Website Design - The Most Important Question by Suzanne Carter

The single most important question to be asked when looking at the design of your website is "Does it attract visitors and encourage them to browse further than the home page?"

The actual design of the website is of course, very important, but there is no point in having a great look if visitors, once on your site, just aren't interested in finding out more about your business and your products or service.

It is critical to look at a website from a visitor's point of view. Visitors to your site will glance at the page, scan some text and click on the first link that catches their interest. In fact, there are large parts of a page that they may not even look at.

Most visitors search for something interesting or useful so if a page on your site, whether it is your home page or an inside page, doesn't meet the expectations of the visitor they will move away from your site to someone else's.

Is it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for? Make your navigation intuitive and non complicated. Your navigation options need to be visible at first glance. People won't stay on your site if they can't find their way around it.

Visitors appreciate quality and credibility so one of the first things to look at is the content of each page. High quality content actually wins over high quality design.

When writing your content make sure that you use short and concise phrases and sentences. It is important to come to the point quickly. Promotional style writing won't be read. Long text blocks will be skipped. Break up your text by using headers, sub headers, visual elements and lists with bullet points. The use of visual elements i.e. graphics can certainly add to the design but keep it minimal otherwise visitors may become distracted.

Focus on a clear, clean and simple look and feel. Don't clutter your pages with too much content or visual elements. You can always split up your content and add new pages. Communicate what you need to concisely and clearly. Grab the attention of your visitors so that they want to find out how you can help them.

Most people using the internet to find a product or service that meets their requirements are pretty impatient so if your website doesn't meet their expectations or they can't easily find what they are looking for they will leave and potentially move on to your competitors' site.

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Basic Web Design Tips by Steven Francis

The popularity of the World Wide Web has made web design one of the most sought after services in many parts of the world. Not only are web design services in demand in first world countries where almost everyone has access to the Internet, developing countries such as India and the Philippines have also shown drastic growth in their web design industry. A web designer would always want to build a website that would encourage new users to visit back. With that in mind, web designers should always keep into consideration the following basic concepts in web design which can come in handy in terms of design improvement and usability.

1. Only use safe colors and color combinations. As much as possible only use a maximum of 5 or 6 colors on a website including text. Having to many colors may cause conflict in combination and may become eye-straining. It's also better to have a solid text background so that the content is easily readable.

2. Fonts and font size matter. Just as colors may affect the user's first impression, fonts and font size are an important element of a website as well. Using easy to read fonts such as Arial and Times New Roman is better especially in the content area.

3. Use meta tags. One of the basic concepts in doing offline search engine optimization, meta tags help search engine robots categorize a web page. Placing a targeted keyword in the title tag is essential and can boost the search engine ranking of a website.

4. Too many images. Using images enhances the appearance of a website, but let us not forget that images are heavier than text in terms of file size. Thus a web page with a lot of images may take time to load and may cause a website to lose visitors. For SEO purposes, images should come with an alt tag in order to be crawlable by search engine robots.

5. Avoid flash (or too much of it). Flash animation enhances user experience and gives a website a more "modern" look. But the downside is it may take a long time to load which may not be good especially when not everybody has high speed Internet connection.

6. Make a sitemap. One of the basic concepts in web design that a number of websites seem to take for granted. Sitemaps provide users an easy access to the rest of the pages of the website, giving them an easier time to look for the content that they want. Sitemaps are also important since they make it easy for search engine robots to crawl the pages of the website making indexing easier.

7. Easy navigation/usability. The last thing that a web designer would want is to confuse users with complicated navigational buttons. A website should make sure that its visitors have easy access to each content.

8. Provide a search box. When navigation fails to assist users, their tendency is to look for a search box. A website should always have a search box to further help users in obtaining the information the they want. Failure to do so may force visitors to look for another website instead.

9. Lastly, Avoid too much ads. Not only that too much ads may become annoying (especially flashy banners and pop up ads) for users, too much ads means longer loading time, an issue that may cost a website its visitors.

With millions of existing websites and thousands of competitors on targeted keywords, websites should make sure that they are providing maximum usability to their users. These basic tips are focused on enhancing the usability of a website, an aspect that should be given the same amount of importance and consideration as with the visuals and content of a website.

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