Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarter 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.
Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.
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.
Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate 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.
Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.
Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.
Use CSS to style your page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.
Tags: website, Website Design
March 4th, 2008 at 8:17 am
[...] but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.read more | digg [...]
March 4th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
great post…good tips
March 5th, 2008 at 1:40 am
Hey Mike,
What your take on Recognition or Identifable Logos like:
Hacker Safe
BBB
SSL
Even Ebay Seller and Amazon
I tell a lot of my website clients that they should use them if they are selling products and services.
Gives the website visitor more confidence that they can shop and buy from you.
March 5th, 2008 at 6:05 am
Really, they do nothing for me. I just know they cost some money, and it is easy to add them. But as for deciding to buy something between a guy with all of the logos and a mom and pop website with no logos, I choose the better price!!
March 5th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
Yeah,
Got the information from the Brad Fallon and Andy Jenkins. The Stompernet guys, they run that heat and click test. For example they put the Hackersafe logo up at the top right hand corner of one of their websites and apparently their sales increased. They do all sorts of tests like that with other logos as well…Anthony
March 8th, 2008 at 4:32 am
Hmmm, I’ll have to try that one. With regards to a website design. It’s often good to read posts like this just to refresh and get perspective. Sometimes you can get so caught up with content, you forget.
May 1st, 2008 at 3:51 am
[...] but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.http://www.socialseoguide.com/social-bookmarking/2008/03/04/design-a-good-website/WWWW Founded March 10,1996WWWW:. The World Wide Waterfalls Web! This web is dedicated to Griff who [...]