Your website should be a tool used by others to find out about yourself or your company, what you do, how you can help them… Your website should be easy and clear for everyone to be able to find what they are looking for.
This is why the design of your website is so important, does it look good? Will it appeal to the visitors you are aiming it at?
Here are a few guidelines to designing a website that is clear and easy to use:
- Clear menu – Create a menu that is in the same place on every page with the same links in it. It can be so very confusing for people if the menu bar keeps moving or links change. If people don’t find your site easy to use they will just leave and find a website that suits their requirements.
- Site Map – Create a site map that is detailed with all your links indexed properly, if you have a large sitemap (over 100 links) break it down into separate parts.
- Style of the page – The text on the page is very important, you need to make it easy to read, good clean lines and nice flowing text. Getting the color of the text to match the rest of the page and making header, links and other important text to stand out is good practice for professional looking websites.
- Content – What is your site about? Brain storm ideas for keywords and key phrases, which would be used to find your website, add these to the content of your website, making sure you use headers and sub-headers to keep your site clear.
- Images – Images are great to bring color to a website, but don’t use too many as too much can be very distracting for a visitor and with so much going on they might miss the information they were looking for.
- Behind the scenes – You might not see them but image need some text to back them up which is descriptive, accurate and related to the topic. Add these to the ALT attributes and TITLEs.
- Test – No one likes to click on a link that doesn’t work so test the page, and make sure your HTML is correct.
- Dynamic Pages – Search engines spiders don’t always search dynamic pages, so use few of them and remember static pages can always be crawled.
- Overwhelm – Don’t crowd your website, sites that are packed with moving items, images and messy text are not nice to look at. Too many links on one page can also be a problem, so no more that 100 links on a page is best.
Now go back to your website, look at it from another person’s point of view and take your time to correct all the little bits that aren’t quite right. Remember your website needs to look good to do its job.
