Talking about your website, more attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven vital rules of thumb to observe to insure your website performs well.
1) Don’t employ splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They commonly 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.
2) Don’t utilise excessive banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy individuals have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you’ll be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, offer more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they wish to buy instead of being pushed to purchase.
3) Have an easy and clear navigation
You have to bestow a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to employ it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered drop-down menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they’ll leave your site.
4) Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you’ll wish to ensure they know which part of the site they’re in at that moment. That way, they’ll be able to browse relevant info or navigate to any section of the site easily. Do not confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!
5) Avoid using audio on your site
If your visitor is departing to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you’ll wish to ensure they are not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have a good number of control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.
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