Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Five Crucial Rules in Website Design

By Ferdinand Emy

Talking about your website, more attention should be paid to every minute detail to make certain it performs excellently to serve its purpose. Here are seven necessary rules of thumb to observe to ensure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they're just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

two) Don't use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy persons have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, furnish more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have an easy and clear navigation

You have to endow a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to utilise it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered drop-down menus. If your visitors do not know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you'll want to ensure they know which part of the site they're in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant data or navigate to any section of the site with no trouble. Do not confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

5) Avoid employing audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you'll want to ensure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, ensure they have a good number of control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

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