The most important thing in a website design is to ensure that it does what it was designed to do. 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.

Here are five basic website design rules to help you in your quest to achieve maximum web performance for maximum results.

1) Splash pages are not a good idea

These are fancy pages you will see when you click on to a link to visit 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”. In fact, they are just a ‘pretty vase’ that serves no real purpose. 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) Try using less banner advertisement if you can

Normally you will find these at the top of the web page where they will be advertising something (not always related to the site) but sometimes they will be elsewhere on the page as well. Blatant ads such as banners tend to be regarded as being less credible and it is a total waste of website space Web surfers tend to ignore such banner ads so adding them would only mean a waste of virtual 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) Keep a simple and clear navigation

Navigation must be simple so that even a small child can use. Do not use any form of menus that will complicate users, drop downs and multi-tiers are not a good idea. Remember, if users find it hard to navigate, they will leave very soon after landing on your home page. A site map will help them find what they want and should be factored in to the website design right from the start.

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

You will need to have a sitemap to facilitate the user to be in control. This way, they can head to the right information they are looking for. When each link that has been visited is marked in some way form the ones that are fresh, visitors can easily know which is fresh and which is fresh and which is not. Remember, any form of ambiguity or confusion will drive your hard earned visitors away.

5) Don’t use audio on your site wherever possible

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. If sound is used, do not let it play over and over again. If adding audios seems like a good idea to you, do make sure you provide some form of control such as muting or volume control so that your visitors can adapt to their surroundings. If you wish for the visitors to return to your site, learn to apply all these website design rules and you can reap the benefits of long term traffic.

In Internet |