Top Five Web Design Tips

by Mark Dale, www.Digiwise.co.uk  

When it comes to your website design, attention should be paid to every tiny detail to ensure the website performs optimally to serve its intended purpose. Here we list five top web design tips to follow to make sure your website performs well and looks great.

Tip 1 - Don’t use splash pages – they serve no purpose!

A Splash page is the first page you see when you navigate to a website. They usually have a very neat image and a few words like "welcome to the site..." or "click here to enter".  They are in fact just that pretty screens with little or no real purpose. Don’t give your visitors the wrong first impression and give them a reason to click the "back" button!  What they want to see is content and the real value of your website site up front. Good web design doesn't include that annoying splash page.

Tip 2 - Don’t use excessive advertisements

Most of us want to make a bit of cash by placing ads on our web site.  However, even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements, so you’ll be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable 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.

Tip 3 - Use simple and clear navigation

 You must include simple and very straight-forward navigation menu in your web design. Make sure that even a young child will know how to use it (if you have children, get them to test it!). Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered drop down menu systems. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they just give up and leave your site.

Tip 4 -  Give a clear indication of where the user is on the website

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your website, you need to make sure they can easily identify which part of the site they are in at that moment. This way, they will be able to browse and search for relevant information and find there way to other sections of the site. It’s easy to confuse your visitors, so be careful because this confusion will often mean "abandon ship!", and then they are gone.

Tip 5 - Avoid blaring out audio when a visitor arrives

If your visitor is going to stay a while on your website, reading and searching your content, then it’s not a good idea to annoy them by automatically playing some audio looping on and on.  If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it. You can easily put “play”, “pause” and “stop” buttons on any audio controls that you chose to place on your website. Good web site design puts the user in control, so remember not force audio on them.