Tips For Designing Your Website | Search Engine Optimization

By LucasHeijn
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Word Count: 516

When you come across the headquarters of an off-line company, what you see gives you an impression of the company, good or bad. Your website is just the same. This makes it very important to practice good design principals. Your website need to reach the maximum number of people so that you can make the most sales possible.

Keep Navigation in Mind

keep your navigation simple. It must give clear direction on how to navigate your site. It must be uncluttered and easy to follow. Make sure you avoid confusion, if you're visitor becomes confused. They were just leave it and go somewhere else.

Visitors come to your site, because they're interested in the content. Let's say you have a large number of articles or downloads available on your site, you need to make it simple for your visitor to find what he is looking for. You may do this by providing an SQL driven data base search, or just a simple index. By providing one of these features you have made it simple for your visitor to to be able to find the content they were looking for.

Your goal in navigation should be to keep it so simple that even a young child would be able to navigate your site. Multi tiered drop-down menus and complicated flash-based navigation should be avoided. If your visitor can't work out how to navigate your site they will leave.

If your site has many pages and your visitors become deeply engrossed in surfing your site, you will need to make sure that they know where they are and how to get back to the main page. It is important not to create confusion with visitors. Confusion means abandon ship!

A few more pointers that may help.

#1 Do not use splash pages.

On some websites the first page you come to is a pretty page that welcomes you to the site and may also have something like "click here to enter". This is a splash page. It serves no real purpose other than to be pretty as often they are highly graphical pages. The reason to avoid splash pages is to give your visitor no reason to click the back button.

#2 Do not use excessive banner advertisements.

I would almost say that I failed to see why banner ads are used today. Nobody even bothers to look at them anymore. For this reason, I would suggest that instead of using banner ads you provide content for your visitors. You are also able to weave in affiliate links into this content. This would help your visitors to feel when they buy that they are buying because they want to and will not feel pushed.

#3 Avoid Audio

If you want a visitor to spend a long time on your site reading your content you need to make sure they're not getting annoyed by some looping audio on your website. If you're determined to add audio to your site, make sure they have some control over it. This could be volume or muting controls, these would work fine.

About the Author

Need help in setting up your up own web site? Information is available in free videos and articles from LinksParadise. This a free site with how-to and videos on such topics as How to build a website, creating web site graphics and more.

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