Web Design Recommendations

Sometimes, the best way to get your product out there, spread your message and make is to have customers visit and purchase from your website. This is especially true for smaller businesses that do not have the big budget to spend on advertising or who do not have a very well known name yet. Therefore a good web design is very important to make a first impression and increase the chances of people visiting your site and buying products from that site. In order to write a good website, it is important that you first plan and have a very good idea what your website is going to do and be about before you even start developing.

There are some excellent tools available to help you write very effective websites. If your web designing skills are still developing it might be a good idea to use WordPress or CMS to write your site in. These software offerings have great applications and content that can be tailored to your needs.

One of the most important things when designing a website is to realize that performance is crucial. Web surfers are very impatient people and, a website that is slow to load or keeps them waiting is going to fail. People will close the site and move on to the next one instead of waiting. A couple of tips to improve the performance of your website is as follows…

• Keep graphics small and simple. Pictures can be quite large and may take a long time to load – especially if there are a lot of them.
• Try use as little animation and other multimedia on your site. These are also large and take a long time to load. Sometimes animation is important to your site but, if it is absolutely necessary, keep it small by limiting the size and cycle time.
• Where possible, use thumbnails instead of the full graphics. The user can click on the thumbnail if they are interested in seeing the full picture.
• Write your site so that text loads before graphics. In this way, the really impatient users will have something to look at whilst they waiting and this may distract them from closing the window.

So, once you’ve ensured that your content is quickly available to the users, you need to make sure that those users will remain interested and excited about your site. You do want them to spend some of their hard earned cash after all. So here are some tips to make sure your website works for you…

• Make your content interesting but not too long. Say what you have to say quickly.
• Make sure the headings you use catch the attention and make the user want to read more.
• Don’t overload the user’s senses with too much color or animation.
• Keep changing the website content to keep people coming back for more.
• Use a feedback or comments section so that users can interact with you. And make sure that you respond to the comments. Unanswered questions or unaddressed problems just cause frustration.

Using these simple tips can really help you make a very effective and successful website. However, it is very much a learning process and a website is an ever changing thing. Stick with it, eventually your hard work will pay off.