Good Web Design Practices

Your website is the place where your online business starts. It is similar to the headquarters of a company found in the real, physical world.

Good web design principles ensure that your website reaches out to the most number of visitors possible and sells to as many people as possible.

Provide clear navigation on your site

The first principle: have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The visitors should know how to navigate around your website without confusion. This is achieved easily if your navigation menu is uncluttered and concise.

There should not be too many images on your website. They make your site load very slowly. If any image is really important to be shown on the site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

An online paragraph consists only at most three sentences. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Adhere to website standards

There is a set of standards that all websites should adhere to. Go to www.w3.org to get a validation run on your site and this site will tell you if your website complies with the standards.

Also make sure that all your webpages are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Scripting languages, unless absolutely necessary, should be avoided on your site. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website.

It is a fact that heavy scripts slows down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. In addition, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some of your visitors might miss important information because of the use of scripts.

As to the style of your pages, a lot of work is saved if you utilize the cascading style sheets or CSS. With CSS it becomes a breeze to revise the style on your webpages.

As you go along and expand your online marketing endeavor, you will discover that you need to incorporate more good practices. Following these will help you ensure a successful internet marketing venture.

The Useful Strategy Research Team