Effective Business Websites
Elements of a Well Designed Business Website
First Impression is a Lasting Impression
The quality of a website is often a measure of the quality of the business behind it. If your site doesn't look professional, potential customers will assume your business isn't professional either. The goal is to create a website that shows credibility and industry expertise.
Easy Navigation: A Must for Effective Websites
A website is a collection of web pages each designed to cater to a specific business or informational need. Navigation refers to the links that allow vistors to move from page to page on the website based on their interest. Visitor interaction with a website's navigation must be easy, seamless and intuitive or visitors become frustrated and leave the website.
Intuitive Website Design and Navagation Strategy
Design and navigation continuity across web pages is imperative for an intuative website design. A horizontal navigation bar with pull down menus and/or a vertical navigation bar or buttons that appear on all web pages are examples of easy to use navigation. Often categorized data or information is organized in a navigation tree on the left hand side of a website. This is intuative because most website visitors are computer users and are familiar with popular business software like Microsoft which often uses trees to allow drill down through information.
Importance of Rich Content and Selective Graphics
Rich content is very important for SEO. Search engine spiders scan content and rank a website's importance based on the relavance of its content to popular keywords used for searches people make in Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines. Some people hate to write and fill their website with images and videos. Images and videos are nice additions to a website, but nothing is more valuable than quality text content. Some peole like to add animated graphics to their website. Too much of this is distracting to visitors and makes a website look unprofessional. Pictures are most valuable to show examples of work or products; even then images should not congest or dominate prime webpage Real Estate. Websites dominated with images and videos take a lot longer to load and may cause visitors to become impatient and leave.