Thursday, February 12, 2009

Get an Optimal Website Design

By James Hillard

A beautiful website design can never compensate slow performance in any website design. One very common occurrence in many websites owned by amateurs is the use of fancy graphic works that need a very long time to load them.

These are the rules of a good website design. 1) Do not be tempted into using slash pages: Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. These pages use elaborate designs created with the purpose to entertain the visitor with fancy animations, brilliant photos and include welcoming words such as "hello" or "welcome" or "click here to enter our website". They are pages with no purpose, and serves to discourage uses from fully utilizing the actual purpose of the website due to their slow loading time. This page serves a good purpose to entertain but if website conversion is your goal, it can be a big barrier for you to achieve your goals.

2) Be careful using banners: When banners are displayed on a web page, they are usually right at the top but can frequently be seen located elsewhere, including the foot of the page also. Even the newbie to the internet have trained themselves to ignore banner ads so placing them would only waste precious real estate space. The best way to utilize web space would be to use good contents and weave your affiliate links into them so that the users would not feel coerced into buying.

3) Keep all navigations simple: Keep navigation simple so that the youngest user can use it. Avoid the use of flash menus or multi-tiered menus because generally they are not a good idea as far as easy navigation is concerned. Any form of complicated navigation will cause them to leave your site for good. Have a sitemap added to the website design to help them find what they are looking for.

4) Let it be clear on the user where he is at the moment: Give them a clear view of where they are now and how to get to where they want to be. This way, they can head to the right information they are looking for. When each link that has been visited is marked in some way form the ones that are fresh, visitors can easily know which is fresh and which is fresh and which is not. If you confuse your visitors in any way they will leave.

5) Achieve all your goals without the use of audio: If you want your visitors to stay a long time and read the contents, do not irritate em with your audio. One can get irritated by continuous sounds being played over and over again. If adding audios seems like a good idea to you, do make sure you provide some form of control such as muting or volume control so that your visitors can adapt to their surroundings. If you wish for the visitors to return to your site, learn to apply all these website design rules and you can reap the benefits of long term traffic.

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