5 Golden Rules

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are five golden rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

Do Not Use Splash Pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page. Also splash pages have become the online marketers soap box. There are thousands of these one page splash pages world wide, just cluttering up the internet. If you want a splash page to sell an item from, place it within your website and link to it form your sales material.

Do Not Use Excessive Banner Advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy. You see these banners everywhere and ask yourself this, "Do you pay attention to them?" Yes you may glance at them but do you click on them? Now place yourself in your visitors shoes. YOu surf the web so you know how annoying they can be. Also something we talked about in Good Webdesign Practices wes that images slow your loading time down, which could lead you to losing the customer or customers. Do not let your website become an online sales board.

Have Simple and Clear Menus

I know it is so tempting to put flashy menus and navigation's into your website, but you have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered drop down menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site. Navigation is a very big part of website design, so remember it well.

Have A Clear Understanding Where The User IS

Having your visitors deeply engrossed in browsing your website, is what you are trying to achieve. You need to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"! Which means lost sale and return customer. Always place a home page button on every webpage, that way if they do get lost they can navigate back to ground zero and start again. Never leave them out in the woods to wonder around on their own, take them by the hand and lead them to where you want them to go.

Avoid using audio on your site

You hope your visitor is going to stay a long time on your website, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on, on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine. I only use audio for information website's, where I need to explain something or let the visitor listen to information that is easier to explain verbally than written. Always try to place yourself in your website visitors shoes.

You will find lots of useful information on just website design in this area of the website. Should you like more information please sign up to our website design course below, its free!