Web Site Design Principles And Best Practices

Article written by: William Perkins

The key to designing an excellent website, and doing it in the
least amount of time, is planning. Internet web site design
follows a set of principles which you must incorporate into
your plan. Additionally, you'll want to use a good web building
tool to expedite the process.

Planning your web site on paper first is vitally important. I
don't mean planning every little detail, I just mean planning
the look and feel of your homepage, as well as the navigation
or flow chart of the various pages of your entire web site.

Think of your website as a pyramid with your homepage as the
pinnacle of the pyramid. Your visitors will navigate from your
homepage to your 2nd tier pages, and from there to the 3rd tier
pages. In the beginning, you will just want to build your home
page and the 2nd tier pages.

Here's a Fast Track Technique to make your job of designing and
building a website a lot easier:

All you really have to do is plan one page, your homepage, and
then clone all your other 2nd and 3rd level pages. Your goal
should be to make one perfect webpage, and then you'll simply
use this as your template and fill in the pages with different
content.

Let's look at the requirements of a successful webpage. A good
webpage must fill the needs of the visitor to your site, as
well as the needs of the search engines, and must also entice
the visitor to click-thru to the merchant page where s/he can
make a purchase.

But that's not all. A webpage should also capture the name and
email address of the visitor. There should be numerous places
and opportunities for the visitor to opt-in to your newsletter
or to get your freebie product. I recommend you put your opt-in
email capture form on every page of your website. Getting your
visitor's name and email address is actually more important
than selling a product to your visitor.

Optimizing your webpages for the search engines is especially
important to get free, targeted traffic to your site. Using
articles that you write about your business, combined with SEO
webpage design principles practically guarantees an avalanche
of targeted traffic to your website.

In addition to convincing your visitors to give you their name
and email address, and optimizing for the search engines, a top
notch webpage should also be designed to nudge the visitor along
a pre-defined path to get the visitor to take a particular
action. The action you usually desire the visitor to take is to
click on the link that leads to your merchant page where a
purchase can be made.

Here is where website navigation becomes vitally important. The
amount of clicks from the time your visitor arrives at your
website to the merchant page where the visitor is confronted
with an offer should ideally be not more than three clicks.

The navigation must also be designed so that the visitor is not
overwhelmed with choices. I see too many websites that offer a
plethora of choices to the customer. This is a Big Mistake. A
confused mind hesitates to make a purchase, or takes no action
at all and exits the website in search of a simpler solution.

Design your navigation so that no more than five choices are
offered at any one time. So your homepage might offer five
category links at the top of your page, each of which might
lead to five more 2nd tier links. This already adds up to 25
pages plus the homepage.

The navigation should also be placed in the same place on every
webpage to make your visitor's experience easy and pleasurable.
You do not want a frustrated customer. The happy mood is the
buying mood. What's more, a good experience at your website
ensures that your customer will return again and again to your
website.

Offer excellent, easy to find content at your website. Design
your webpages with simplicity in mind. Nothing fancy or
complicated. Use a white background and easy to read fonts. Do
not overdo the colors! Choose black type and one or two colored
fonts and that's it.

You need to convince your visitor that you are reliable,
trustworthy, honest, and credible. To do that your webpages
should be conservative, easy to navigate, and easy to read.
It's also important to include your email address prominently.

By following these webpage design guidelines, everybody wins.
The search engines do their job by delivering relevant content
to the visitor (because your webpage has been optimized for the
search engines). The visitor wins by effortlessly locating the
information and product that s/he was seeking. The merchant
wins by making a sale. And you win by collecting a commission
from the sale. You also acquire the customer's trust, as well
as their name and email address, so that you can market to them
again in the future.

About The Author: Big Willy writes about starting an online
business, affiliate marketing, and making money. He has
packaged much of what he knows into a re-brandable ebook
titled, "Fast Track To Internet Riches!" which you can get for
free at his website. http://www.BigWillySite.com