A professional front page design is essential to the success of any ecommerce site. Statistics show that once a viewer links to your site, you have about 8-10 seconds to attract their attention. Your design needs to be laid out in a way that will attract the viewer to stay and navigate them to a purchase. Three characteristics of quality homepage design are logos, banners, and navigation.
Logos, Banners, and Navigation
A logo is an icon that defines a company. When you think of a logo you might think of such companies as Microsoft, GE, Ford and Pepsi. Your logo should be a simple graphical, textual, representation of your company-it is your icon and should also be simple, clean and clear.
To design your own completely custom logo, you may purchase software programs that can help with the creation process like Photoshop and Paint shop pro.
A Banner is a combination of graphics and text. Banners may be static or animated and the MOST effective area for a banner is in the upper fold, or top half of your website.But you must not overdo it with putting banners on your site because it might download slower to a client's pc. Visitors DO NOT want to wait more than a few seconds for a site to load.
Depending on what kind of site you have, the navigation of a site can be very different. However, there are some standards that will work on any site. Navigation to the left or to the right and / or navigation at the top are always a safe design.
