Does Your Business Website Meet These Standards?

In business, even seemingly tiny details can make a difference. Your company’s website design is a public presentation of yourself to the world. Here are five of the most important guidelines to check to assure that your business website performs as it should.

1) Never use splash pages

Always remember that we attract our site’s visitors for a specific purpose, and we want nothing to stand in the way of achieving that goal as efficiently as possible. A splash page, which you probably have encountered on occassion, is a landing page that is nothing but decoration. Usually, they are meant to be visually attractive. The only meaningful content they have is a phrase such as “click here to enter this site.” Why add the frustration of one additional click between your landing page and the desired outcome on the part of the site visitor? Get those visitors through that virtual door immediately.

2) Avoid excessive banners

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 valueable 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.

3) Don’t construct hurdles in navigating the website

Your navigation menu should mimic what your site visitors have used many times before. Make it evident that your links to other pages are just that; they should be like directional sign posts on a highway. If you insist upon an animated, dynamic menu or a multi-level dropdown, also provide a tradition, text-based static menu in one of the traditional menu locations, such as along the left panel of the site. Besides, the static menu will contribute toward your search engine optimization efforts.

4) Provide a clear indication of where the user is

If your site is well designed, users will easily flow from one page to another. However, along the way, they may feel like returning to a previously visited page to read it more carefully, to remind themselves of details or to compare one set of features to another. Provide a way for them to retrace their steps or to know how to get from “point g” back to “point c.” Using a breadcrumb trail serves this purpose very nicely.

5) Use audio only very cautiously

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 sound looping on and on at your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control — volume or muting controls would work fine.