Webmaster Widget

By: Guadalupe Sharp
If you're doing business online, your website is your store front, your virtual business location. As such, it's critical that you use good website design principles to ensure your site reaches the maximum number of customers and prospects. Believe it or not, there are design strategies that are virtually guaranteed to improve your site's results.

First, be sure you use clean and understandable navigation on your site. Your navigation menu should contain only what's needed to direct your visitors around the site without confusion.

Next, you'll want to consider the load speed of your site. Too many graphics and photos make your site load extremely slow. Use only graphics that are truly an essential part of the design. And optimize the ones you do use with an image editing program such as PhotoShop, or even an online optimizer like the one at DynamicDrive.com. The smaller your image files, the better.

Write short paragraphs and include lots of white space to make reading online easier. If paragraph are too long, break them into shorter ones so text blocks don't look overwhelming. Large blocks of text deter people from reading the content and the content is what sells your products and services. Do all you can to get visitors to read it and your web designer will do it.

Follow compliance standards of W3.org to ensure your site is cross-browser compatible. While your site may look great in Internet Explorer, if it's unreadable in Firefox, Chrome or Opera, you can lose a lot of visitors. Keep in mind version differences as well. Many Internet users are still surfing with older versions of IE, so be sure you consider what your site looks like to them as well.

Don't get carried away with the number of scripts on your site, either. Too many scripts slow down the load time just like too many images. And some can even crash some browsers! Many scripts aren't supported on all browsers, so if you rely on a script to provide important data, some of your site visitors could miss important information if the script doesn't work properly.

Make use of tools such as stylesheets (CSS) and server side includes (SSI) to manage your content. It may not seem important when you first begin because you only have a few pages. But as your site grows CSS and SSI can save you hours of work. If you don't know how to use them, learn. Or hire a web designer who does.

Unless the purpose of your website is purely personal, you need to present a clean, professional image to the virtual world. That's done with a clean, professional website. It requires some work, but it's definitely achievable. And well the effort in bringing in added traffic and sales to your business site.

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