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5 Important Rules in
Website Design
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When it comes to your web site, extra attention should be
paid to every small detail to make sure it performs optimally
to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb
to observe to make sure your website performs well.
1) Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive
at a web-site. They normally have a very beautiful image with
words like "welcome" or "click here to enter".
In fact, they are 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.
2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to
ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable
web site real estate space. Instead, provide 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 a simple and clear navigation
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation
menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay
away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered drop
down menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they
will leave your site.
4) Have a clear indication of where the user is
When site visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site,
you will want to make sure they know which part of the site
they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to
browse relevant information or navigate to any section of
the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion
means "abandon ship"!
5) Avoid using audio on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site,
reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not
annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If
you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control
over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.
Why Hire A Website
Designer?
A lot of online-business owners start with no money. They
have to do everything themselves -- the preparation of a product,
the development of a marketing strategy, the actual building
of a website to cater to their product's marketing needs.
As their business expands over time, they will find that their
simple "homemade" site might not be enough to cover
everything, and they will have to take a day or two away to
simply dedicate that to the website expansion.
Sounds familiar? Chances are, you're someone who started
everything with no money too, so you're pretty skeptical when
it comes to giving away your money in exchange for something
that you could have done yourself. However, there is a lot
more to hiring a designer than just finishing up a job that
you don't want to do.
When you hire a web designer to do your job for you, you
are doing more than just handing over the "dirty job"
to someone else. In fact, by paying a little money, you can
let the designer worry about the little annoyances that always
evade the main picture and only come haunting when you're
halfway through the job. That way, you will be more focused
and have more time to spend on your actual business strategy.
On the other hand, the designers you hire a professionals
so they are good at what they do. By outsourcing your web
design jobs to them, you won't have to worry when problems
surface because you can always get them to fix it for you.
Again, they will be able to pin point the problem and fix
it faster than you probably will be able to.
Also, the work you pay for will turn out more professional
than what you can achieve because the web designers have been
doing it longer than you have. After all, they do it for a
living so they have to be good!
So, remember to not just work your business, but grow your
business too!
Web Design Elements
to Avoid on Your Site
As a web designer, you should design your websites to give
your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression
and most important of all a welcoming experience. It doesn't
matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world
-- if your website is poorly done you won't be able to sell
even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your
website by the lousy design.
When I'm talking about a "good design", I'm not
only talking about a good graphical design. A professional
web design will be able to point out that there are many components
which contribute to a good website design -- accessibility
design, interface or layout design, user experience design
and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design.
Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web
designs I've come across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare
that against your own site as a checklist and if anything
on your site fits the criteria, you should know it's high
time to take serious action!
1) Background music
Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD
or anything related to music, I would really advise you to
stay away from putting looping background music onto your
site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine
if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and every time
a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background
music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I'd just
turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, they just
add to the visitors burden when viewing your site -- users
on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view
your site as it is meant to be viewed.
2) Extra large/small text size
As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics
-- user accessibility is one big part of it too! You should
design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably
sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining
their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website
or your sales copy is, if it's illegible you won't be selling
anything!
3) Popup windows
Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements
that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention
so I just close them on instinct every time each one manages
to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like
many users out there!) and, well, pops up on my screen. Imagine
if you had a very important message to convey and you put
it in a popup window that gets killed most of the time it
appears on a visitor's screen. Your website loses its function
immediately!
In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster
your job is to make sure your website does what it's meant
to do effectively. Don't let some minor mistakes stop your
site from functioning optimally!
Reducing Load Time
Through Image Optimization
Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband
every year, a large portion of the web's population is still
running on good old dial up connections. It is therefore unwise
to count them out of the equation when you're designing your
website, and a very major consideration we have to make for
dial up users is the loading time of your website.
Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in
a very short time even on a dial up connection. The culprit
of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website,
and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between
using just enough images to attract your users and not to
bog down the overall loading time of your site.
You should also go to a greater length and optimize every
image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time
possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software
to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby
effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting
its appearance.
If you own Photo shop, it will be obvious to you that when
you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and
lets you choose the "quality" of the JPEG image
-- normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will
preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small
file size. If you do not have Photo shop, there are many free
image compressors online that you can download and use to
reduce your image's file size.
On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG
format to get the best quality at the least file size. You
can also save your images in GIF format -- the image editing
software clips away all the color information not used in
your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible.
However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance
of your image, so make your choice wisely!
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