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Website Design: The Most Effective Tools in Your Electronic Toolbox
The competition to develop and maintain an effective website is pretty stiff, when you consider our current technology and the amount of creative education that most webmasters are armed with today. It’s not enough to have a good website; in order to outshine your competitors, it needs to be truly outstanding. The amount of business that you do is often in direct correlation to the type of presentation that your website makes to consumers.
In order to achieve success, it’s necessary to utilize the most state-of-the-art tools that are available, combined with creative, progress thinking. Your approach should be one of careful planning, which includes effective design and development strategies in your website’s presentation. All too often, webmasters are in a hurry to post flashy new changes to their websites, only to violate the most important principles of effective web design.
It’s important to be honest with yourself when it comes time to evaluate your skills and creativity. If you have a flair for writing, an eye for color and a pretty good understanding of HTML, then you can probably get by with the design and implementation of your own website. If, on the other hand, you find yourself lacking in any of these areas, then it’s best to leave the job to the professionals. One of the best examples of a firm that’s outstanding in web design is DivaDesignWorld in
Portland
,
Oregon
. Known as a leader in their field, this highly successful company employs the cream of the webmaster crop and has developed a reputation for reaching the creative pinnacle in the design of their client’s websites.
One of the ways in which to make your website an exciting experience for those who choose to visit is to make it interactive. Most people truly enjoy the opportunity to directly interact with what they see on the screen, and those websites which are simply canvasses for two-dimensional information without the benefit of links and other forms of interactive tools will be far less successful in gaining customers.
The uniformity of your web pages is important. Using a variety of backgrounds and fonts may look nice to you, but they may leave visitors wondering if they’re still on your website, or if they’ve been moved off to some distant spot in cyber-space. Avoid the confusion, and the discomfort of the adjustment from one presentation to another, by offering page stability. Don’t use more than two different fonts within your website (one is best!) and keep a consistent background. Overwhelming visual effects can often drive visitors away from your website, which means lost sales.
Index pages are a critical element of a good website design. These serve a dual purpose, in that potential customers will be able to find specific pages or information more quickly, and the search engine software will have an easier time of finding all of your site pages. A good site map is the best way to ensure that this will happen.
There’s nothing quite so frustrating as trying to navigate through a poorly designed website. If you’ve ever tried to access a particular web page, but couldn’t find a link for it from within the web page that you’re currently on, then you’ll understand that frustration. Each page within a website should reference the index page or site map. It offers the convenience of being able to jump from any one point to any other point without having to search around for navigation tools, or constantly returning to the home page every time you want to find a certain piece of information somewhere else within the website. Viewers may become so frustrated by the inability to find navigational tools that they won’t return, and you’ll suffer a tremendous sales loss.
In order to publish your website, you’re going to need a domain name. Though it’s very probable that the best names will have been taken by other firms, a bit of creativity and careful wording can gain you the extra points that you need for a higher search engine ranking. Start by determining which words would best describe your company and/or its products. Once you come up with a winning combination, use those words in your domain name and the title tag for your website’s main page.
Keywords and phrases are what it’s all about when we strive to obtain a high ranking on the major search engines. Keep in mind that these should reflect your business in the best way possible, so that potential customers will easily find your website when searching through major engines on the web. These words and phrases should be relevant and should populate each page of your website, in order to gain a higher ranking and become more readily visible to consumers. There are some rules to follow here, though. If you appear to be using keywords to simply litter the search engine with them in order to achieve a higher ranking, you’ll be penalized for doing so, since this is considered “keyword stuffing”. When the “powers that be” assign rank designations, they have the technological tools that are necessary to scope out natural and unnatural sentence structure. If your wording comes across as being a member of the second group, you’ll get bumped to a rank that’s far beneath what you would have achieved if you’d used naturally flowing sentences.
Web pages should be given the individual attention that they deserve. This is also true when it comes to populating them with keywords. Since each page should be reserved for a specific topic, then the keywords shouldn’t be generic enough to apply to any particular web page, but should be more specifically designed to reflect each unique page. It’s important to ensure that the information on the page and the page tags match; otherwise, you’ll suffer in the search engine rankings.
By keeping these few tips in mind, you’ll be on your way to a more productive – and more successful – website that will aid in increasing your client base and boosting your sales potential.
About the Author: Monique Danielle owns Portland Marketing Agency, DivaDesignWorld.com, a full service firm that offers web development, graphic design, consulting, and a wide variety of creative services. She is also the founder of divadirectories.com,a free online resource designed to promote the growth and development of women owned businesses throughout
Oregon
,
Washington
, and the Northwest.
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