The Characteristics Of A Well (web design) Designed Website
No commentsBy Peter Brittain
If you want to convert your hit products and services into well-paying online clients, you need to present a well designed Website that not only attracts new visitors, but also keeps them excited enough to remain within the various pages of your Website for a long time. However, there are some characteristics that should be embedded in your Website, if you want your visitors to stay glued to your Website.
Once your Search Engine Optimization SEO experts have swung into action and ensured that your Website name figures in the top list of any engine search, then the next difficult process is to keep your visitors interested enough, to surf your Website and also provide business to you. A well-designed Website should start off with an attractive home page that looks exciting and enticing without looking crass or too cluttered. Stick within the parameters of your business format in your home page. Offer precise menus and sub-menus to your visitors to make your Website easily navigable. Use colors and graphics that are easy on the eyes and do not strain your Website speed. Try to get into the skin of your target audience, in order to understand their needs. This will enable you to offer a better-designed Website.
While graphics, animations and sound might be required to enhance your Website, it is also essential to present high-quality content that can be easily read by your visitors. Do not use fancy fonts for your key content. An easy-to-read font should be used to display concise content that should be totally relevant to your Website. A white background with simple black fonts will work best in any resolution. If you are displaying blogs on your Website, then dedicate a specific corner of your Website only for blogs. Do not try to provide fancy background designs, while displaying your content, since it might dilute and confuse the quality of your content.
Your Website should also offer fast navigation, so that your visitors can quickly navigate between various menus. If you are offering various products in your Website, then add an image of your product along with a brief explanation of the various features of that product. Use Alt-tags to insert a short description in all your images. This will help during the SEO process as well as provide some relief to those visitors, who may not be able to view the image due to any reason. If your Website demands animated images, then do provide them to make an impressive impression, but try out various resolutions to achieve the right balance of visual attraction without any loss of speed.
Assume that a lot of your visitors might not be Internet savvy. Keep all navigation menus simple to understand and provide high quality links that are active at all times. Remove outdated images and content from your Website at regular intervals and add the latest information to your Website to keep it fresh and interesting. Test your Website on a daily basis, since adding and deleting data and images from it might sometimes result in unforeseen errors.
Thus, a well designed website should be functional, yet fun and simple, yet eye-catching. It should be constructed after a thorough study of the target and should encourage the visitors to linger on. The above characteristics are absolutely necessary, if you want your visitors to get so impressed that they visit your Website time-after-time.
Peter is a director of northland digital agency which owns web design company slinky web design, and writes earth movin media, a web design blog.
Questions To Answer Before Designing Your Website
By Peter Brittain
When you are designing a new website or re-designing your old one, it is imperative that you first have a clear mental picture of what you want from your site. Use the following questionnaire to make the process easy. It will save you a lot of trouble later on.
1. What type of a website do you want? - Your site can be a brochure site with a small introductory message about your company. Alternatively, it can be an entertainment site drawing visitors through entertainment still providing topic and company information, an E-commerce site selling stuff through affiliates, or a community site aimed at building a community.
2. What are the reasons for building a site? - Are you providing customer services, selling a product, providing general or product specific information, want to earn more money, mark your presence on the web, or any other reason?
3. What goals do you wish to achieve through your site? - You must take into consideration both your short-term and long-term goals. Define a measuring technique to determine the websites success rate.
4. What is the nature of your business? - Prepare a brief note on what ever your business offers by way of products or services, their distinctive features and what would be the areas that you would like to reach.
5. How will the site figure in your marketing plan? - Do you want the site to be informative, unusual, innovative, educational, supportive etc. and whether you have thought over design elements to support your vision while building the site. Do you stand in need of customized graphic support or you are able to supply all images and other inputs.
6. What e-commerce solution are you targeting?
It is necessary to establish the following:
Whether you want a non-interactive site where visitors are required to print out order forms, fill them and fax the order, or place an order over the phone.
A single page order form which sends orders via e-mail
Multi-page order forms that includes a shopping cart and allows visitors to select products as they look through your site, change orders if they want to and preview the order before submitting it online. Do customers communicate orders via email, or do they download through FTP.
A complete e-commerce solution with shopping cart and fully automated real time credit card processing that is linked to a backend database.
7. Do buying seasons affect sales? - This will let you understand if your site needs changes for the different seasons and what you will have to do to entice people to shop off-season.
8. How will you keep the website current? - The information on your site needs updating from time to time. You must decide in advance, who is going to create fresh content and update it. If you have an interactive site, then who is going to answer emails and phone calls.
9. Do you require domain registration? - Keeping your budget in view, you must determine your domain registration and web hosting service requirements including yearly maintenance.
Peter is a director of northland digital agency which owns web design company slinky web design, and writes earth movin media, a web design blog.
Locate A Web Developer For Your Website Needs
Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 11:40 pm and is filed under design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
