Friday, January 30, 2009

Optimal Website Design Guide

By James Hillard

A beautiful website design can never compensate slow performance in any website design. One very common occurrence in many websites owned by amateurs is the use of fancy graphic works that need a very long time to load them.

To help you remember the rules for effective website design, here are five basic rules. 1) For peak performance, do not include splash pages: Splash pages are the fancy pages you see when you enter a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". The unfortunate thing is splash pages actually takes away attention from the real purpose of the website, and often frustrates users with their slow loading time. This fanciful addition only serves to confuse the visitor who will likely leave your website immediately if loading time takes too long.

2) Reduce the number of banners on your site: When banners are displayed on a web page, they are usually right at the top but can frequently be seen located elsewhere, including the foot of the page also. Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable space. Instead add useful contents and add your affiliate links skillfully into the body of the text so that it would seem like a natural part of your text and not an advertisement.

3) Stick with an easy navigational system: Keep navigation simple so that the youngest user can use it. It is good to leave out any fancy flash menus or even multi-tiered drop down menus, they only serve to make navigating the site harder. If you make it difficult for them, they will leave your site. A site map will help them find what they want and should be factored in to the website design right from the start.

4) Make it clear to the visitor where they are: When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. With this map, they can directly head to the information they are looking for. This can be achieved by making sure that each page has its own title and some form of trail that shows them which links they have been to and which is new for them. If you confuse your visitors in any way they will leave.

5) Achieve all your goals without the use of audio: If you want your visitors to stay a long time and read the contents, do not irritate em with your audio. One can get irritated by continuous sounds being played over and over again. If adding audios seems like a good idea to you, do make sure you provide some form of control such as muting or volume control so that your visitors can adapt to their surroundings. If you wish for the visitors to return to your site, learn to apply all these website design rules and you can reap the benefits of long term traffic. - 16738

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