Your website, by extension, is the impression visitors have of you, and also is where your business resides. It's like the headquarter of an off line company, and either gives the impression of a run down shack or an impressive corporate office building. So, it is important to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.
This advice also applies to any kind of website. If your site doesn't sell a product (such as a blog, article directory etc.), but gives information, you want to sell your website to visitors as an enjoyable place to visit, along with great information!
Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion. Placing your navigation at the bottom of the page is not normally a good idea, although a link to a site map is perfectly acceptable.
Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.
Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Fire fox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.
Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.
Use CSS for your page content because it can save you a lot of work by styling all elements on your website at one time. This is more of a suggestion for you as the designer than your visitors, but still a good thing to do.
Try to keep you site colors to a minimum. Having 10 different colors that don't match (unless it's your intention to do so) may give an unappealing impression to your visitors rather than drawing them into an inviting environment.
Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.
Check all your site content for spelling errors. Everybody makes spelling errors, but no one wants to see them (although I'm convinced there are those that love finding mis-spellings!), so run everything through a spell checker, then look for obvious mistakes. Some more common blunders are using "there" when you meant "their". Spell checkers won't catch that kind of thing, so check your sites content carefully.
Finally, an old saying about women and makeup truly applies to web design. Less is More.
Author Resource:
Jan Michaels is the creator of the Article Friendly Article Publishing Script for php & mysql, and can be found at: Article Friendly Article Friendly is Not Encoded, with tons of options, or try my new Serenity Niche Article Script with RESELL Rights! Submitted By ArticleUnited.com Submission Services
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