Good Website Design

Your website is the hub of your online business; it is the virtual representation of your enterprise whether you have it offline or not. When you are doing business online, people cannot see you physically like how they could if they were dealing with you offline. Hence, people do judge you by your covers. This is where a good website design comes in.

Imagine if you are running an offline company. Would you allow your representatives to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they are dealing with your customers? By making your staff wear professionally, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. This works simply because first impressions matter (good first impression comes from good web design)

It's the same thing with your website (which goes back to how good or bad the website is designed). If your website is put together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute "quick fix", you are literally creating the impression to your visitors that you are not professional and you do not care for good, quality web design.

On the opposite, if you have a totally professional looking, good website design layout, you are giving your visitors the perception that you have given meticulous attention to every detail and you care about professionalism. You are organized, focused and you really mean business, as shown in your choice of good web design.

On the other hand, you should also have anything related to your company, good or well designed (not just your website). From business cards to letterheads to promotional brochures, every little bit matters. This is because as you grow your business, these items become the face of your business. Once again, think of the "salesperson dressed shabbily" analogy and you will get the point.

Your website is where your business resides -- it's like the Headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practice good website design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Good website design practices #1: make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Good web design practices #2: reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Good website design practices #3: keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Good web design practices #4: make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Good web design practices #5: avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Good website design practices #6: use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

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 5 important rules of thumb to observe to make sure practice good website design.

1) Good websites design 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.

2) A good web design 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.

3) A simple and clear navigation is paramount to good website design

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 dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Good websites designs have clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want 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. A good web design doesn't confuse the visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

5) Good web design incorporates audio appropriately

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on, on your website. Good web designs which add audio also add control -- volume or muting controls work fine.

Good website design -- to put the wonders of a good website design into perspective, imagine you're purchasing a T-Shirt. First of all, what do we look at? The design of the T-Shirt, of course. Well most people do, other than the material factor. But let's assume the all other factors are constant, wouldn't the good design or looks, become the key aspect?

Let's look at two scenarios:

Scenario A: A website with good design and breathtaking graphics. (Good color schemes with matching theme), pictures (optimum resolutions and relevant) with proper fonts and word sizes.

Scenario B: A website obviously lack of good website design elements, inversely equipped with hideous graphics and pictures in terms of resolution, quality and relevancy (red pictures with a bright green background), fonts used were not matching albeit too fanciful (too small, artsy font-types)

For A, visitors to the website are immediately awestruck by the good web design and artwork. The well placed pictures and designs will somewhat symbolizes the positive nature of the individual/website. As we know, most people DO judge by impression (which flows from good website planning and design).

As for B, the shabby environment due to severe lack of good website design elements and creativity, with badly taken pictures, wouldn't exactly help in attracting visitors. Fonts that is hard to read, let alone comprehend, and mismatching themes in terms of color, isn't exactly welcoming, is it (just shows lack of interest in creating lasting impression and good web design)?

Analysis: Now, the main idea here is to always plan your websites design well, try to get other individuals for feedback and perspectives. Each mindset might differ, but at least you make room for improvement. Don't get me wrong, even a plain website with proper design would generate plenty of positive implications, but the key idea here is to at least maintain an impressionable website.

A good website design aims to give visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most importantly a pleasant experience. Even if you had the greatest product in the whole world -- if your website is poorly done you won't be able to sell effectively because visitors will be driven off your site by lack of good website design elements.

Talk about a "good web design", I'm not only talking about a good graphical design. A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components which contribute to a good website design -- accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design.

Hence, I have highlighted some features opposite of a good website design I've came across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it's time to take serious action!

1) Background music

Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant initially, but if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and every time a visitor browses to another page, the music starts playing again. I'd leave your site if that happened. It's a burden to the visitors viewing your site. Worst, users on dial up will have to wait longer just to view the site. Truly not 'good web design' element.

2) Extra large/small text size

There's more to good web design than graphics -- user accessibility is a big part of it! A good website design uses text which is legible and reasonably sized to enable visitors to read without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it's illegible it won't sell!

3) Popup windows

Popup windows are used to display advertisements, and to me, 90% of popup are not worthy of attention. I just close them on instinct if they manage to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!). Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed 9 out of 10 times it appears on a visitor's screen. Your website loses its function immediately, and it goes without saying that it's the result of lack of good web design element.

To sum up this article, be reminded that you ought to make sure your website displays good website design element, and does what it's meant to do effectively. Do not let lacks of good web design element on your site prevent it from functioning optimally.

If you run a website, chances are you often wonder whether it is the right time to do a total redesign of the layout of your website. Here are some points to consider:

Are you thinking of a redesign just for the sake of it? If you answered yes to that question, it is not yet the right time to do a redesign. Remember, a design serves a specific purpose. If you are not sure whether to do an overhaul of your site, keep in mind that your current design might have a specific purpose that you might not know about. You will lose that function if you do a redesign.

On the other hand, if your website has had the same website design since 1990, perhaps it is time to redesign. The last thing you would ever want to happen to your site is when visitors leave your site without taking a look at your content just because the design is old fashioned. If this is your case, here are some points to ponder before doing a redesign.

Redesigning your website is like performing plastic surgery on it. Your website loses its current identity (for the better or worse) and your regular visitors might not recognize your new design at first glance. You risk losing them just because they thought they landed on the wrong page. Hence, it is very important that you retain a characteristic feature from your old layout. Perhaps it is the logo of your site; perhaps it is the same text style for the title for your site.

To play it safe, put a poll on your site to let your visitors do the talking. If they think it is necessary for the website to have a fresh look, give it to them!