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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.

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.

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.

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 Be careful not to use too many banner ads

I would almost say that I failed to see why banner ads are used today. Nobody even bothers to look at them anymore. For this reason, I would suggest that instead of using banner ads you provide content for your visitors. You are also able to weave in affiliate links into this content. This would help your visitors to feel when they buy that they are buying because they want to and will not feel pushed.

#3 don’t use audio on your site

With plenty of content on your site your visitors will spend quite a lot of time reading the content. You will need to make sure that they do not become annoyed, because of some looping audio on your website. If you feel that you must have audio on your site, make sure that you also provide a volume control or muting.

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