Sniper Marketing Tactics

Important Rules in Web Design for Business

When thinking about your business website design, careful attention should be paid to every detail to make sure it performs well to serve its goals. Here are five vitally important rules of thumb to consider to make sure that your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Eye tracking studies indicate that, while such banners might distract visitors to a website, modern visitors are accomplished at not noticing the content that the banners contain. Unless your business plan is advertising, the last thing you want to do with your visitors’ time on your site is to direct their attention away from your content (and the action that the content is designed to achieve).

3) Don’t construct hurdles in navigating the website

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Provide a clear indication of where the user is

If your site is well designed, users will easily flow from one page to another. However, along the way, they may feel like returning to a previously visited page to read it more carefully, to remind themselves of details or to compare one set of features to another. Provide a way for them to retrace their steps or to know how to get from “point g” back to “point c.” Using a breadcrumb trail serves this purpose very nicely.

5) Use audio only very cautiously

If you are determined to have audio automatically load and play for your visitors, be sure that it a) makes a genuine contribution to your objectives, b) allows the site visitors to control and volume levels and c) is not on a page on which all of their attention should be focused upon reading the carefully written copy. If your audio does not meet all of these guidelines, play it safe and disable it.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.