Keep these five basic principles of website design in mind when planning your site:
1. Avoid the use of splash pages
A splash page is usually a work of art containing the words ‘Enter’ or ‘Welcome’ and not much else. They often have flash animations; they serve no useful purpose, can take an age to load and give visitors to your site an excellent reason to hit the back button and go elsewhere.
People do not have time to sit through the load of a splash page. They simply want access to the information they thought would be shown when they clicked the link to your site. If you disappoint them you will lose them.
2. Avoid the use of excessive banner advertisements
In much the same way as those who live next to the railway line no longer hear the trains passing by, even the least savvy visitor to your web site will have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements. Unfortunately, such has been the abuse of banner ads that people simply don’t see them.
You of course want to use your web site to promote your goods and services but do this in a less obvious way. Provide your web visitors with real information. Make your web content valuable and interesting and weave your advertising links into the text as anchor links rather than in your face advertisements.
Help your web visitors come to the decision to buy without pushing them to buy, which will push them away.
3. Make the navigation on your site simple and obvious
If your web visitors can not find what they want within seconds they will go elsewhere. Don’t allow your web designer to go mad with creative menu bars and hidden links. All you will do is confuse your visitors and drive them away.
Navigation needs to be simple, obvious and easy to use. Your visitors will not thank you for bells and whistles.
4. Make use of breadcrumb trails for easy navigation
To encourage your visitors to follow links into the depths of your site make use of a breadcrumb trail menu to give them a way back to the place they started. It’s part of making the navigation on your site easy and simple but it also encourages the visitor to be brave and explore off the beaten path, as they have the comfort of knowing they can get back.
If visitors explore deep into your site and find themselves lost, the quickest way to solve the problem is to click away and do a fresh search. You don’t want them to do that. You want them to stay with you. A breadcrumb trail menu will help.
5. Avoid using autoplay on the audio and video on your site
If you are going to include audio or video on your web pages do not make it run on autoplay. You want your visitors to explore the site and focus on the content. They won’t do that if they are distracted by unwanted audio or video – especially if it’s designed to loop round and replay every time it comes to the end.
Remember that not every one of your web site visitors is using a computer in the comfort and privacy of their own home. Some are using machines in their workplace or a cyber cafe – they will not thank you for offering them an unwanted sound byte.
By all means make use of multi media formats but do be sure that your web visitors have controls to start, stop and mute as is appropriate for them.
There you have 5 simple basic principles which, if applied, will turn your mediocre website design into a great website design.