Six Surefire Steps to a Winning Website Design

As the owner of an e-business, you can think of the Internet as a mall. Your website represents your individual store within that mall. Obviously you want a storefront that encourages customers to come inside and take a look around. Website design is the key to building a storefront that's inviting, entertaining and easy to navigate.

You don't just want your potential customers to linger in the doorway. Entice them to come inside, and once they do, be sure you've got a website design that will hold their interest beyond the homepage. Here are six of the top tips for creating a winning website design.

* Don't use a website template. There can be a temptation on the part of e-business owners to build the website themselves with a template instead of hiring a professional website designer. Templates, though, greatly limit your ability to customize your site. Certain elements may not work within the predefined parameters of the template. When restricted in this way, you're unlikely to wind up with a finished product that truly represents your unique identity as a business. Given that a website is all that potential customers have to judge an e-business on, a poorly designed website is not a chance you can take. By far the wisest course of action is to hire a professional website designer who can build you a site that will keep the customers coming.

* Include "hands on" features in your website design. Interactive features engage your visitors and encourage them to spend more time at your website. Elements such as comment sections and message boards send the message that you care about what your customers have to say. Surveys and blogs are two other ways to make visitors part of the action.

* Be judicious in your use of flash player. Flash player provides you with opportunities to present your marketing message to visitors in creative ways. However, it can also interfere with the functionality of your site. Because flash player takes several seconds to load, your opening page is probably not the best place to use it. Visitors can quickly lose their patience and move onto another site. If you use flash player, make it optional, so that it only loads if a visitor clicks on it. Also, use flash player to enhance your site, not as the main mode of communication. That way visitors who choose not to not use it will still understand your sales message.

* Be selective about including pictures and other images. Large images, or too many images, can cause your page to load slowly the same way that flash player does. Thumbnails are a good alternative for a website that has a business-related need for a lot of pictures, such as an online catalog. Thumbnails take very little time to load, and your visitors can still see the larger picture by clicking on it.

* Limit the amount of text on each page. Ideally, each page of your website will contain between 500 and 1000 words. The problem is not only that you'll overwhelm your visitors with text, it can also hurt your search engine rankings. Typically spiders crawl only the first few paragraphs of a long page. The rest of the text is wasted for SEO purposes.

* Hire a well-rounded website designer. In addition to website design, you need a designer who understands the principles of search engine optimization. A fantastic-looking site won't do much for your business if it isn't ranking well in the search engines. All search engines care about is content. Your website designer should know enough about search engine algorithms and SEO to help you develop the right content. This includes the proper use of tags and meta tags.

* Before you hire a website designer, review the websites they've already created. It's the same as asking a potential employee for references. When looking at the websites, put yourself in the customer's shoes. Are the sites visually appealing? Are you coming across glitches, errors or broken links? How long do the pages take to download? Are they easy to navigate? To test the designer's SEO skills, select a few keywords from the site and perform a Google search. How high does the site rank? Whatever your final assessment of the designer's work, that is about the same quality you can expect for your own site.

The success of your business is firmly tied to the effectiveness of your website design. A site that's attractive, interesting and error-free encourages visitors to browse. The longer a visitor stays on your website, the better chance you have of making them a customer!

About the Author

Chris Coleman is a Business Analyst at Capita Technologies. Capita Technologies provides web design services for a wide variety of clients.

Author Profile: ccoleman

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