5 Principles For Website Design

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are some important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

It is a basic principle of web design to keep things simple and not to waste space, so using a splash page not only reduces your client’s chances of getting people through to their home or sales page, but is also bad web design practice because you are wasting space and not giving your client the best value for their money.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

Also keep in mind that banner ads achieve one thing (if they are effective) and that is to get people to click on them.  What happens when some clicks on a banner ad?  They click away from your website and you can potentially lose the client or the sale.Therefore, unless you want to lose visitors, don't do banner ads.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

This is another very important principle of web design.  Any page in your website should be just one click away from any other page in your website.  If you apply this rule, navigation will be very simple for anyone to follow.

It forces the website designer to plan the layout of the site so as to keep navigation simple.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your site browsers, because it will only frustrate them and they will click away!

The above can easily be achieved if you apply Rule 3.  Always make sure that the one click rule is applied and always be sure to name the page the browser is on with a relevant tab.By simply naming each page with an appropriate tag, the browser will know where he is right now and how to get back.

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on in your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

Alternatively, if you are going to add the video, make sure that it plays only once and then stops.

Keep in mind that people from right over the world could be visiting your website.  This means that some may not have such a fast internet connection as you may be used to.  Streaming video could have the effect of slowing down a slow connection even more and the visitor could end up clicking away, because of the slow connection and the even slower video.

Rian Schoeman

SilverFox Web Design