subject: How to get the edge over your competitors with proper web design [print this page] How to get the edge over your competitors with proper web design
The ultimate goal of a website is to lead customers to buy products or services from your site. If you are looking for an edge over your competitors, then it is time to get serious with website design. By putting in effort in designing your website, not only will you increase your sales and customer satisfaction, you will also gain valuable information about your products and customer preferences.
Here are a few tips for website design:
Make your website unique. Create you site to reflect the image and personality of both you and your business.
Keep your website simple, both in an aesthetic point of view as well as an engineering point of view. Keeping things simple, and making it easier to locate the important sections are all that you need really. Look at how successful Google's home page is this is because it is so easy to locate the search box. Keeping the site in plain HTML makes it easier to index and quicker to load.
Ensure your website is compatible with all types of browsers. There is Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and many more browsers out there. Many people leave sites quickly when they find out that they cannot work on their browsers. Although it may be difficult to ensure 100% success, because there is always 1% who is still running an older version of a browser, it still pays to make sure that your website is compatible with almost all types of browsers.
Make your website easy to navigate through. This is probably the most important item, because once customers find your site, they will most likely spend a few seconds deciding if it is worth going through. Customers need to quickly find the information they are after, or else they will return to their search engines to click on your competitor's site. To make your site easy to navigate through, use a left hand menu that lets the visitors see what the main topics are, and lets them easily jump from section to section on any page of the site.
Ensure your website is easy to bookmark. Once users have found what they are looking for, they may not make their purchase right there and then. It is important that they should be able to return to the website easily, especially to the point they were at, later. It is important that users will be returned to the exact page that they bookmark.
Having a good website design company by your side will help you make the best choices and steer you in the right direction concerning your website.
