5 Fundamental Guidelines For Website Success
When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to the details involved in making sure the visitor feels welcome and comfortable with their visit. Sometimes the bells and whistles detract from the experience more than add to it. In terms of website traffic, this can mean the difference between success and failure of a website. Here are a 5 basic elements of design that can keep your website moving in the positive direction of traffic flow.
1) Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page. I made this mistake when building my company website for my landscape business. It was a great picture of a completed project with an “Enter The Garden” phrase for the enter button. Very few people entered the garden!!!
2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy. I have a few banners on this site but I have just taken a few down too because they did just take up space with no conversions.
3) Have a simple and clear navigation
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site. WordPress themes make it very easy to have clear navigation. The Thesis Theme makes it even easier than a lot of other themes, but most themes allow you to create a few different navigation possibilities on your site.
4) Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!
5) Avoid using looping audio on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.
The same is true with video. Video that automatically starts ever time you land on a page can be annoying as well. I have done that before on other sites thinking it was going to add to the site but the opposite is true. It becomes annoying and makes people want to bounce off your site.
