Articles - Website Design

Website Design – First Impressions Count – Invest in Good Website Design

Your website design has a direct impact on your site traffic and on the success of any e-commerce business you generate. Think about it this way, if you walk into a department store and all of the clothes are heaped in untidy messes on the tables, slipping off onto the floor, and simply tossed over the clothing racks how do you feel about shopping there? If on the other hand, the displays are neat, the aisles clear and the item you are looking for easy to find aren’t you more likely to think positively about the store and be willing to return to it again and again? The same principle applies to websites – if the site is neat and easy to navigate it will draw in both first time and repeat customers.

The keys to good website design are readability and user friendliness. What it means for a site to be ‘readable’ is a combination of good grammar, and specific web focused text. They say the average time spent on a site by web surfers is 10 seconds. Think about that – you have 10 seconds to catch their attention and convince them to stay. Too much text and they will not be able to read and absorb it in 10 seconds – too little and there is nothing to hold their interest.

User friendly website design is a little more difficult to quantify because exactly what qualifies as ‘user friendly’ will change as web fashions change. In the end run, however, what is meant by user-friendly is that your site should be easy to navigate with clear menus and navigation buttons. Few things will drive away potential customers faster than an inability to reach pages or find details on sections of your site. What users want is a site that is clearly laid out, sensibly organized and easy to navigate from point A to point B and back again.

Today’s web consumer is extremely savvy and unwilling to put up with inferior sites. They know that the internet is a vast place full of many different options. If your site does not grab them they will continue the search for one that does. You need website design with impact but that also loads quickly, offers quality information and is easy to navigate. It is worth investing in professional website design to ensure that the ‘surfers’ that find your site stay to become your customers.