Web
Design and Development - A Comprehensive
Look
Learn the "Why" of Designing
Your Website
Paid and at home webmasters
are notorious for creating pretty websites that
produce little. With a little planning and some
basic web design and development knowledge
you can have an online presence that looks great
and performs well. Build with a purpose and get it
all. How to Increase your conversion rates? Good
web design and development is more than just
coding. You need to consider more than just a
visually pleasing page.
Let your customer easily
find and order your product or service
online
With very few exceptions,
websites are there to make money. Sure, it's true
that you've got to have good content and plenty of
it in order to raise your search engine rankings.
However, once your visitor arrives, it's imperative
that the visitor can quickly and easily discern
what you have to offer.
Navigation should be a
cinch
You need to make it easy to
navigate your site as well, placing links to other
pages on your site which are relevant to that
reader's interest. While it may seem obvious, your
web design and development plan must include the
assumption that your visitor does not necessarily
land on your homepage.
You need to organize each
page accordingly. Your general page layout and
screen size are other factors which contribute to
usability. In a nutshell, usability is most
important to your success. Here are a few tips that
will increase your conversion rates.
Designing for
monitors
The latest figures on screen
size indicate that upwards of 80% of users use the
1024 x 768 screen resolution, so it's best to
design your page to that size. A three column page
makes a good composition, but in order to be sure
your sales propositions are clear to the other 20%
of visitors using the smaller screen resolution,
it's best that your sales propositions be placed in
the left hand column. For example, if you have an
email newsletter, place this offer in the left hand
column.
Everywhere they look --
Your mailing list
Remember what we said about
not assuming your visitor lands first on your
homepage? A good web design and development plan
means that you must place your offer for your
e-zine in the same position on every page. You'll
increase your readership exponentially, since every
visitor will spot your offer.
"Above the
fold"
Newspapers and print
magazines use the above the fold method in order of
relevance to the page. This brings us to the
scrolling factor. Unless you make your purpose and
value proposition visible in the top portion of the
page, without the user needing to scroll down,
chances are good they'll never see it. All such
messages should be displayed in the left hand, or
second column, as appropriate.
Have I made myself
perfectly clear?
Your web design and
development plan must tackle the complex problem
developing the organization of content on every
page.
Knowing that a first time
visitor can land on any page on your site,
introductory material must be written such that
your visitor is not confused. Make the purpose of
that material clear, on that page. Do not write it
as a continuing saga with the assumption the reader
has read the previous page. This isn't really
tricky, as long as you apply the principle of the
material being standalone information.
Give visitors a chance to
see other relevant web pages
Now for navigation aspects.
Let's say you've got a gardening website. One page
contains an article on the general care of roses.
Your web design and development plan needs to
address the question of which of your other pages
might be most relevant to that reader, and place
links to those other pages in an easily found
location. As your traffic grows, you'll begin to
see user patterns to refine your links to suit your
traffic.
Basic traffic
generation
Enhance your initial
website
design and development
plan with this page of short but powerful advice
and watch your traffic (and money) grow. A "pretty"
website is not enough. But, if you create web pages
with a purpose you can have both beauty and
practically.
Getting training
One place I've used for many
of my tools in getting targeted traffic is Mike
Leibner's Article and Blogging
Underground. Mike has
just put up an overview of his simple, but
effective 12
step training video
for you to watch.Take a moment and take a look now
...
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