Design Website Look and Feel

How Does Your Website Design Look and Feel?

Taking time to review your website and hosting service could add to your customer base and save you money. Make sure you are getting what you paid for in your web site design.

Website design tipsChange a few things for more success. And get our beginner web design tips newsletter before you read further.

Have you taken a look at the design of your website lately? Things and ways of presenting yourself online are constantly changing so it might be a good idea to critique your pages.

If you are spending money every month for a website, are you making sure that you are getting the most for your payments?

If you just have a series of static pages sitting in cyberspace for people to read and then move on, you are definitely not making the most of your site.

How to look at your website design

Here are a few things you can do to make your site better. Make sure your website keeps track of how many “hits” you get each day or week. How can you assess the effectiveness methods you are using to draw people to your site if you don’t know how many people are actually visiting?

Keep ’em busy!

Create things for people to do on the site. If you are selling widgets, you could offer a free leaflet on how to use widgets, for example. You could have a video for them to watch. If you are a singer, a songwriter or a voice-over actor, you could have one free audio or video download.

Have links within your pages to other pages on your site, but be careful of links to other sites. The goal is to keep people on your website and to ultimately have them buy your product or use your service. It is normally fine to link to “authority” sites.

This gives you clout in the search engines and shows visitors you want to give them the best information. For instance, if you are selling a website design course (like we do here) it is okay to direct people to Whois.Net , an industry standard for finding domain names.

The power of the “zine”Tips for designing a website

Offer to send them an e-newsletter with helpful classes in your area of expertise.

When signing them up, ask for a little more information than just their e-mail address, such as where they live, what they do, what their interest are. It’s up to you and your needs to determine what to ask. But do not ask for too much info or they will be intimidated.

This will give you valuable information about the people who are interested in your small business. There are companies that provide e-newsletter services for you, so you don’t have to figure out how to program your site to do this. All you have to do is sign up with a service.

Business sites – Make it easy to order

You can also sign up with companies that provide standard shopping cart services to websites so you don’t have to invent the wheel on this one.

Shopping carts don’t necessarily keep track of who purchased what, however, so it might pay to have a programmer design your site so that you can know when someone is a repeat customer and what their needs are. You’ll see an example of this kind of customization on Amazon.com.

Content they can use on your web pages

Provide content that is of value to your visitors. And have sections that are updated at regular intervals, at least monthly. People are not going to keep coming back if they always see the same things. You want to think of your website itself providing a service to your customers.

Do you publish a blog?

Blogging is one way to have updated content. Blogs are very popular with internet users. Another popular thing to do is to provide industry-specific news updates. If you provide timely and useful content, people will come to rely on you as a source of useful information.

The more people rely on you for timely information and great products, the more they will keep coming back. So go ahead and do something today to liven up your website.

P.S. Speaking of which, if you decide to do this yourself, I just finished writing a review of a simple website design options which you can do yourself. Take a moment and check out the website designing review here …

Design Website Look and Feel