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.

Plan Navigation

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.

Navigation must always be simple and straightforward, so that even a young child could work it out. It's a good idea to stay away from complicated flash-based navigation or multi-tiered drop-down menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate your site, they will leave.

It is important to avoid confusion. If your visitors become confused you will lose them. At times your visitors will be deeply engrossed in surfing your site. Your pages must make it possible for them to know where they are, and how to get back to the main page.

A few more pointers that may help.

#1 Do not use splash pages.

A splash page is the first page you see when you arrive at a website These are often very beautiful with graphics. They often have the words welcome or, click here to enter. In fact, they are just pretty pages with no real purpose. Don't give your visitors a reason to click the back button. You then give them the real value of your site up front without the splash pages.

#2 Do not use excessive banner advertisements.

I would almost say that I failed to see why banner ads are used today. Nobody even bothers to look at them anymore. For this reason, I would suggest that instead of using banner ads you provide content for your visitors. You are also able to weave in affiliate links into this content. This would help your visitors to feel when they buy that they are buying because they want to and will not feel pushed.

#3 don't use audio on your site

If you want a visitor to spend a long time on your site reading your content you need to make sure they're not getting annoyed by some looping audio on your website. If you're determined to add audio to your site, make sure they have some control over it. This could be volume or muting controls, these would work fine.

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