You need to pay attention to ensure every minute detail in your website design is observed to ensure peak performance of your site. Many common mistakes are made by amateur and professional designers who believe their visitors require an entertaining visual and audio experience when that isn’t the case at all.
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) Splash pages should be left out. The splash pages are the fancy pages you see when you enter a website. These pages use elaborate designs created with the purpose to entertain the visitor with fancy animations, brilliant photos and include welcoming words such as “hello” “welcome” or “click here to enter our website”. They are pages with no purpose, and serves to discourage uses from fully utilizing the actual purpose of the website due to their slow loading time. This fanciful addition only serves to confuse the visitor who will likely leave your website immediately if loading time takes too long.
2) Do not overuse banner advertisements. When banners are displayed on a web page, they are usually right at the top but can frequently be seen located elsewhere, including the foot of the page also. Even the newbie to the internet have trained themselves to ignore banner ads so placing them would only waste precious real estate space. The right way to use the space is to add contents that are engaging and informative and add your affiliate links into them so that they would feel natural instead of sounding like and advertisement.
3) Have a simple and clear navigation. You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Do not use any form of menus that will complicate users, drop downs and multi-tiers are not a good idea. If you make it difficult for them, they will leave your site. Have a sitemap added to the website design to help them find what they are looking for.
4) Let it be clear on the user where he is at the moment. 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. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. 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. Never confuse your visitors because you will lose them very quickly as they become frustrated.
5) Audios are a bad idea. If you wish for your visitors to stay long enough to read the contents, do not loop your music file in a way that irritates. The sounds when added can enhance an experience, but when played over and over gain it can start to be irritating. Using audios may not always be a good idea, if you have to include them be sure to allow for some form of user control such as volume or muting ability. By applying all these website design tips we share, you can expect to reap long term benefits from continuous traffic from returning visitors to your website.
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