WebPage Design Tips

Knowing how to build a website is simple enough, but knowing how to keep your site’s visitors returning can be difficult. There are many reasons potential customers may not revisit your site. Perhaps your product or service was not quite what they needed. Maybe it was too expensive, or the shipping made it cost-prohibitive. Sometimes, the reason has nothing to do with your business or its offerings at all, but instead with the website itself.

There are many aspects of a website that have the ability to scare away prospective buyers. It’s often a good idea, once a site is completed, to have a market study performed of your site and its usability.

This will help you know if there are any major flaws that will keep your site from performing optimally by bringing customers in to buy your product or service. Without a market study, or at least a few good friends to give some honest advice about your site, you will need to take a good look at it with an unbiased eye.

The first thing you will want to pay attention to is the speed at which the site loads. Is it weighed down with heavy scripts, Flash animations, or other design elements that will considerably slow the loading of the page on older computers? Remember that not all of your visitors will be browsing your site on the latest hardware and software.

What is the overall look and feel of your homepage? Are the colors soothing and pleasing? Chances are if you have neon or other bright colors, your visitors may not stick around for very long. Psychologically, purple and yellow are hard on the eyes, and even if they are your business logo’s colors, you may reconsider creating a site laden with them. Medically, it is common for people to get migraines while reading white text on a dark-colored background, so take that into consideration as well.

When you build a website, it takes only a little common sense to create a pleasing site for your visitors. However, consider asking a consultant or some friends and family for their honest opinion. Stay away from neon colors, tiny fonts, resource-heavy graphics, and flashing pop-ups and advertising, and you will be off to a good start.

Web design is more than coding and inputting content from a writer; it is an art form. “Design” itself means to create, or plan out in accordance with a goal or purpose. So when creating a website, designers are formulating the best way to fashion the site so that the goal — having visitors — is reached successfully. Just because you build it does not mean they will come, and this is where having a talented designer who knows what elements are essential to your site’s success is critical.

Color - Almost all of us are aware of the color of a website when we visit it. Subconsciously or not, we will make the decision to stay longer on the site or click away immediately based in large part on color alone. The reason for this is psychological; there are entire fields of study devoted to color theory. Typically, site visitors prefer calming colors such as those from the blue family. Also, when reading a page of text, visitors prefer black text on a light background.

Texture - This is often an element that sets apart amateur websites from professionally-looking ones, even if they are not designed by a professional. Texture refers to the feeling of the page. Even on a website, you can create texture with patterns, special use of fonts, and even a creative use of placement on the page. For instance, overlapping two boxes of text gives the page some depth.

Direction - The way a page flows is its direction. Visitors to a website don’t realize how much thought was probably put into the site they are browsing. However, there is a reason their eyes move they way they do, from the site’s navigation to its advertising, to its content. Strategic placement of a website’s material helps “direct” the consumers’ eyes where the site owner wants the attention given.

If you have never thought much about web design, you may now see that art is as equally important as computer science when creating a website. Designing principles are pretty standard, whether designing websites, consumer packaging, or literature for publication. Knowing the critical elements of the design will help when you sit down to plan your next website.

If you have decided to build a website for your business, there are other options you may not be aware of when it comes to getting your business noticed online. Ten years ago, weblogs (or blogs for short), were relatively unknown. Today they are among the top ways to make your business stand out among the crowds on the internet. Amazingly though, many business owners are still unaware of the impact they can have on their presence.

What is a blog exactly? Blogs began as a way to supply information to people online, in a non-static manner. Unlike websites that have fixed pages and standardized content, blogs are more dynamic. Meaning, their content is constantly fresh and changing. The design may even change more frequently than a standard website’s would.

For this reason, blogs became the popular medium for those wishing to create online journals, where the site was updated on an almost daily basis based on the continued activity of the blog owner. On any given day, a visitor to the site may have a new article, product review, or testimonial to read.
Of course, the major benefit to having a site with constantly changing content is that visitors will anticipate this. They may visit your site several times a week, perhaps even several times per day. This benefit can increase the chances of prospective customers sticking around your site, making a purchase, or reading more about your products and in turn recommending them to someone else.

Creating a blog isn’t anymore difficult than putting together a website, and in fact it may be easier for the non-designer. Many web platforms, such as WordPress, have “themes” that you can upload onto your web host’s servers. These themes are easy to modify, allowing you to change colors, fonts, graphics, and more. With a website that is traditionally coded, you would need your web designer go into the code and make the changes.

Alternatively, with the way web platforms are designed, it is not difficult at all to add new content to your blog without having to access the code. This makes upkeep of your site simpler and perhaps less costly, as you can often avoid the services of a web designer that you will require if you build a website.