5 Important Rules in Website Design
Whether you’re designing a website for a client or just for yourself, make sure that you pay attention to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here is a list of five important web design rules you should observe to make sure your website performs well.
1. Do not use Splash pages
A Splash page is that first page you see when you first arrive at a website. They usually have a beautiful image or some kind of Flash animation and a button or link with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. They are just that – a pretty introduction with no real purpose. Internet Marketers once used splash pages to add lots of different keywords to help with search engine rankings, but splash pages are now just considered as spam by the search engines. Don’t give your visitors a reason to click on the “back” button before they’ve even seen your site! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.
2. Use simple and clear navigation
Navigation is one of the most important things to consider when designing a website. You should make it simple and straightforward so that even a young child will know how to get around your site easily. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered drop-down menus. If your visitors are having trouble trying to navigate your site, they will quickly leave your site.
3. Let the user know exactly where they are
Not everyone comes to your website from the Home page. In fact, unless they’ve been to your site before and bookmarked it, there’s a good chance that most visitors come from a search engine. So when visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you should make it clear that they know which part of the site they are in at any moment. Most sites do this by using “breadcrumbs” – a trail of links near the top of the page that says “You are here:”. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of your site easily. If you confuse your visitors, they’ll “abandon ship” and not likely to return.
4. Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy people quickly train themselves to identify and ignore standard banner advertisements. So instead of wasting valuable website real estate on large graphic banner ads, you should provide more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your site’s content. By doing this, your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy. Text link ads like those provided by Google AdSense or Text-Link-Ads.com are easy to implement, are less intrusive and often have a higher Click-Thru Rate (CTR) which helps your site make money.
5. Avoid using music on your site
If you want your visitors to stay longer at your site and reading your content, you want to make sure they’re not going to be annoyed by some music stuck on repeat on your website. There’s nothing worse than visiting a site and having unexpected sound effects or annoying music playing while you’re trying to read something – especially if you’re at work or in a public place! If you must add audio to your website, make sure you offer your visitors control over the music like a volume slider or mute button. If you don’t, then you’ll lose visitors very quickly as they click the “back” button just to turn the music off.
Tags: banner ads, designing a website, drop down menus, flash animation, internet marketers, search engine rankings, search engines, site navigation, splash pages, text link ads, web design
