When you come across the headquarters of an off-line company, what you see gives you an impression of the company, good or bad. Your website is just the same. This makes it very important to practice good design principals. Your website need to reach the maximum number of people so that you can make the most sales possible.

Keep Navigation in Mind

keep your navigation simple. It must give clear direction on how to navigate your site. It must be uncluttered and easy to follow. Make sure you avoid confusion, if you’re visitor becomes confused. They were just leave it and go somewhere else.

Simplicity is the key word. let’s say your site had 1000 or more articles. Your visitor is looking for a particular article, you need to make it simple to find. You can do this by using an SQL driven database, or just an index. This means that your visitor is now able to locate a particular article easily. By providing this index or database driven search you have created a hassle free way for your visitor to find what he was looking for.

Once we have the visitor to our site, it is important to keep them there. They will only stay if they can work out how they can get to the content they want. if they can’t work out how to navigate the site, they will leave. I would recommend that you stay away from complicated flash-based navigation and drop-down menus.

It is important to avoid confusion. If your visitors become confused you will lose them. At times your visitors will be deeply engrossed in surfing your site. Your pages must make it possible for them to know where they are, and how to get back to the main page.

Here are a few more tips that will help.

#1 Do not use splash pages.

A splash page is the first page you see when you arrive at a website These are often very beautiful with graphics. They often have the words welcome or, click here to enter. In fact, they are just pretty pages with no real purpose. Don’t give your visitors a reason to click the back button. You then give them the real value of your site up front without the splash pages.

#2 Be careful not to use too many banner ads

Do you even bother to look at Banner ads or take notice of them? I would say that almost nobody does. It is obvious from this that they are not effective. If you use lots of banner ads, you are wasting valuable web space that would be better used in providing content for your visitors. In this content, you could weave affiliate links, helping your customers to feel that they want to buy and never feel pushed to buy.

#3 don’t use audio on your site

If you want a visitor to spend a long time on your site reading your content you need to make sure they’re not getting annoyed by some looping audio on your website. If you’re determined to add audio to your site, make sure they have some control over it. This could be volume or muting controls, these would work fine.