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Designing and building a website is one thing, designing and building a
website that sells is another. If you\'re committed to creating a website
that drives customers to buy and keeps people coming back for more, you\'re
going to need to do more than just throw together a bunch of content and
graphics. You\'re going to need to put up the effort needed to make a great
website. These web design tips should help you along the way towards making
that happen.
Web Design Tip #1 Know your site\'s purpose and always keep it in mind.
It\'s easy to get sidetracked into all kinds of plans and ideas about your
website. First and foremost in your mind should be the purpose behind your
site\'s inception. Of all that you read here, this web design tip should be
tops in your mind. A website without a clear purpose can quickly become
incoherent. Stick to your purpose.
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Web Design Tip #2 Don\'t get too excited about those graphics. Yep, you
heard me. Design isn\'t all about graphics, it\'s also about great content
and easy functionality of the site. With all three, you\'ve got a great
site. With only one or two, you\'ve only got a mediocre site.
Web Design Tip #3 Keep the site interactive, but not blocky or
demanding. You want your visitors to be interested in the site, to feel
involved a little in the site\'s flow as it moves them towards your goal
(a purchase, contact, whatever). It\'s a very thin line between this
objective and the blocky, hard to use sites that often are the result of
attempts at this. Just keep these two web design tips in mind: interactivity
without too many demands=KISS (keep it simple, stupid). |
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Web Design Tip #4 Do not over advertise yourself on your site. Very rarely
is a website, by itself, an advertisement. Usually it is where people go
after seeing an ad, whether it was a paid click on a search engine or a
traditional TV, radio, or print ad. Regardless, they most likely came to
your site looking for more information, not a heavy sales pitch. So keep the
sales copy light and be gentle as you push them towards buying.
Web Design Tip #5 Be careful how you use that magic audio, video, or
other widget on your site. We know the latest buzz is all about audio,
visual, and other widgets to make your site unique. This might work if
you\'re in a mass-market where anything that makes your site stand out is an
advantage, but most of the time, that\'s not really your situation. Often,
these widgets are added to sites with the result that the site looks
amateurish, or the widget distracts from the site's goal rather than aiding
it. And by all means, if you\'re going to ad audio or video, make it
professional: hire someone to do lighting, sound, and other things for you
so it looks like more than just a YouTube broadcast from a web cam.
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Web Design Tip #6 Your site is never finished. You might think it is, but
it\'s not. Always be evaluating, checking, double-checking, tweaking, and
otherwise eyeballing your site. There\'s always a typo to be found, a broken
link to be corrected, an element to ad or remove, and more.
Web Design Tip #7 Make finding information on your site easy. Navigation
is usually the first thing you\'ll notice that sets apart
professionally-designed sites and amateur ones. Amateur sites will have
bulky navigation, hard-to-use controls, and links that go nowhere. A
professional site will be easy to use, intuitive, and clean.
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Web Design Tip #8 Keep it organized. This is part of navigation, of
course, but it\'s a separate idea as well, since a site can have great
navigation, but still have very little information organization. After all,
easy to move around and easy to find things on are two different and
important aspects of a website.
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Web Design Tip #9 Include your contact information. If this site is for
professional purposes, then you want your potential (or current) customers
and clients to be able to contact you easily. This means you need to have
contact information on your site. Form-to-emails are fine, but you should
have more than that: phone/fax number, physical address or mailing address,
etc.
Web Design Tip #10 Optimize your site for users, not search engines. If
you believe all the marketing hype (usually from marketers, of course) about
how essential it is that your site rank high on the search engines, then
you\'ll believe that this is the only way to get anywhere on the Web. That's
only partially |
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true. Sure, being ranked high on searches is good,
but if the customers who do the searching then find an incoherent site full
of keywords and no full sentences, they're going to leave without buying.
Make the site user friendly FIRST, then worry about
SEO.
There you go. Those are my top ten web design tips. If you keep them in mind
while you're designing, building, and implementing your site, you're
likely to go far.
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