Website Designing – Top 20 Dos and Don’ts to Design Effective Sites

Good website design is central to your website’s success. An effective design can expand your client base and increase profitability. Conversely, a bad design can discourage website usage despite excellent products and service. Consider the following dos and don’ts when designing your website to turn it into a profit center for your business:

Top 10 Dos of Website Design

1. Provide easy search and navigation capabilities. Your website design should facilitate quick and easy search of required information. Each web page must have all relevant links to enhance customer visiting experience and satisfaction. As a rule of thumb, it should not take more than two to three clicks for customers to access desired information. The faster your customers can navigate through your website and find what they are looking for, the more likely you are to get repeat visits from them.

2. Keep your website content simple and easy to understand. Develop clear, effective and to-the-point content to capture customer attention and help them understand better what you have to offer. Your content should address customer problems and provide efficient solutions for them.

3. Creating a consistent look and feel for your entire website through the use of similar fonts, colors and layouts is a must to give your website a professional look. Linked pages especially should use consistent font styles, graphics and colors.

4. Make sure your website works effectively on multiple browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer, for greatest impact.

5. Put your contact information on every page. Though you can put your address on the ‘Contact Us’ page, make sure to put your phone number and email address on every page to give a mature and professional look to your site.

6. Put important information near the heading of each page to allow customers to easily see it and not wait to scroll down to find it.

7. Use high-quality graphics and pictures. Images on your website, including your logo, should be of high-quality to attract customer and create interest but should not take too much time to load.

8. Use bullets, icons, boldface and italicized words, color and headline to draw customer attention to important segments of your content.

9. Make sure that your security and privacy policy are easily visible to customers and stated in clear terms. Take all necessary steps to make your website secure for customers.

10. Use clear and concise page titles. Visitors see web page title in search results and clear effective titles can significantly increase the traffic coming to your website.

Top 10 Don’ts of Website Design

1. Don’t clutter up your web pages with too much information. Create a new page for each separate topic, product or product category.

2. Don’t make excessive use of bandwidth consuming audio and video features, such as graphics, animations and photos. These features can make your pages slow to load, annoying customers and discouraging website usage.

3. Don’t use text and color combinations that make content hard to read. Additionally, don’t include distracting visuals on your web pages.

4. Don’t add unnecessary or irrelevant information or features to your website. Adding content and features on your website that don’t carry any meaning for visitors is a waste of time and bandwidth.

5. Don’t let the content and links on your website become outdated. Content should be regularly refreshed and links monitored. Outdated links are annoying and can seriously affect your business reputation.

6. Don’t use jargon or overly technical terms on your pages unless your website is designed to address the needs of a small segment of technical people. Additionally, avoid using conflicting information in your web pages. In addition to confusing customers, such information gives a highly negative and unprofessional image to your website.

7. Don’t use flashing icons and text as that can distract browsers and prove detrimental to the popularity of your website.

8. Don’t fill up your web pages with advertisements. Also, keep a check on pop-ups as they can irritate customers and damage your credibility.

9. Don’t include introductory advertisements on the first page before your web content appears. Such advertisements put customers in a sore mood even before they look at your content and negatively impact your business reputation.

10. Don’t brag about your company’s achievements. Provide your customers with easy to digest information and back it up with references and customer testimonials to allow them to judge your performance.

Follow the dos and avoid the don’ts to create an effective website design, and greatly enhance the chances of successful web entrepreneurship.