As you build your own website, you need to ensure that it’s attractive, readable, fast-loading, and easy to navigate. It doesn’t matter whether you make your own website all by yourself or hire someone else to do it for you, you need to remember the basic rules of good website design:
1. First impression counts! Create a nice, professional-looking design. After all, your site reflects directly on you and your business.
If you are creating a WordPress-based website (as you should be, in my opinion), there are plenty of professional themes out there that you can purchase inexpensively. Just pick one that is the closest to what you had in mind and modify it to your needs (or hire someone to do it for you).
2. Include some graphic images and photos. to make your content more visually appealing. You can add photos of your products and services, or you can just find some interesting pictures to illustrate your points.
If you don’t have your own photos, you can purchase them online on one of the stock photos websites. You can also go to Flickr.com and search for public domain photos. You can then use these pictures on your website, provided you display credits according to the license guidelines.
When selecting the pictures, make sure they are relevant and interesting to look at, but also clear and not too large in size. Especially, avoid high-resolution pictures, which take a long time to load.
3. When writing text for your website, avoid rambling and long-winded sentences. Also, make sure you include subheadings in your text, and use other formatting attributes (such as bold, italics, etc.) to emphasize important points .
People are turned off by text-heavy sites, so you need get to the point quickly. Most people do not use enough white space, even though they may think they do. You should aim at paragraphs with no more than 3 or 4 sentences in them. That might not sound like much, but go through your content look how many sentences per paragraph you have on average. If you are like most people, your average will be much higher.
4. Link to other pages on your website in your writing. Make at least one internal link to another article on your website (or, if using WordPress, install a plugin to do this automatically).
5. Avoid animated splash pages. There was a time that these pages were everywhere. Today, however, introduction pages created with Flash (a Web-authoring tool that provides text animation effects) can be annoying , distracting, or even problematic to load.
6. Test your site on a dial-up line. Believe it or not, there are still people out there using dial-up connections, which are considerably slower.
Of course, just building a terrific website is not enough. Even if the design looks great and the content is right on target, your next step is to make sure your prospects find it. That means optimizing your website and promoting it to bring in traffic.
Related articles
- Increasing your PR – Google Page Rank (iamsellingtoday.com)
- How To Get The Most Out Of Your Ecommerce Product Pages (capturedtech.com)
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