Having a good website layout is a must no matter what type of website you are building. Keeping things uniform throughout your website makes it look nice, but more importantly it makes it much easier for your visitors to read and follow through what you want them to do.

There are many dos and don’ts you should follow when deciding on your website layout -

1. Headers – this is the top part of your website. Do Not make this huge and wild looking. Keep the height of this no more than around 100 pixels. This can be a graphic you have designed for you, or just a colored background with words on it.

2. Your Headline – use the h1 tags of html to write your headline, if you don’t know what this is, then ask your designer or learn it. Search engines look for h1 or h2 tags to tell them about the website. Your text should be easy to read, don’t make it fancy looking, keep the color usually to a red, this usually makes peoples’ eyes attract to it.

3. The body of your website – too many times a lot of website designers makes this way too colorful, and this makes it difficult to read. Most people want to know exactly right now what is in it for me, not all the fancy stuff. Keep your text family to one type, do not change this around. The norm for this is Times New Roman or Arial. You do not have to stick to these families but the important rule here is to use the same family for your entire website.

4. Images – please do not plaster your website with graphics! This is so annoying and distracting. An important rule to remember when using images on any website, is the size of the image, if your image is large it will take the site a long time to load and people won’t stick around to wait. Make sure that your images are clear and relative your website theme. Another important fact that most do not use, is the alt tag, this tag is inserted so if your visitor doesn’t have the ability to see images the words will display, also, search engines do not see images, so by using the alt tag within your image will tell the search engines what is there.

5. Buy Buttons – too many times I’ve gone to a website, read through it, liked what I saw and read; now I want to know the price? Scroll to the bottom to find the buy button only to see no price at all! Make sure that your price is clearly seen, the best place to put your price is directly above or below the buy button. Make it clear exactly what the price, no hidden costs! The fastest way to lose a sale is by not telling the purchaser how much they are going to pay.

6. Closing – make sure that your name is clearly at the bottom, people want to know who they are dealing with. Having a professional taken picture of yourself is the best, but if you either do not want to do this or don’t have one, then make sure your name is clearly there. And a way for them to contact you if they have questions. Do Not put your actual email address on your websites!! You can put the words Contact Me and have them linked to an email address. Do not ever put your actual email address on your websites. There are spiders out there that look for this format and will spam you!

7. PS – Always, Always, have a ps or two. Recap what they are getting and restate your price and guarantee. It has been shown that by having a ps increase sales, so use it!

By sticking with these steps you will get a better looking website that will convert much better. It really doesn’t matter what market you are in or what you are selling, by having the a good website layout will make all the difference.

Laura