Ghosts!

When you come across the headquarters of an off-line company, what you see gives you an impression of the company, good or bad. Your website is just the same. This makes it very important to practice good design principals. Your website need to reach the maximum number of people so that you can make the most sales possible.

Keep Navigation in Mind

It is very important that you give clear direction on how to navigate your site. It should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to get around your site. If a visitor is confused about how to get around your site they will leave it and go somewhere else.

You need to make it easy for visitors to get around and find the content on your site. Let’s say you have a thousand articles on your site and a visitor is looking for a certain one. You need to make it easy to find. You need to provide a feasible means for someone to find it without a hassle. This could be an SQL driven database, or just a glossary Index. By providing such a feature you make sure your visitors use your site.

Once we have the visitor to our site, it is important to keep them there. They will only stay if they can work out how they can get to the content they want. if they can’t work out how to navigate the site, they will leave. I would recommend that you stay away from complicated flash-based navigation and drop-down menus.

If your site has many pages and your visitors become deeply engrossed in surfing your site, you will need to make sure that they know where they are and how to get back to the main page. It is important not to create confusion with visitors. Confusion means abandon ship!

A few more pointers that may help.

#1 Do not use splash pages.

What is a splash page? It’s the first page you see when you arrive at a website. A splash page is often a very attractive page with lots of graphics. They will often have the words welcome to my site or “click here to enter”. They are in fact, just pretty pages with no real purpose. The reason not to use the splash pages is so as not to give your visitors reason to click the back button. Visitors come from content. Not pretty pages.

#2 Banner ads don’t work. be careful not to waste too much space on them

Even the newest people using the Internet have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements. This means you would be wasting valuable Web real-estate in using banners. It is far better to provide valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content. This will lead your visitors to feel they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

#3 don’t use audio on your site

With plenty of content on your site your visitors will spend quite a lot of time reading the content. You will need to make sure that they do not become annoyed, because of some looping audio on your website. If you feel that you must have audio on your site, make sure that you also provide a volume control or muting.