Effective Website Design

Build your website -> Website Design

Your system must be logical and intuitive what to do next. Remove the guesswork and just let people get where they need to go. Doing this with website design is never easy. Doing this on a budget is even harder.

Remember to look past the flash when designing your website. Cluttered design does not make purchasing easier or conversions increase. It distracts the viewer and sometimes overwhelms them into quitting and moving on. Make sure your design is clear and easy to follow. And then you will have an elegant system of your own - and the conversions to match.

The following are some basic and useful tips for an effective website design.

Fast Loading web site design
You must give this the highest priority when building your first website. No matter how good your design is, if downloading the website seems to take forever, the visitor would stop loading the page by clicking the respective button on the browser. Your design should be optimized for the web and all design gurus agree, it should not take more than 15 seconds to load.

Effective Navigation
Once visitors have come to your website, you need to make sure they stay on your website and go through major portion of it. To do this you need to have clear and effective navigation. Make sure all your important links are at prominent places. Preferably right on top - that's usually where a visitor first looks. Make use of menus on the right and the left. Let your information be accessible from all parts of the site.

Browser Compatibility
Make sure your website is browser compatible. Don't stop designing your site as soon as you find that it looks great on IE. Some browsers might give some problems, especially when you try doing complicated HTML designs. But don't give up too soon, usually with patience these problems can be easily fixed. Validate your website.

Readable and professional looking fonts
If the font you use is not available in a visitors computer, the browser when downloading your website will use the default font of your computer which is much worse. So try to keep to common and professional web fonts. The fonts that are more commonly used are Arial, Times New Roman  and Verdana.

Graphics and images - Less is More
Simple designs are the most effective for the web. Keep your website simple but neat. Don't clutter your page with big, bulky images that take ages to load. Promoting a poorly built website is much like trying to dig half a hole. You must succeed in creating a good, clean web page design
and interesting and original content.

Use of white space
Again, try not to clutter up your page with too many images, backgrounds and colorful fonts. Use KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid - principle by minimizing the use of graphics and using a lot of white space. White space gives a sense of spaciousness and overall neatness to a site.

Check for broken links
Always check for broken links within a site before uploading it to your web server.

Cut down the use of animated gifs
Don't use animated gifs unless it is necessary. Animated gifs take a long time to load and can also be very irritating. But since they catch your attention, you could use small animated gifs to draw a visitor's attention to a particular section of your site.

Design simple icons
Instead of using big, bulky images, use simple and small icons that add a little color and draw the attention of a visitor.

Use Flash but limited
Don't make the entire website using Flash. It may look great but it takes hours to load and can really put off visitors. If you do want to use Flash, use it within an HTML website and make sure it loads fast.