The success of your online business depends very much on your website. It is there before of the utmost importance that you use good website design practices in order to maximize the number of visitors and, importantly, the number of people who buy from your site.
Good website design is one of the most serious aspects of creating an online presence for your business. Your website is equivalent to an online business card. It is used to represent your company, and the individuals involved in that company. A company site can be used in conjunction with Internet advertising and marketing to get your products in front of millions of people.
Make sure your website complies with the latest web standards and is cross-browser compatible. It's no good your site looking great in Internet Explorer but looking awful in Firefox or Opera. If you do not do this, you will not attract many visitors to your site.
It is very important that paragraphs are deleted to a reasonable length, as large blocks of text will put visitors off from reading your content. Paragraphs that are too long should be split into several smaller ones so that the text blocks are easy to read with plenty of white space around them.
Style your pages with CSS as this will make life easier by styling all elements on your site in one go. This is much easier than having to code each individual page separately.
If at all possible, avoid using scripting languages unless really necessary. These should be used to handle or manipulate data and not to create visual effects. The loading time of your site will be slowed down by the use of heavy scripting languages and may even crash some browsers. Another thing to consider is that scripts are not supported across all browsers, and because of this, some visitors to your website may miss important information.
Keep the number of images to an absolute minimum, as they can make your site load slower than normal and, more often than not, many of them are unnecessary. If you think an image is essential for your website, then you must make sure that you optimize the image by using an image editing program. Try to keep the size of the image files as small as possible without compromising image quality.
One thing you must ensure is that your website is clear and easy to navigate. The navigation menu should be simple and well laid out so that visitors can easily navigate around your site without getting lost. In other words, make it as easy as possible for them to move around your site.
Creating a website is fairly straightforward once you learn the basics which are not that difficult. Like many things worth doing, if you want to do it well, it takes time to learn. However, once you learn the basics, it becomes much easier as time goes on.
