Making sure your website design doesn't suck

Building an excellent website can be done. All it takes is following a few guidelines that I'll go over in this article. A key in starting out, is understanding what you want to end up with. This will help you to stay focused and keep the site's scope manageable.

The requirements of a great website will vary depending on what it is supposed to do. Whatever the site is supposed to do, make sure it dose it well. It should also do it as simply as possible. Something basic but often overlooked that all exceptional websites have is a contact form rather than a mailto: link. Why? Well, to start not everyone uses POP mail with a local client. Not everyone will be browsing from their own computer. On the positive side, having an easy to use contact form indicates a desire to communicate with your visitors.

How a website is organized, the nature of the site's navigation, and how visitors will interact with the website are all part of something called Information Architecture or IA. This is one of the more crucial parts of a website's design. If your visitors can't find what they need, then they will simply leave and never come back. Great sites understand the visitor and organize their content in such a way as to make it as intuitive for the visitor as possible.

The style and aesthetics of the website will have a lot to do with how well you connect emotionally with your visitors. Excellent sites know their audience and are designed accordingly. You wouldn't do an ultra modern theme with techno music for a deli, and you wouldn't do a grunge style website for a fortune 500 company. High valued sites make their visitors feel comfortable and in their element.

A slow Load time for a website is always a sure way to lose a visitor before they even get to your website. They teach this in every basic website design course from here to China, but getting that fat content out there is just too tempting. Video and bump'n Flash animations are all the rage, but they have to be used where and when appropriate or they will cause more harm than good. A great site has a great load time.

That content is king is a clich, but it still holds true. If you have unbelievably hot unique content, then your website is going to be unbelievably hot and popular. It should be valid, relevant, and easy to access. Exceptional content is at the heart of every exceptional website.

How current and up-to-date a site's information is can make or break it. Exemplary websites will always be 100% current and be used as an almost real-time communication tool to interact with their visitor base. Stale content, even if it was all the rage last month, often times just won't cut it for today's best websites.

Keeping your visitors safe is a big one. This can be more difficult for some sites than others, but the mantra remains the same. Security comes first: then function. All exceptional websites go the extra mile to make sure their visitors can safely visit and engage in ecommerce with the knowledge that their personal and financial information remains safe.

Article Source: http://www.myaddirectory.com

About the author: Dustin Dickens is a professional website designer living and working on the South coast of Spain. Get Dustin's free report on how to make sure your business website design doesn't blow!

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