the one at DynamicDrive.com. The smaller your image files, the better.

Write short paragraphs and include lots of white space to make reading online easier. If paragraph are too long, break them into shorter ones so text blocks don’t look overwhelming. Large blocks of text deter people from reading the content and the content is what sells your products and services. Do all you can to get visitors to read it.

Follow compliance standards of W3.org to ensure your site is cross-browser compatible. While your site may look great in Internet Explorer, if it’s unreadable in Firefox, Chrome or Opera, you can lose a lot of visitors. Keep in mind version differences as well. Many Internet users are still surfing with older versions of IE, so be sure you consider what your site looks like to them as well.

Don’t get carried away with the number of scripts on your site, either. Too many scripts slow down the load time just like too many images. And some can even crash some browsers! Many scripts aren’t supported on all browsers, so if you rely on a script to provide important data, some of your site visitors could miss important information if the script doesn’t work properly.

Make use of tools such as stylesheets (CSS) and server side includes (SSI) to manage your content. It may not seem important when you first begin because you only have a few pages. But as your site grows CSS and SSI can save you hours of work. If you don’t know how to use them, learn. Or hire a designer who does.

Unless the purpose of your website is purely personal, you need to present a clean, professional image to the virtual world. That’s done with a clean, professional website. It requires some work, but it’s definitely achievable. And well the effort in bringing in added traffic and sales to your business site.

———-

By: Darlene Bishop

About the Author:

Darlene ‘Dee’ Bishop is the owner of Business Support Group where she and her team of professionals provide writing and editorial services, website design and hosting, and virtual assistance to small and home-based business owners, churches and non-profit organizations.

Create a video blog

A Guide to Good Website Design

admin — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:30:14 +0000

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Never allow your site visitors to be in a situation that they have to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Don’t use complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Do not confuse your visitors because confusion means “I am out fo here”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

The Website Doctor » Navigation Menu

Website Design Tips Guaranteed to Improve Your Site

A Guide to Good Website Design