Your Website Design Says Alot About You

It is hard to believe that the first real website was as recently as 1991 and now billions of pages are in competition.Your Home Page is the most important as it is your company's shop window. It is too easy for visitors to hit the back button that a website has to grab hard and try to keep its visitors and, hopefully,create them into customers.

In a recent interview, the great retailer Sir Philip Green stated that the reason why his shops are a success despite the recession is because the shop windows are regularly refreshed and the goods on offer are regularly revised.

A website has to continually evolve if it is going to continue to attract attention. Most organisations are not just interested in hits to their sites but in converting these hits into paying customers. Although it is always important to attract new customers it is even more important to retain existing ones, so innovation has to be balanced with the tried and tested.

A few years ago, Coca Cola decided that their cola recipe that has been kept secret for generations could be improved and the costly experiment cost Coca Cola a small fortune. The Changing of the cola drink recipe, that has worked for generations was marketing madness.

Successful giants like Sir Philip Green know that there are things that must be changed and things that must stay constant. When Coca Cola changed their own recipe they became like any other cola company and the drink was no longer "the real thing".

Download speed If a search engine has brought your website to the attention of a potential customer, the first thing that the person will notice is how long the website takes to load. Of course, broadband speeds vary considerably but good website design will enable a website to download in just a few seconds.

First Home Page impressions The first question that any web designer should ask of his client is what they want the visitor to do when they arrive at the Home Page. This is always a tough one for big organisations that have lots of products and services to sell. If there are too many images, messages and things to do ,making it a chore for the viewer and slowin their computer down because of all the processes clogging up the works, resulting in a potential customer making a hasty retreat with the back button.

Navigating around and from the Home Page Many websites are designed by people with state of the art monitors and what looks good on a giant screen may not look so good on a laptop or notebook screen.

Creating a clear, easily navigable Home Page that is also interesting and can be easily refreshed is a great design skill. The Home Page's content is not just for the human eye as it also has to work well for search engines.

The Home Page has two principal functions: to inform and to lure. The copy must be short and sweet to read but also Search Engine Optimised so that the potential customer can find the website easily when Keywords or Phrases are searched for.

The secret of good website design is simplicity. Lots of designers believe that the more whistles and bells there are to deflect attention the more exciting the website be. Simplicity does not mean boring; a web page can still be visually stimulating without making the visitors feel that they are the target on a shooting range and every flashing, twirling, ticker-tape style image is gunning for them.

Website design conventions In the last couple of years, most people who use computers for work or pleasure have visited hundreds of websites and so have an idea of where to look for things. For example, it makes sense for all websites to have navigation links across the top of the page or down the side or both.

It is also still surprising how tough some websites make it for their customers to be able to find contact details or to place an order. Sometimes, protective measures against spam are so tight that only the most ardent customer would be bothered to fight through the security.

SEO - the essential website ingredient Every phrase that is written within a website should be Search Engine Optimised. That does not mean that the copy is going to be rubbish to read, but it does mean that there are always two ways of saying something - any old way and the SEO way.

The size of the copy is also another factor to consider. A customer may be looking at a notebook that has a screen a third of the size of the website designer's massive screen. Legible, bite-sized chunks of copy that is well-written and regularly renewed, is the key to retaining visitors.