Making your website successful

A good web design is one of the most important requisites of a successful website. A successful website is one that brings you good sales. Suppose you had a brick and mortar shop, how would you measure its success? By how much you sell and how much profit you make, right? In order to realize these objectives what would you do? You would make your shop look attractive from the outside, promote your shop in all publicity forums that are relevant to our business, arrange the products in your shop attractively and in an orderly fashion, provide information and assistance related to your shop and the goods that you sell, explain the advantages of your products and so on. That’s exactly what you need to do to make your website successful too through proper web design and presentation. Let’s consider a few details.

Make it easy and attractive for your visitors

Your web design should take care to ensure that visitors are attracted to your site. Some of the issues that you need to take care in your web design to achieve this are

• Quick loading of pages: If your home page takes ages to load, very few customers will wait. Studies have shown that millions of dollars are lost in potential sales due to faulty web design that fails to take of this aspect.
• Neat and pleasing layout: Once the customer is into your site, he or she gets that all-important first impression by what he or she sees. Your web design should take care to make this a pleasing and impressive experience by choosing the right colors, test, fonts and background. Don’t use too many colors or graphics in your web design. Ensure that the pages are well laid out and not cluttered with too much information.
• Easy navigation: Make sure that your web design allows for easy navigation from one page to another.
• Spelling and grammar: Make sure that the web design is free of minor errors. Check for spelling and grammar errors. These cold be distracting and also give a less favorable impression about you to most visitors.
• Use animation and graphics with moderation in your web design. If animation does not play any specific purpose avoid it altogether. Unnecessary animation can divert attention and slow down the loading of the page. Graphics are less distractive and carry smaller overheads, but if used in excess they could be equally damaging.

Tell then what you sell them

Your web design should include enough details about the products and your company. This may sound obvious, but when you consider everything that is involved in this process you will realize that not everyone is doing it. The following check list should help you.

• The web design of your site should provide for giving specific details about your products or services on the home page itself. It’s very easy to reserve this information for the pages that speak about your products, but if you don’t say this in your homepage, a new visitor would be confused, and even if you’re offering what she is looking for, she may not take the trouble to look beyond your home page.
• Explain the advantages of your products or services.
• Tell them what safeguards and guarantees come with the product.
• Give details about your company and contact information for those who want to communicate with you.

Bring Traffic in

Your web design should pull traffic. Some of the things that you can do to achieve this are

• Good web page design: Ensure that your web pages are attractively designed to bring in returning visitors.
• Search engine rankings Increase your search engine rankings through good website design by including appropriate keywords, quality content and good site layout.
• Fresh content: A good website has fresh content that makes visitor want to return. If you hardly update the information on your site, it becomes stale and few would have the motivation to revisit it.
• Make your site interesting: You can provide additional information that is relevant to your product, industry or company. You can also include some information on topics of general interest.

It is not enough to take care of these aspects in your web design. You should also test your site to see whether all these criteria are met in practice. In particular, test the speed with which your homepage loads whereby your site should load as fast as the websites hosted on our avrserver. For this purpose use a slow connection and test it from different computers. Testing from the same computer might be misleading because the site details might be stored in your computer, and therefore display faster.