Designing A website? Here Are Some Tips

by: LucasHeijn
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Word Count: 536

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.

Plan Navigation

It is very important that you give clear direction on how to navigate your site. It should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to get around your site. If a visitor is confused about how to get around your site they will 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.

Here are a few more tips that will help.

#1 Do not use splash pages.

What is a splash page? It's the first page you see when you arrive at a website. A splash page is often a very attractive page with lots of graphics. They will often have the words welcome to my site or "click here to enter". They are in fact, just pretty pages with no real purpose. The reason not to use the splash pages is so as not to give your visitors reason to click the back button. Visitors come from content. Not pretty 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 Avoid using 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.

About the Author

Need help in setting up your up own web page? Information is available in free videos and articles from LinksParadise. This a free membership site with how-to and videos on such subjects as How to build a website, creating web site graphics and more.  

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