Site Design

You can have a unique and potentially lucrative idea for a website, but if your site is designed poorly this can seriously impact upon the eventual success of your site. There are several things you should consider when designing the layout of your site.

Firstly you can be creative and radical, but I think your basic site layout should conform to the majority of sites on the internet because internet users are used to this layout. You can always change it later if you wish. This common layout consists of a header, left and/or right panel, which could include a navigation menu, Adsense, sign-up form, etc, and a page footer with links to all your main pages.

Also try to keep things simple when designing your site. Don't try and impress your visitors with flashy graphics, most of which will take ages to load for those visitors with slow internet connections. This will often result in those people just becoming impatient and leaving your site before it's fully loaded.

Don't give your visitors too many options. If you have a home page with many different links scattered all over your page, to many different pages, then visitors can be put off by having so many options. Have a clear, user-friendly navigation menu, and interlink every page of your site, ensuring that there is always an easy link back to your home page. Focus their attention on the areas of your site that you want them to end up. For example, if your aim is to get visitors to buy your product from the product page, then draw attention to this page in the various pages of your site, and create prominent links to it.

As I also mentioned in the sales letter page, if you are trying to get customers to buy products from you and send you money, then your site needs to have credibility. You should include as much information about yourself, plus a photo of yourself ideally, and provide lots of contact information.

To get visitors to return to your site then you may want to provide a way for them to interact with you and your site. This could be done through a forum or message board, or possibly through competitions for example, or simply by including RSS feeds which will ensure that your site is constanted updated with fresh content.

Finally, and most importantly, your site must have good content. There is no point spending ages on your site design if the actual content that people read is poor. Do the basic things like spell checking and checking grammar, and make sure that you are providing information that you yourself would find interesting to read if it was someone else's site.