The Importance of A Good Design

Your website is the hub of your online business; it is the virtual representation of your company whether your company exists physically or not. When you are doing business online, people cannot see you physically like how they could if they were dealing with an offline company. Hence, people do judge you by your covers. This is where a good design comes in.

Imagine if you are running an offline company. Would you allow your salespersons to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they are dealing with your customers? By making your staff wear professionally, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. This works simply because first impressions matter.

Similarly, the same case is with your website. If your website is put together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute "quick fix", you are literally shouting to your visitors that you are not professional and you do not care for quality.

On the opposite, if you have a totally professional looking website layout, you are giving your visitors the perception that you have given meticulous attention to every detail and you care about professionalism. You are organized, focused and you really mean business.

On the other hand, you should also have anything related to your company well designed. From business cards to letterheads to promotional brochures, every little bit matters. This is because as you grow your business, these items become the face of your business. Once again, think of the "salesperson dressed shabbily" analogy, and you will get my point.

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Web Design Elements You Should Avoid Having on Your Site

As a web designer, you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience. It doesn't matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world -- if your website is poorly done you won't be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.

When I'm talking about a "good design", I'm not only talking about a good graphical design. A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components which contribute to a good website design -- accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design.

Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I've come across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it's high time to take serious action!

1) Background music

Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and everytime a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I'd just turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, they just add to the visitors burden when viewing your site -- users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed.

2) Extra large/small text size

As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics -- user accessibility is one big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it's illegible you won't be selling anything!

3) Popup windows

Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just close them on instinct every time each one manages to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and, well, pops up on my screen. Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor's screen. Your website loses its function immediately!

In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it's meant to do effectively. Don't let some minor mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally!

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How to Design your Web Site

When a customer visits your website, you have roughly ten seconds to capture their attention, so you better think carefully about what you want to include. Some websites go directly into the navigation and content of their websites on their first “index” page. Customers can surf around the site and decide if they want to buy the product or service. This is not really the wisest option available. Of course, every site does need the standard index page chock full of frequently asked questions, testimonials, order form, etc. But there is a better way to “capture” your visitors by using a squeeze. A squeeze page captures your audience with a screaming headline and brief key points about the customer’s problem and how you intend to solve it. Sometimes a squeeze page offers a free report or newsletter. Either way, all squeeze pages purpose is to retrieve the customers name and email address, or sometimes they ask the customer a burning question.

So what is the point in retrieving the customer’s name and email address? Have you heard of opt-in lists? An opt-in list is gold to an internet marketer because you can send your customers information which will hopefully attract the customer back to the website to either purchase a product or service being offered. Spamming is illegal and having a great opt-in list is really necessary to any Internet marketer. You can also use your list to make money as an affiliate with another company. You can send customers an email from the site you are promoting and make profits as an affiliate. This is a great way to earn extra income indeed.

Squeeze pages are sometimes the first page found on a website. Sometimes they are pop ups on the index page of a website. They are very crucial to any Internet marketer’s business.