Webmaster Blog

Have you ever thought what a good web design can do to your site ? After all, a good site isn’t just about plain articles. As they say, there should be more than meets the eye.

It will surely be a waste of time if you try to put up a website, have visitors check out what you got, and then lose them instantly. This is what normally happens if you don’t get to plan your design effectively. All your ideas, effort, and money go down the drain.

There are some tips that you can always follow to ensure that you have the most effective website set up.

1. Be as informative as possible. Do not simply rely on information. Instead, go for the juicy, interesting ones—those types that customers will be digging in. There are already a lot of tools to help you out with that one. You can check out popular blogging communities such as Technorati or Digg.com and see what topics people love to read and talk about. You can also use free keyword selector tools to determine what “are good keywords” these days and use them to search for interesting articles. You can also participate in forums so you’ll have an idea what ticks in their minds. Once you have a list of excellent topics, you can start writing about them.

2. Get rid of any inconveniences in your design. Thus avoid scrolling texts, blinking letters, or bold and flashy colors. For one they are irritating to the eyes. Second they are not really necessary. It’s good to have a perfect blend of colors and a great layout, but don’t overdo your design. You can use a little flash, though, and some funny animation.

3. Make your website truly easy to navigate. You can do this by minimizing visitor’s clicks as much as possible. At most two clicks are sufficient. A click is a manual action; no matter how simple the process can be, it still requires energy and effort. Nobody will surely like to dwell on websites where information is real hard to find.

4. Put variety into your site. Too much media is bad; so are plain texts. Strike a good balance between the two. For example, if you’re designing a travel site, you can combine your review with pictures of the place. It makes visitors relate to your stories a lot better than by merely reading them.

5. Settle for small-size media files. It’s true that you should have audio or video formats in your site but do limit their sizes. They eat bandwidth too, especially if you have a real-time online streaming system. This will then slow down the speed of downloading your webpage. Not all people are patient on that. The best thing you can do is to compress these files with free software available.

Web design is more than graphics or art. It also incorporates words. A good web designer should be able to create superb chemistry between these two.

Popularity: 19% [?]