July 19th, 2008

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.

A splash page is the first page you see when you arrive at a website These are often very beautiful with graphics. They often have the words welcome or, click here to enter. In fact, they are just pretty pages with no real purpose. Don’t give your visitors a reason to click the back button. You then give them the real value of your site up front without the splash pages.

#2 Banner ads don’t work. be careful not to waste too much space on them

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

Have you ever visited a site and you are trying to concentrate on the content, but find the audio overwhelming. What did you do? There are a few options. One is turn down the sound on your computer or hopefully, there is a volume control on the site. If you have plenty of content on your site you will be better off not using audio. If you are determined to have audio on your site, make sure there is a volume control or muting available.

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