Excellent website design is vital to your website’s success. If the design is effective, it would increase traffic to the site and also increase sales. On the other hand, if the design is poor, it would drive away the users even if you have wonderful products and service.
Consider the following dos and don’ts when designing your website to turn it into a profit center for your business:
Top 10 Dos of Website Design
1. Do provide convenient search and navigation capabilities. Your website design should promote quick and easy search of required information. All pages also need to have the relevant links to information that would improve the user experience. As a rule of thumb, it should take less than two to three clicks for customers to access desired information. You would ensure repeat visits from your customers if you save them time by offering fast navigation and quick access to information they are looking for.
2. Do keep your website content simple and easy to understand. Develop clear, effective and to-the-point content to secure customer attention and help them comprehend better what you have to offer. Your content should address customer problems and provide effective solutions for them.
3. Do give your site a consistent look and feel. If you want your site to look professional, it is important to be consistent in fonts, colors and layout of pages. This is especially important with regards to the interlinked pages.
4. Do make your site accessible on multiple browsers. Users may visit your website using many different web browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer or Chrome. Increasingly large number of users are surfing web sites on the mobile phones. It may make sense to test the site for access on mobile web browsers.
5. Do display your contact information on every page.
List your physical address including other contact information like phone and email on the ‘Contact Us’ page. It is also important to list phone and email at the bottom of each page for easy accessibility.
6. Do put essential information near the heading of each page to enable customers to easily see it and not wait to scroll down to find it.
7. Do use high-quality pictures and graphics. Keep a good balance between the image resolution and time to load them. High quality graphics will appeal to users but would be a turn off if they take too long to load.
8. Do use bullets, icons, boldface and italicized words, color and headline to attract customer attention to vital segments of your content.
9. Do understand that security of the web site is important and builds confidence Make your website secure for visitors. Privacy policy also needs to be readily available to the users.
10. Do use clear and concise page titles. Users see web page title in search results and clear effective titles can appreciably increase the traffic coming to your website.
Top 10 Don’ts of Website Design
1. Don’t clutter your website. Unorganized web pages are hard to read and navigate. Restrict the amount of information you provide on each page. Create a new page for each separate topic, product or product category. Any advertisement on the web pages must be non intrusive else the visitors would leave and most likely not come back for a repeat visit.
2. Don’t go overboard while using audio and video features that use high bandwidth. These may be slow to download and are aggravating if the customer has to wait too long for them.
3. Don’t make content difficult to read by using offbeat text fonts or color combination. Additionally, don’t include distracting visuals on your web pages.
4. Don’t add needless irrelevant information or features to your website. Adding content and features on your website that don’t carry any meaning for visitors is a waste of time and bandwidth.
5. Don’t let the content and links on your website become out-of-date. Frequently refresh the content and update the links to relevant information. Out-of-date links are annoying and can seriously affect your business reputation.
6. Don’t stuff the site with technical terms or jargon unless your website is designed to address the needs of a small segment of technical people. Moreover, do not use conflicting information in your site. In addition to confusing customers, such information gives a highly negative and unprofessional image to your website.
7. Don’t use flashing icons and text as that can distract browsers and could be detrimental to the popularity of your website.
8. Don’t stuff up your web pages with advertisements. Also, keep a check on pop-ups as they can annoy shoppers.
9. Don’t include introductory advertisements on the first page before your web content is displayed. Such advertisements put customers in a sore mood even before they look at your content.
10. Don’t just brag about your company’s achievements. Offer your buyers easy to consume information and back it up with references and customer success stories to allow them to judge your performance.
Follow the dos and steer clear of the don’ts of website design to design an effective site, and greatly improve the probability of successful web entrepreneurship. Daljeet Sidhu is the author of this article.
Tags: web design, web design service, web designer, Web site design