Written by Ray Larson
You’ve got your brand name and marketing color scheme and are now ready to work on your Web site. What next? Check out this cheat sheet for three tips to getting your site’s design off to a good start.
Purpose. Your first step should be to determine the primary purpose of your Web site and who your audience is. Do you want your site to generate leads, sell products or share expert knowledge? Is your audience C-level executives or stay-at-home moms? Once you establish your core function, you can write your content accordingly with the most effective calls-to-action for your desired objective.
Your audience and content will then play an important role in your overall design. For instance, if your site is targeted at CEOs, you may want a streamlined, corporate look with few integrated graphical elements. Your design may have a simple white background contrasted against a single color with a basic content area. This would be accompanied by a header or logo, a few icons and some photographs with a couple of sidebars. The overall design? Clean and easy to read.
Usability. You want visitors to know exactly what to do when they come to your site, as the average user has a low attention span. The best approach is to plan your site’s navigation in a way that people have grown accustomed to using. For example, horizontal navigation is a mainstay on Web sites, with headings that run across the page instead of vertically down in a left-hand sidebar.
To keep an uncluttered look, consider drop-down menus from your horizontal navigation bar to locate different site sections. However, ensure that visitors know the menus are there by adding down arrow icons next to your main headings. Surprise drop-down menus tend to put visitors off. If down arrows are not to your taste, you may opt for visible secondary headings underneath your main titles. For instance, your main heading might read “About Us,” and below that would be the sub-heading “Our Team.”
Clarity. Larger text is easier to read and makes your site more friendly. Visitors will want to spend more time on it knowing that it’s not a big undertaking to wade through mountains of text and find what they need.
Make searching your site even easier by having a search box clearly positioned on each page where relevant. This can be in your main navigation bar or in another designated area.
Also ensure that you have fast-loading pages; otherwise, readers will simply leave. Optimize images for the Web and decrease the size of CSS/HTML files. Avoid loading unnecessary Javascript/CSS files that simply add to the load time. In fact, around 81% of people leave a video if it starts to buffer halfway through, according to TubeMogul.
It’s important that you like your site’s aesthetics, but it’s far more important that the site is an effective tool. Use a tool like Google Analytics to track site usage and uncover where visitors are going, and optimize the site for them. Ensure that the look, usability and speed of your site meet users’ expectations, and watch your visitor stats soar.
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