4 Reliable Guidelines to Web Design

The appearance of your web site is one of the most important aspects of a successful online business. Your products and services will literally be evaluated by how your site looks. Poor web design is usually the leading cause of business failure. There are several small businesses struggling to make a living online. Most of them make very trivial amount or no profits at all and just end up closing their site in defeat.

If you really want to succeed in online business, then you should first educate yourself on how to properly design your site; this refers to a professional web design that showcases or sells your products and services. Take these reliable guidelines that I would love to present in order for you to have a competent web design for your online business.

The first guideline concerns "branding" in your web site. Your logo should be placed in all pages. Complement your logo with a tagline or catchy sentence that summarizes your business purpose. Create a favicon which is a small graphic that appears next to the URL in the address bar. Have a consistent look and feel in all your pages so that the viewers may not feel being lost. Use a color scheme and layout that are clearly recognized across your site. Also, have an "About Us" section that includes all relevant information about you and your business including your contact details.

The second guideline covers the topic on navigation. Design your pages that are loadable in a few seconds and group your navigational options in relevant categories. Provide simple text navigation links at the bottom of lengthy pages so that readers will not need to scroll back. Link your logo to your homepage, except in the homepage itself. Put a link to your homepage on all your internal pages. Additionally, create a custom error page. That way, you will not lose visitors that have followed a bad link to your site or who have misspelled your URL.

The third guideline concerns the layout and content presentations. Good content must flow to the top. Make sure your page fits the screen so viewers will not need to scroll horizontally. Use high contrast for the body of your page; black text on white background, or white text on black background work best. Don't use too many different fonts. Don't use pop-up windows; they distract visitors and are immediately dismissed as ads.

The fourth guideline is about optimizing your site to lead in search engines. Create short, descriptive page titles, to entice search engine users to click on your links. Create a site map containing all your pages, and link to it directly from your homepage. Decide what the two or three main keywords are for each page (the words you believe search engine users will type to find your page) and repeat them often in your page title, description Meta tag and page body. Use more text than graphics, and minimize the use of Flash and JavaScript.