Website Design Tips

Posted on July 18, 2008
Filed Under Day Online Trading | Leave a Comment

Designing your website is usually done with sales in mind. First impressions are very important. It’s much like visiting the headquarters of an off-line company. For this reason, it is very important to keep good design principles in mind. Your site needs to be unable to reach the maximum number of people in the most styles possible.

Plan 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.

You need to make it easy for visitors to get around and find the content on your site. Let’s say you have 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.

Your goal in navigation should be to keep it so simple that even a young child would be able to navigate your site. Multi tiered drop-down menus and complicated flash-based navigation should be avoided. If your visitor can’t work out how to navigate your site they will 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 are and how to get back to the main page. It is important not to create confusion with visitors. Confusion means abandon ship!

A few more pointers that may help.

#1 Do not use splash pages.

On some websites the first page you come to is a pretty page that welcomes you to the site and may also have something like “click here to enter”. This is a splash page. It serves no real purpose other than to be pretty as often they are highly graphical pages. The reason to avoid splash pages is to give your visitor no reason to click the back button.

#2 Do not use excessive banner advertisements.

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

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

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