Core Web Solutions Articles

Layout- Most of us are very experienced website visitors, we have seen thousands of websites in our lifetime. During this time we have learned how to scan a websites homepage to determine if the site is worth further exploration. Because of this you need to plan the layout of your site, if the site does not offer value to the visitor there is little chance that they will stick around. A quick way to turn people off is by overusing ads, if your website has more ads than content this is a huge turn off.

Don’t make people search for what your site is about. If your website is there to sell a product make sure that most of the links are teaching people about the product or leading people to information related to ordering the product.

Ease of Navigation- When you are thinking about how people will navigate your website, start with the basics. Start with a clean canvas and then add the most valuable points. Each of these points needs to have a link in highly visible location There should be an area where people can easily learn about your company, contact you and view what products and services are being offered. If these things are not easily visible to your visitors they may not find the best part of your site before they click off to some other part of the internet.

Make sure that your that the most relevant pages of your site have links to one another. If someone clicks on your products page there should also be a link there which will allow them to contact someone if they have a question.

Page Load Time- I’m sure that everyone reading this has had a time when they visited a website and the page load was just too slow, after a few seconds many of us will just give up. Remember that not everyone has high speed broadband access and often those that do may not have patients for a slow loading website. It is important to minimize the size of your web pages. Extras like large photos, Flash and ads are not needed and can cause people to never return to your site. Besides this Google is now beginning to put weight on search results according to their page speed download. It is understandable that search engines would want to serve WebPages that are more optimized than full of excess baggage. This is a very deep topic that will be covered in another article.

Browser Compatibility- What could be worse from a webmasters perspective than working to bring visitors to your site and they are not able to view the page or view it in a distorted way? If your website is not correctly setup you will have exactly this problem. How many users will you loose? Your site should display the same way whether you visitors are using Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer or Netscape.

Designing a successful websites can be complicated. However if you think like a consumer and use common sense it will help you to create an idea of how your users experience should be. By using these ideas you can make improvements to your current site or get an idea of how to setup a correctly layout site. Either way a website is a very powerful ally, jut make sure you set it up with some consideration.

Author

Phillip DeMassa is a staff writer for Core Web Solutions Web Design