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What Does It Take For Good Website Design?
Your website is where your business resides -- it's like the brick
and mortar building of an offline company. Hence, it is important
to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches
out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people
as possible.
1) Clear Directions on the Navigation. Make sure your website is easy
to navigate around. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.
2) Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site
load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary.
If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize
them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.
3) Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.
4) 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. Do not let your
visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button!
5) Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.
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
valuable 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.
Background Music, Yes or No?
Background music unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and every time a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again.
If I were your visitor, I'd just turn off my speakers or leave your site.
Moreover, they just add to the visitors burden when viewing your site
users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your
site as it is meant to be viewed.
Let me remind you that as the webmaster of your website, your job is to make sure your website does what it's meant to do effectively. Don't let some minor mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally and sending you customers looking somewhere else!
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