Battle Tested Web Design Guidelines

Having an effective web design for your site is extremely important if you're looking out to make a good impression on your target audience. Like it or not, websites are often judged mainly by their appearance and you have to face the fact that people will look at the design before noticing anything else about the site. What follows are some key points that will enable you to design your website in a way that will make the right impression on your visitors.

Make Best Use of 404 Pages: People reach 404 pages when they type in something incorrectly in trying to find something on your site. You may be wondering how this fact relates to designing a website properly. The relevance is that when a prospect reaches your 404 page, he or she is likely to click away and never find your active pages. What you should do is transform the default 404 page, which is essentially a dead end into a menu where the visitor can easily find the part of your website where you want them. It's easy to lose hundreds of visitors if you don't take this step, especially if your site is a high traffic site. You can design the 404 page however you want, as long as you make it easy for the visitor to find your site. Actually having never done business offline can be helpful to you since your only exposure will be doing it online. It is the possibility for sudden change in some of the operating rules that can really throw you for a loop.

There can be a lot of reasons for this type of dynamic nature, and it is really easy to understand if you are familiar with what can go on. This article touches on Adam Horwitz for your consideration, but remember you should look at that as just one facet of what you do. But ask your self the tough questions about longevity and any possibilities for future problems.

There are always two sides to any coin, and even though we urge caution we will also say to give something a shot if it is resonating with you enough. Make Your Content Readable: When visitors reach your website, it's essential that they can readily browse through your content without any difficulty. The formatting of the content that's placed on each of your pages should be well done, so that the content is effectively organized. Rather than have your text and other content too close together, break it up with ample amounts of white space. If your site has lots of articles or other written content, you have to pay particular attention to this principle. The look and design of your content is actually just as important as the actual quality of the content, and will influence how long people stay on your site.

Register Alternate Domains: If you want to ultimately protect your brand and identity you should register different, alternate versions of your domain names with a bunch of different extensions. This is a step that just prevents others from using the available (similar) domain names for themselves. It's not really related to your website design but take this step anyway so that you won't accidentally lose any valuable readers. You can simply re-direct all your domain names to your main domain name, which is often done by big companies to protect their brand and increase awareness of their site. For example, in addition to registering a .com, you can register .net and .org as well so that you can own all three of the most popular domain extensions. This will help you protect yourself against search engine competition from those other domains. We think most web designers are never totally happy with their work because they always see things they want to improve upon. Overall, your site design needs to fit with your product/service and your market demographics.