Designing your website is usually done with sales in mind. First impressions are very important. It's much like visiting the headquarters of an off-line company. For this reason, it is very important to keep good design principles in mind. Your site needs to be unable to reach the maximum number of people in the most styles 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.

Visitors come to your site, because they're interested in the content. Let's say you have a large number of articles or downloads available on your site, you need to make it simple for your visitor to find what he is looking for. You may do this by providing an SQL driven data base search, or just a simple index. By providing one of these features you have made it simple for your visitor to to be able to find the content they were looking for.

Once we have the visitor to our site, it is important to keep them there. They will only stay if they can work out how they can get to the content they want. if they can't work out how to navigate the site, they will leave. I would recommend that you stay away from complicated flash-based navigation and drop-down menus.

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.

On some websites the first page you come to is a pretty page that welcomes you to the site and may also have something like "click here to enter". This is a splash page. It serves no real purpose other than to be pretty as often they are highly graphical pages. The reason to avoid splash pages is to give your visitor no reason to click the back button.

#2 Be careful not to use too many banner ads

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 Avoid Audio

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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