If your business involves selling shoes for instance, your website design should be one that focuses on your core business — selling shoes. While it may be tempting to use bright colours and “Flash” presentations, this may not necessarily sell more shoes. They key is to keep it simple.
Simplicity means that visitors should find your content easy to read. Consumers easily notice those ads or headlines which they can read — even from afar. For websites, this means short sentences and short paragraphs. Remember that most users do not read everything on the site, so highlight important items such as product features. Make use of headings and bullets.
Try using dark (black or dark blue) text. This should also be an appropriate size, such as12 pt and fonts should be clear. Also, use a white or light coloured background as this will not obscure text. Avoid using colours that may hurt the eyes. These include red, yellow, or colours which are too dark.
Another aspect of website design is ease of navigation. Users are mostly in a hurry or have one purpose when visiting a company’s website - to get information. So make this information easy to find. Just as you would have courteous and well-trained sales people to assist your clients at your UK outlet, a good website must contain easy to find and legible menus. Place these where they are easily seen - even while glancing. While a lot of sites use fancy menu buttons, some people have trouble reading them - and that could mean lost customers. Simple, straightforward buttons are the key to helping a customer find that hot new golf shoe.
It would also be a good idea to have both graphic and text links. Some people like graphics since they are easy to see. Text links are for those who usually turn off their browser's graphics display as this slows things down. So give them an option.
While your site may have great looking graphics and informative content, these won’t matter if it takes an eternity to load. Keep in mind that there are still a lot of people who surf the net using dial-up connections. This means slower loading times as compared to the ones on DSL or Cable. You should also take them into consideration when designing you site. Use graphics only when necessary. Music and other multimedia files are best left as an option and not for the main page. These only slow things even more.
So when studying your website design, keep things simple. Your site may not receive any “most innovative" awards, but what you will get are more sales and better business.
Talk to The Web Marketing Group about Website Design - click here or call 0845 555 5040
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