Before you start coming up with your website, you want a concrete plan for what you need to do with it. Do not get this one backward ; your internet site design should fit with, but be secondary to, the purpose for your internet site’s existence, not the other way around.
For many of us, the goal is to design a site which will generate business, not outbursts of “Ooh.
This, in my mind, is one of the most significant steps of the design process : Develop a “mission statement” for your internet site and stick to it. Fight the urge to add absolutely surplus items simply because you “like them”. I am not good at planning and I can admit I’ve a weakness for the bright, glossy objects of the Web, but I have attempted to train myself to act otherwise for the good of my site and you must consider doing so too. Another difficulty with many business sites is dead, flat, uninteresting and uninspiring content.
You do not have the luxurious of going on and on about why your product is great. With print advertising, possible clients can look over the data almost at their leisure. Online, they look over it at that moment and if you do not catch their interest straight away, you could have lost them for good. Make it interactive if at all possible and make it concise.
Do not expect your visitors to read a 2500 word pitch for your product / service ; I’d bet about 99.9999% will not ( and that is being conservative ). “Make $5500 in the following two hours, if you are not busy.” “Become a millionaire in your spare time.”. “Since dinosaurs rambled the Earth, there’s never been a better product than [fill in the blank]. In fact, in a rare occurrence of species foreboding, dinosaurs essentially foretold our product and died out due to overpowering despair caused by the awareness they might never be ready to use it. But do not cry for the dinosaurs, their loss is your gain. There’s not a thing in the world inaccurate with being happy with them, but duck the ludicrous claims, the bold text, the exclamation marks, the blinking thingies, and the money graphics. I believe folks’s fraud meter pegs out at any of these.
Your contact info should be really obvious on the front page. Explain to visitors how, where, and when they can get in contact with you. Help dispel that unnamed, faceless image that we site owners are sometimes the subject of. To my mind, this fosters trust and trust engenders potential sales. Some sites I have seen have the products displayed poorly, or not at all. This ties in with “form follows function” above. If you are making an attempt to sell something, you would like to make it straightforward to buy, don’t you? Make your website simple to navigate ; particularly the order / shopping areas. Provide clear, easily followed instructions on ordering and ( I suspect ) you must consider accepting visa cards on your website, if at all possible.
Don’t make your visitors jump thru lots of hoops to set an order. Spend a while contemplating how you might make your website the best it can be for your visitors ; they will love you for it.
