Important Design Considerations for Your Business Site
In business, even the smallest details can make a big difference. Your company’s website design is your presentation of your enterprise to the world. Here are five urgent guidelines to check to assure that your business website will perform in the way that it should.
1) Avoid splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.
2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Eye tracking studies indicate that, while such banners might distract visitors to a website, modern visitors are accomplished at not noticing the content that the banners contain. Unless your business plan is advertising, the last thing you want to do with your visitors’ time on your site is to direct their attention away from your content (and the action that the content is designed to achieve).
3) Make sure your site navigation is intuitive
Your navigation menu should mimic what your site visitors have used many times before. Make it evident that your links to other pages are just that; they should be like directional sign posts on a highway. If you insist upon an animated, dynamic menu or a multi-level dropdown, also provide a tradition, text-based static menu in one of the traditional menu locations, such as along the left panel of the site. Besides, the static menu will contribute toward your search engine optimization efforts.
4) Let your visitors see where they are on the site
If your site is well designed, users will easily flow from one page to another. However, along the way, they may feel like returning to a previously visited page to read it more carefully, to remind themselves of details or to compare one set of features to another. Provide a way for them to retrace their steps or to know how to get from “point g” back to “point c.” Using a breadcrumb trail serves this purpose very nicely.
5) Avoid using audio on your site
If you are determined to have sound automatically load, be sure that it a) makes a genuine contribution toward meeting your objectives, b) allows the site’s visitors to control and volume levels and c) is not on a page on which all of their attention needs to be focused upon reading the exquisite copy. If your audio does not meet all of these criteria, err on the side of caution and disable it.
Your http://www.99sites.us/>web business will benefit from attention to details such as these.