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 The most important website design principles in building an innovative and effective website is crucial for the future success of your current or future online business. Applying the best tips, tools and other design principles to your website and making full use of available technologies can bring you unimaginable success on the Internet.
At the same time, using powerful and innovative ideas in the design and development stages of your website will level the playing field for your business and raise its competitive edge on the Internet. We have been doing website development for more than 9 years now, and during this time, we have identified many important design and development principles. So, why waste valuable time making the same mistakes many website designers and webmasters do?
The following 8 powerful website design principles will assist in helping you make the right choices for your online business :
1. Do-It-Yourself vs. Outsourcing
Before you start compiling material for your new website, you have to first establish your skills level to tackle the specific project. If you have sufficient html understanding, a good idea of graphics and colours, plus fair writing skills, you mostly can develop the website yourself. If, however, you do not have a fair understanding of html, it would be advisable to outsource.
2. Dynamic vs. Static webpages
Do you want your website to be static, i.e. to have no input from or interaction with visitors, i.e. to be fully interactive with visitors being able to log on, take part in forums, post information, etc.? Many new and fantastic scripting languages are available to make your website more dynamic and bring it to life.
3. Website Title vs. Domain
Before registering a domain name for your website, take some time to think of words/names that best describes your business. Compile a few possibilities and then check for their availability on the Internet. The best ones would normally already be taken but innovative thinking can get you very far! When compiling you main page, use this domain name and extend it to your website's main page title tag. This is step number one in getting good future search engine rankings.
4. Build your website around important keywords
When building the contents of your website, remember to include a fair dose of relevant keywords and phrases that best describe your business. These keywords, the words and phrases people use when searching for relevant information on the internet, should also be extended to all the important tags on every page of your website. Be careful though not to overdo it, as search engines penalise 'keyword stuffing'. Also use full sentences and make them sound natural. The clever search engine algorithms have recently just become even more advanced, and can now track unnaturally sounding sentences!
5. Optimised title, description & keyword tags
Every single page on your website should be individually optimised to carry the message that you want it to carry. Every page should be different and specifically there for a reason. If the information on the page and its respective page tags do not match in terms of keywords, the page will not show up in search engine results. Search engines want to give their users relevant results, and by not applying this principle, your website will not rank well.
6. A Sitemap with links to all pages
Assist the search engines by making it easy for them to index your site. If all your webpages can be reached from a central point like a Sitemap, you will firstly need to make sure that the search engine spider finds all your webpages and secondly help visitors find the information and pages they require quickly. Websites with good structures and fresh content gets spidered more often.
7. All pages back-linked to the Sitemap and Home Page
Visitors to your website will not necessary land on the index page or Sitemap. It is therefore imperative to give them a way to get to your index, Sitemap and other important pages. A well structured informative website also receives more return visitors.
8. Standard background & fonts on all pages
By keeping your webpages uniform, you assure your visitors that they are still on your website. Having various banners, backgrounds and fonts will only confuse visitors. Try to stick to one font, or two at the most. The human eye needs to adjust every time it reads text written in a new font. Do not irritate your visitors by using many different fonts - they will leave in a flash!
If you have an existing website, but nothing much have been happening for you, try to apply these 8 principles and see what transpires. |
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