5 simple rules to keep in mind when designing your website.

You have 10 seconds to make an impression to a visitor to your website. Whether you are wanting to provide a service or sell them a product, the first impression of your website is what counts. If they go onto your website and see lots of advertisements and big flashing banners, then the visitor will probably leave your website straight away. Giving the right impression will decide whether they are a customer or just a visitor.

I am going to tell you 5 simple rules to keep in mind when designing your website.

Rule #1. If a visitors comes onto you website and the first thing they see are flashy banners and advertisements on downloading free mouse cursors. They will see how poorly your website is designed and made and will leave. I am not saying you can’t have those 2 things on your website but there is a time and a place for them to be shown.

Rule #2. When you are designing your website, keep in mind that it needs to be easy to navigate for visitors that come onto your website. The best way to have an easy navigation system is to pretend that you are the visitor and imagine how you would like to get around your site. You need to give your visitors a clear indication of where about they are on your website. Having an “about us page” and a “contact page” is a great way to let your visitors know more about you and the business. This is good because then the visitors will have more of an idea of what your company/business is about and may have more trust in you if they know that people have been given your service before or other customers have bought from you.

Rule #3. When designing your website, the colour and text is very important. Having a dark website can strain your visitor’s eyes, but on the other hand having bright colours is not very good as well. Your choice of colour for your website needs to be friendly and appealing. Having plain and simple text is always the best, having script text or really fancy text is sometimes hard to read. Keeping it plain and simple is sometimes the better option. Also when choosing your font colours, try not to have more than 3 because this can also annoy your visitors.

Rule #4. When you are designing your website, you need to pay close attention the loading time of your page, if your page takes more than 20 seconds to load, then you need to reduce the amount of graphics you have. Lots of pictures, heavy graphics may look good on your website but it also makes your loading time slow. Users or the internet do not have enough patience to sit and wait for you site to load.

Rule #5. Keep your information and content relevant to your services/products that you provide. It may sound silly, but selling carpet cleaner on your site when you are selling 32”, LCD flat screen TVs is not good. People will visit your site for what they need and don’t want to be looking through all of your irrelevant content. Another good tip is to also keep your data and content up to date, you don’t want a visitor come onto your site, they see a product and try to order it but then realise you no longer sell that product.

Again when designing your website look at it from your internet visitors standpoint. Would you want to visit this website? Would you want to purchase a product from this website? If you answer "no" then correct the problems.