Solid Web Design Guidelines for Online Business

By Lavender Jonshon


When considering the various components that go into creating a good site, you realize how complicated web design is. You don't want your site to only appeal to visitors but also to receive high rankings from the search engines. But even if you are successful with impressing the search engines, it won't really do much unless you make your site attractive enough for visitors to stay on it. The "bounce rate" of your traffic, namely people who leave as soon as they land on your site, is mainly dependant on how nice your site looks. If you want to achieve effective results in the long run then you need to focus on good web design. While they achieve great results with the search engines, some sites have very poor results in terms of sales. We will look at a few hints and tips you can implement when designing your website.

Creating a good site that draws visitors back is highly dependent on providing useful content that they will find helpful. Your design's visual elements may work well to bring in the wow factor when they visit your site the first time but to make your site is sticky and to have people coming back, you need to have compelling content. This can be achieved simply by making sure you always add fresh content because people are always searching for new information online. If you want to make sure people actually read your content you must make it interesting as well because many articles are ignored because they are boring even if the information is useful. One secret to sparkling content is to make sure you write in a similar fashion to the way you talk and thus you will avoid a stale tone. You must also try to keep your content from being too long and complicated because people don't have the time and patience to wade through large amounts of information. Also remember to enquire what they think of your site. If you interact with your visitors, your payoff will be substantial in the long term. The design on your website needs to be consistent across all the web pages of your site. By changing the design from page to page, people on your site may become confused and have problems when they navigate looking for important content. You can achieve this by using the same type of color schemes on all the pages.

The best approach is to know your market, for example - some markets will not respond very well to the use of popups. You need to test because sometimes people will just leave right away if they see popups. Popups have a bad name, so you'll need to be mindful about creating a bad impression for yourself. The conservative and probably profitable route to take is to not use them. Don't put your reputation at stake by having these on your page as they might make you look like a spammer by some users. The healthy alternative is to use a subscription form on your site with a good incentive.

It depends on your market, but usually you want to follow proven design ideas and conventions because people relate to them faster. At this point, surfers are accustomed to seeing the usual bookmark buttons, RSS feed buttons, etc on all sites. If you try and go against the tide, the chances of them missing on vital ways to connect with you are high. They're used to seeing these things in certain locations, and it helps to create a feeling of security, that everything is all right.

All in all, website design isn't difficult once you know what you're doing.

Just keep in mind that the more effort you put into designing your site, the better your success will be in the long run.




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