Your website is where your business resides -- it's like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is very important to practise good design principles to ensure your site reaches out to the utmost number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.
Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise to ensure that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.
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 to ensure that they have a minimum file size.
Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate 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 ensure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a great deal of prospective visitors.
Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is totally 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 to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.
Website templates are very affordable they usually save you a lot of effort and time when you desire to create a new layout for your website. However, a great deal of people make mistakes in the process of choosing and using a web template and end up with something that was unlike the image they had in mind. Here are some guidelines that will help you avoid those mistakes.
The first obvious mistake you should be aware of is using a template that is very popular. If many people use similar template, your website will not appear unique at all plus your credibility as a solid, different website will probably be tarnished. In other words, you will appear generic just like your next-door neighbours.
To whole point of using a web template is to save time and effort. You simply change the title and appropriate details and you're done. The most important mistake one makes is to customize the template beyond recognisation. While that may be good in the way that you're creating a unique graphic, you're defying the very purpose of using a web template -- saving time and effort.
However, on the opposite side, if a template you buy is suitable but some changes must be made to fit your site's theme, then you will have to take some time to make the changes. For example, you'll find a very nice template that suits your hobby site except the original designer has put an image of stamps within the header. you'll find images of garden plants and spades to replace the stamps for your gardening hobby site. However, do only make the necessary changes and don't redesign the whole template.
In some circumstances, many people simply make the incorrect choice of templates. This is a very subjective issue but you have to be careful in selecting templates to fit your audience. Do not choose templates just because they are pretty, choose them because they serve your purpose.