5 Essential Website Design Tips

If you're anything like me, you've probably created a brand new website, Submitted it to a few search engines and hoped that people would mysteriously show up at your site and buy whatever it is you were selling.

After a couple of weeks go by and only a few stray people show up at your website, you decide to try and "optimize" your website around your main keyword in hopes that you just might rank well in 1 of the millions of search engines. Another couple of weeks go by and still no luck.

At this point you probably give up and decide to either build another website around a different target market or just lose all hope and quit. Well, news flash, as you've probably figured out by now, this is not the way to go about doing things.

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a pretty picture with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are that -- vases with no actual purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the worth of your site up front without the splash page.

1 Tell your audience what kind of support they'll get after they buy. It could be free consulting, tech support, free servicing, etc. This may also answer some of their buying questions ahead of time. People don't want to buy products without knowing you will be there to help if they have problems.

2 Ask people at the end of your copy why they decided not to buy. This will give you new ideas on how to produce ad copy that's more profitable. Have a web form or e-mail link in place so they can answer you. You may find out they don't like your guarantee or graphics. It could be anything.

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner adverts so you will be wasting valuable web-site actual estate. In lieu, provide more valueable content & weave relevant affiliate links in to your content, & let your visitors feel that they need to buy in lieu of being pushed to buy.

Gary B. Shelly, H. Albert Napier, Ollie N. Rivers, Jennifer T. Campbell,Paperback - New Edition, Edition: 4,Series: Shelly Cashman Series, English-language edition,Pub by Cengage Learning

You must provide a simple & straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to make use of it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

There's a real connection between craftsmanship and Web design. That's the theme running through Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design, by bestselling author Dan Cederholm, with a chapter contributed by renowned Web designer and developer Ethan Marcotte. This book explores CSS3 that works in today's browsers, and you'll be convinced that now's the time to start experimenting with it.

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This book's seven chapters deconstruct various aspects of a case-study Web site for the Tugboat Coffee Company, focusing on aspects that make it bulletproof and demonstrate progressive enrichment techniques over more traditional labor-intensive methods.

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When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will require to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they are going to be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site basically. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

An invaluable full-color book-and-DVD training package for Web design Web design consists of using multiple software tools and codes-such as Dreamweaver, Flash, Silverlight, ...

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will need to make positive they are not angered by some audio looping on & on on your net site. In case you insist on adding audio, make positive they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.