Informational Blog

The most important thing in a website design is to ensure that it does what it was designed to do. The biggest mistake one can make when designing a website is to include too many fancy graphic works and flash files that needs endless minutes loading them for display.

Follow these basic rules for website design when creating your site and you can be assured of an optimally designed website you can be proud of.

1) Do not come up with an excuse to use a splash page

The splash pages are the fancy pages you see when you enter a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like ‘welcome’ or ‘click here to enter’. These pages act as a good to lure visitors attention away from the real mission of your website. Visitors will be more likely to leave your first page without waiting for the exceptionally slow loading time due to the heavy graphics used.

2) Do not overuse banner advertisements

These are usually large adverts placed at the top of the web page but can also be at the bottom too. Even the newbie to the internet have trained themselves to ignore banner ads so placing them would only waste precious real estate space. The best way to utilize web space would be to use good contents and weave your affiliate links into them so that the users would not feel coerced into buying.

3) Maintain a simple and clear navigation

Navigation should be made very simple so that even a young child can understand. It is good to leave out any fancy flash menus or even multi-tiered drop down menus, they only serve to make navigating the site harder. Any form of complicated navigation will cause them to leave your site for good. It is good in any website design to include a sitemap to help them find what they are looking for.

4) Don’t let your visitors feel as if they are lost

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. This map will help them get to where they want to be without wasting too much time. This can easily be achieved by ensuring each page has a title and a textual ‘breadcrumb trail’ that clearly shows the links they have made to get where they are now. If you create any form of confusion, you will drive the visitors away.

5) Try to aim for zero audio

If you want your visitors to stay a long time and read the contents, do not irritate em with your audio. One can get irritated by continuous sounds being played over and over again. It may be a cool thing to include some music but do give your users some form of control such as muting ability or volume control. If you use all these tricks of website design effectively, you will in time that your visitors will likely return again and again to your site.